A leading international figure in the use of AI to improve people’s quality of life, Nuria Oliver set out the essence of her professional work in the lecture “Towards a socially sustainable artificial intelligence”.

Holder of a Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Oliver’s research has focused on the modelisation of individual and aggregated human behaviour through automatic learning techniques and the creation of interactive artificial intelligence, covering various spheres of social impact such as health and welfare, financial inclusion and natural disasters.

Among other roles in the telecommunication sector, Oliver is the co-founder and vice chair of The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). She is passionate about scientific and technological dissemination, has made hundreds of media appearances and is actively committed to attracting young talent, particularly women, to engineering and information technology.

The Hypatia Prize was launched in 2018 as part of the first Barcelona Science Plan. The goal is to give visibility to excellence in research in Europe and provide a boost for Barcelona as a European capital for science and knowledge. Three of the four editions of the award have gone to women: the virologist Ilaria Capua, the science philosopher Nancy Cartwright and, this year, Nuria Oliver. The first edition of the prize was awarded to the mathematician László Lovász.

Academia Europea – Barcelona Knowledge Hub

Academia Europea is an international non-governmental association with over 5,000 members, including over 80 Nobel laureates, promoting research and education in all areas of knowledge. The Barcelona Knowledge Hub was launched in 2013 and gives the network coverage in Mediterranean regions and southern Europe.