Nuria Oliver is currently the Scientific Director for the Multimedia and Data Mining & User Modeling Research Teams in Telefonica Research (Barcelona, Spain). She received the BSc (honors) and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the ETSIT at the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid (UPM), Spain, in 1992 and 1994 respectively. She received her PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, in June 2000. From July 2000 until November 2007, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. At the end of 2007, she returned to Spain to create and lead the Multimedia Scientific Team at Telefonica Research in Barcelona. Since March 2009, she is also the acting Scientific Director for the Data Mining & User Modeling Team in Telefonica Research. It is an exciting opportunity to do research in her own country.
Her research interests include mobile computing, multimedia data analysis, search and retrieval, smart environments, context awareness, statistical machine learning and data mining, artificial intelligence, health monitoring, social network analysis, computational social sciencies, and human computer interaction. She is currently working on the previous disciplines to build human-centric intelligent systems.
Nuria has written over 60 papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. Her work has been widely recognized by the scientific community with over 2800 citations. Nuria has over 30 patent applications and granted patents. She is also in the program committee and a reviewer of the top conferences in her research areas (IJCAI, IUI, UMAP, ACM Multimedia, ICMI-MLMI, Interaccion, PervasiveHealth, MIR, LoCA, MMM, CVPR, Ubicomp, MobileHCI, ICCV, AAAI, etc...). She was program co-chair of IUI 2009 and of MIR 2010.
She believes in the power of technology to empower and increase the
quality of life of people. She has received a number of
awards, including MIT’s ‘TR100 Young
Innovators Award’ (2004) and the First Spanish Award of EECS graduates
(1994). Besides her scientific publications, she is very interested in
making science available to the general public. She has been a
technology writer for Tecno2000 magazine and ‘El Pais’ newspapers, among
others. Her work has been featured on
multiple newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations both in Spain
and the US. She has been named <%
Rising Talent by the
Women's Forum for
Economy & Society (October 2009),%>
one of the '100 leaders of the future ' by
Capital Magazine (May 2009) and one of the 'Generation XXI: 40 Spanish
youngsters that will make news in the Third Millenium ' by EL PAIS
(2000).
She is proficient in multiple foreign languages and she
studied classical ballet for 13 years. Her hobbies include traveling,
cinema, art, classical music, yoga, Formula Dodge racing, dance and
swimming