PLENARY SPEAKERS
[in alphabetical order]Asunción Gómez-Pérez
Dr Asunción Gómez-Pérez, a world-wide known expert on the field of Ontologies, Semantic Web and Linked Data, holds a PhD in Computer Science. She is Full Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, director of the Artificial Intelligence Department (2008, -) and director of the Ontology Engineering Group (1996, -). Before joining the UPM, she made a postdoc (1994-1995) in the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, where she started to work in the area of ontologies. After that, she returned to Spain and created the Ontology Engineering Group. In fact, she is the person that introduced the ontology research in Spain. According to Chambers, Mijojevic and Ding (2014), she is right now one of the three most-influential woman researchers in the semantic Web community worldwide. In 2015, she received the Aritmel National Award for Researchers in Computer Science and the National Ada Byron Award for Women in IT in Spain, and the UPM honored her with the Research Award. She has published more than 300 papers, and her research contributions are highly visible. For example, her book on ontology engineering has almost 2,500 citations, so it has become a reference in this field, being used in many courses worldwide. She led the development of the two best-known methodologies for building ontologies, i.e. Methontology and NeOn, which are widely used by ontologists in academia and industry. She coordinated 5 European projects and participated in more than 24 European projects. She also has a long record of collaboration with companies. Since 2011, she has represented the University in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Eva Méndez Rodríguez
Dr Eva Méndez Rodriguez holds a PhD in Library and Information Sciences and she is an expert in metadata. She defines herself in her Twitter profile as an open knowledge militant (@evamen). She has been a lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid since 1997 and Tenured Professor since 2008. She has also taught and carried out research at other universities and institutions. She has been an active member of several international research teams on various standards for the Web. She is member of the US Academy Louis Round Wilson-Knowledge Trust and the Advisory Committee of the DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative). During the 2005-06 she was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship, as part of the European Union postdoc programme, at the Metadata Research Center at Chapel Hill University North Carolina (USA). She has taken part in and led several research projects and acted as advisor to many more in the fields related with standardization, metadata, semantic web, open data, digital repositories and libraries, in addition to information policies for development in several countries. Since 2006 she has been participating as an independent EC expert on the assessment and monitoring of various projects for a number of programmes in different fields such as Digital Libraries and Open Science. From 2009 to 2012 she was Director of the University Master’s degree in Digital Libraries and Information Services. She is one of the original signatories of The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age. In 2015 she won the Young Researcher of Excellence award of her University, and from May this year she is Deputy Vice President for Strategy and Digital Education of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain).
Beatriz Pérez Cabello de Alba
Dr Beatriz Pérez Cabello de Alba is an Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the UNED in Madrid (Spanish National University for Distance Education), where she teaches Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Translation (legal, scientific-technical and economic-commercial English). She also teaches several courses in the UNED European Masters of English Applied Linguistics. Her research interests cover lexicology, lexicography, ontological semantics and natural language processing. She has collaborated in several competitive research projects funded by the Spanish Science and Research Ministry. She is currently implementing a subontology within FunGramKB. She has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Amsterdam and Verona. She has also been a visiting professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, an associate professor at Kingston University and an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Carlos Periñán-Pascual
Dr Carlos Periñán-Pascual studied English Language and Literature at Universitat de València and received his Ph.D. degree in English Philology at UNED in Madrid. Since his doctoral dissertation on the resolution of word-sense disambiguation in machine translation, his main research interests have included knowledge engineering, natural language understanding and computational linguistics. As a result, he has been the director and founder of the FunGramKB project since 2004, whose main goal is to develop a lexico-conceptual knowledge base to be implemented in NLP systems requiring language comprehension. After the design and implementation of the knowledge base, he also developed some NLP tools for the FunGramKB Suite: (a) a multilingual workbench for term extraction and management with domain-specific corpora, (b) an application to categorize a collection of documents into the domains of the IATE database, (c) a system that helps researchers do corpus analysis as well as running statistical and machine-learning algorithms for data mining tasks, and (d) a parser that generates a full-fledged logical structure of a sentence, having Role and Reference Grammar as its linguistic model and FunGramKB as its knowledge base. Therefore, his research has also contributed to the fields of automatic term extraction, topic detection, semantic parsing, machine learning and data analytics. He is currently implementing the FunGramKB NLP Laboratory, a user-friendly workflow environment that is mainly intended for linguists to conduct their own research experiments in human language technology. His scientific production includes over 50 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of linguistics, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He is currently an associate professor in the Applied Linguistics Department at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain.