Speakers’ Profiles
Dr Paul Ayris
Library Services, University College London, UK
Dr Ayris has been Director of UCL Library Services since 1997. He is also the UCL Copyright Officer. Dr Ayris was the President of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) 2010-14; he is now Advisor to the LIBER Board on EU matters. He is Co-Chair of the LERU (League of European Research Universities) Community of Chief Information Officers. He chairs the OAI Organizing Committee for the Cern Workshops on Innovations in Scholarly Communication. He is the Chair of JISC Collections’ Electronic Information Resources Working Group. On 1 August 2013, Dr Ayris also became Chief Executive of UCL Press. He is a member of the Provost and President’s Senior Management Team in UCL.
He has a Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical History and publishes on English Reformation Studies.
Marie Timmerman
Science Europe, Belgium
Marie Timmermann works at Science Europe in the post of EU Legislation and Regulatory Affairs Officer as a part of the Research Affairs Team. Born in Germany, she studied political science, economics and languages at the universities of Passau (Germany) and Limoges (France) before moving to Belgium. She has nine years of experience in legislation monitoring, policy analysis and advocacy, having worked for the European representation of national membership-based organisations during that period. At Science Europe she mainly deals with legislative and regulatory measures taken on EU level.
Daniel Mietchen
National Institutes of Health, United States
Daniel Mietchen is a biophysicist interested in integrating research workflows with the World Wide Web, particularly through open licensing, open standards, public version histories and forkability. With research activities spanning from the subcellular to the organismic level, from fossils to developing embryos, and from insect larvae to elephants, he experienced multiple shades of the research cycle and a variety of approaches to collaboration and sharing in research contexts.
He has also been contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects for more than a decade and is actively engaged in increasing the interactions between the Wikimedia and research communities. All of this informs his current activities around data science as a contractor for the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Eva Méndez Rodriguez
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Spain
Eva Méndez Rodriguez holds a PhD in Library and Information Sciences and she is an expert in metadata. She has been a lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) since 1997. She has been an active member of several international research teams on various standards for the Web. She is member Advisory Committee of the DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) since 2005 and of OpenAire from 2015. During 2005-06 she was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship, as part of the European Union postdoc programme, at the Metadata Research Center (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 expert of the European Commission on the assessment and monitoring of various projects in different fields such as Digital Libraries and Open Science. She was Director of the University Master’s degree in Digital Libraries and Information Services (2009-2012). 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 UC3M (Spain).
Oriol Pujol
Oriol Pujol Vila is tenured associate professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the department of Matemàtiques i Informàtica at Universitat de Barcelona. He obtained the degree in Telecomunications Engineering in 1998 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). The same year, he joined the Computer Vision Center and the Computer Science Department at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). In 2004 he received the Ph.D. in Computer Science at the UAB with a work in deformable models, fusion of supervised and unsupervised learning and intravascular ultrasound medical image analysis. In 2005 he joined the Dept. of Matemàtica Aplicada i Anàlisi at Universitat de Barcelona (UB) where he became tenured associate professor.
He currently leads the Vision and Computational Learning consolidated research group (SGR). He has published more than one hundred and fifty articles in machine learning, computer vision, and their applications. He has more than eighteen years in knowledge transference in data analysis projects is fields such as finance, health, marketing, wearable sensors, among others. He served as director of Computer Science undergraduate studies, director of the postgraduate courses on Data Science and Big Data, and director of the official master’s program in Fundamental Principles of Data Science. He is currently vice-president for Digital Transformation at the University of Barcelona.