Elena Simperl

She trained as a computer scientist at the Technical University of Munich and completed a PhD in knowledge engineering (Dr rer nat) at the Free University Berlin in 2007. She is best known for her work in human-machine collectives, with applications to crowdsourcing, citizen science, knowledge communities, and human data interaction, and for her leadership in data-driven innovation and data policy.[4][5][6] According to AMiner, she is in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade, as well as in the Women in AI 2000 ranking.[7]

Simperl is a fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Arts, President of the Semantic Web Science Association[8] and a former Turing Fellow.[9]

She is also a recipient of the Siemens' Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship at the Technical University of Munich,[10] working on safe and trusted AI with knowledge graphs.

Simperl serves as scientific advisor of data.europa.eu, Europe's flagship initiative in opening up public sector datasets for wider use.[11] She co-chairs the MLCommons task force on standardising metadata for machine learning datasets.[12]

She was the director of Data Pitch,[13] a data innovation programme helping start-ups solve societal challenges through shared data[14] and also the director of Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODINE).[15] which supported start-ups in generating value from open data.[16]