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The University of Southampton
Citizen Science at Southampton
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es6g12@soton.ac.uk

Professor Elena Simperl 

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I am Professor of Computer Science in the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group in the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. I hold a doctoral degree in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Freie Universität Berlin; and a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Universität München. I have held research and teaching positions at the Technische Universität München (2002-2003); Freie Universität Berlin (2003-2007); Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria (2007-2009); and at the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany (2010 - 2012); before joining WAIS in November 2012.

My primary domain of research is at the intersection between knowledge technologies, social computing, and crowdsourcing. In particular I am interested in socially and economically motivated aspects of creating and using semantically enabled content on the Web, and in paradigms, methods, and techniques to incentivize collaboration and participation at scale. Recently I've been looking at particular classes of Web systems that aim at massive crowd engagement: citizen science platforms; crowdsourcing and open innovation initiatives creating economic and social good through the use of open data; or universal knowledge bases such as DBpedia, Wikidata, and the Linked Open Data Cloud. I had the opportunity to investigate these topics in over twenty European and national research projects, often as project coordinator or technical lead.

I published more than 100 scientific papers, organized many workshops addressing the research topics just mentioned, and initiated several training activities for doctoral students and junior researchers such as the Knowledge Web PhD Symposium series held at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) since 2006. In addition to teaching at the undergrad and postgrad levels in Germany, Austria, and the UK, I have founded and organized summer schools in Europe, Asia, and the US, including the ESWC summer school now at its 5th edition, and the IEEE summer school on semantic computing at the UC Berkeley. For many years I have managed the education service within Semantic Technologies Institute International (STI), an association bringing together major players in the field of semantic technologies. In that context, I co-founded semsphere, a professional training and certification company, and coordinated the EUCLID project, which delivered a curriculum for data professionals interested in Linked Data. As of February 2015 I am the scientific director of the European Data Science Academy (EDSA), which will produce a broad demand analysis of data science skills across European countries, as well as training serving that demand.

I have been on the organization committee of several conferences in areas such as semantic technologies, data science, and open data. I am, or have been, among others, track co-chair of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2015 and 2016; general co-chair of the European Data Forum (EDF) 2013, general chair of the ESWC 2012; program chair of the ESWC 2011; and co-chair of the European Semantic Technologies Conference (ESTC) 2009.

Professor Elena Simperl
University of Southampton
University Road
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
United Kingdom


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