Biography
Professor Elena Simperl obtained her doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Free University of Berlin, and diploma in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a former Turing Fellow, and has held positions in Germany, Austria and the University of Southampton (in addition to leading many summer schools across Europe, Asia and the US) prior to joining King’s in 2020.
Elena’s research interests focus upon the intersection between AI and crowd computing, in helping designers understand how to build socio-technical systems that combine machine algorithms with human and social capabilities. Her recent work has involved examination of several classes of online systems that are set up for engagement at scale, participatory sensing apps, and universal knowledge bases.
Elena’s accolades include involvement in over twenty European and national research projects such as INSEMTIVES (EU FP7), RENDER (EU FP7) and QROWD (EU H2020) – as well as leading two European data incubators, ODINE and Data Pitch. Her professional portfolio also includes work with SOCIAM, EUCLID, and the Southampton Data Science Academy.
She is currently leading ACTION, a Horizon 2020 programme that helps 15 citizen science communities around Europe fight pollution, and is also the principal investigator of Data Stories, an EPSRC-funded grant that develops concepts and tools to facilitate ease in everyday engagement with data. Elena’s interest in leading initiatives within the scientific community has also taken form through serving as chair and programme chair of the European and International Semantic Web Conference series, the European Data Forum, and the European Semantic Technologies conference.
Research interests
- Knowledge graphs
- Knowledge engineering
- Semantic technologies
- Human and social computation
- Crowdsourcing
- Open data
- Human data interaction
- Data storytelling
- Human-centric AI
Further information