Nuria Oliver
Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist whose AI research models human behavior and studies human-computer interaction. At Microsoft Research, her work included activity recognition and mobile health; later, she used mobile data at Telefónica and Vodafone for public health research. During COVID-19, she co-led a winning XPRIZE team whose AI models compared intervention strategies. In 2025, she received Spain’s National Research Award in Mathematics and ICT and the Talgo Award to Excellence in Engineering. As of October 2026, she directs ELLIS Alicante, where teams conduct human-centered AI research.
- Now at
- ELLIS Alicante
- Works
- 282
- Citations
- 15,034
- h-index
- 55
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1994–2000
Studying perception and behavior
Oliver is a computer scientist whose AI research models human behavior and examines human-computer interaction. She graduated at the top of her class in telecommunications engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1994 and earned a PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 2000. Her doctoral work explored perceptual intelligence and systems capable of understanding human behavior.
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2000–2007
Building mobile health systems
At Microsoft Research, her projects included multimodal activity recognition and mobile health. HealthGear was a mobile wearable system for monitoring and analyzing sleep-apnea signals.
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2007–2016
Reading cities through mobile data
From 2007 to 2016, she worked at Telefónica Research. Her research used aggregated mobile-network data to study cities, disasters, public health, financial inclusion, and safety.
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2017–2019
Tracking movement for health
From 2017 to 2019, she was Vodafone’s first global director of data-science research. Her Malaria Mobility in Mozambique project used population movement patterns to help target malaria-control efforts.
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2020–2021
Forecasting pandemic response
During COVID-19, she served as the Valencian government’s commissioner on AI and data science. In 2021, she co-led Valencia IA4COVID, a winning team in the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. Its data-driven AI models compared intervention strategies.
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2025
Two awards in 2025
In 2025, she received the Spanish National Research Award in Mathematics and ICT and the Talgo Award to Excellence in Engineering.
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As of October 2026
Leading human-centered AI research
As of October 2026, she directs ELLIS Alicante. The institute conducts basic and applied research in human-centered AI.
Sources and credits
Photo: ester perez broto, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
