Panel

Dr. José Suárez Varela is a Research Scientist at Telefónica Research (Telefónica Innovación Digital). His work focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to communication networks and digital services. This includes research and innovation in AI-based network optimization, privacy-preserving AI algorithms, anomaly detection, and cybersecurity. He actively collaborates with researchers from academic institutions and research centers, and participates in several EU-funded projects aimed at developing future network technologies.

Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Neural Networking center (BNN-UPC), between 2020 and 2022. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in 2020, and a B.Sc and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universidad de Granada (UGR). He was co-Principal Investigator of the IGNNITION project (H2020 NGI POINTER), and main organizer of the GNNet challenge 2020-2022, an international competition co-organized with ITU-T (United Nations).

More information at: https://jsuarezv.github.io/

Dr. Raquel Fernández is Professor of Computational Linguistics & Dialogue Systems at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. She is a Fellow of the ELLIS Society and a board member of the ELLIS Unit Amsterdam. Raquel is interested in natural language processing (NLP) by humans and machines. How do language and vision interact? What coordination strategies help us to communicate successfully with our dialogue partners? And how can answers to these kind of questions lead to better NLP systems? Her lab carries out research on these and related topics from an interdisciplinary perspective, at the interface of computational linguistics, cognitive science, and AI. Her work has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant) and the Dutch Research Council (VENI, VIDI, and Aspasia). Raquel studied Cognitive Science and Language in Barcelona and obtained a PhD in NLP from King's College London. Before moving to Amsterdam, she held postdoctoral positions at the University of Potsdam and at Stanford University. She is currently a visiting scientist at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission in Seville. 

More information at: http://www.illc.uva.nl/~raquel 

Manuel Escobar Montes, a Computer Engineer from the University of Seville, has served as an ICT civil servant for the Regional Government of Andalusia since 2005. For five years, he was head of the Digital Administration Service within the Regional Government of Andalusia. Since September 2024, he has held the position of Deputy Director of Digital Services and Data Analytics at the Andalusian Digital Agency, the organization responsible for managing all ICT services of the Regional Government of Andalusia. In his current role, he is responsible, among other duties, for implementing the Regional Government’s Artificial Intelligence policy, overseeing Data Governance, managing horizontal Digital Administration services, leading Intelligent Process Automation, and launching Quantum Computing services to foster an Andalusian ecosystem around this technology.