Genoveva Vargas Solar

Ttile: "Weaving Feminist and Humanistic Perspectives into Intensive Data Management: Bridging the Human, the Soft, and the Hard in Scientific Research"

My research quest can be summarized as "Bridging the Human, the Soft, and the Hard in Scientific Reserach"—an exploration of how feminist and decolonial perspectives can reshape data-intensive research and AI-driven analytics. While these technologies promise efficiency and scalability, they also reinforce epistemic violence, deepen economic and ecological inequalities, and perpetuate technological colonialism, particularly through monopolized infrastructures and biased datasets from the Global North.

This talk critically examines:

• Who controls, interprets, and benefits from data-driven systems?

• How can we ensure ethical, accountable, and transparent resource allocation in data science?

• How do we integrate fairness in computing infrastructure—balancing service level objectives (SLOs), energy consumption, data sovereignty, and accessibility?

By integrating decolonial methodologies into data processing and management at scale, we can move towards responsible, sustainable, and equitable AI practices, ensuring that scientific research remains a space where the human, the soft, and the hard coalesce harmoniously.

Bio Genoveva

Genoveva Vargas-Solar (www.vargas-solar.com) is a Principal Scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and holds the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) qualification. She is affiliated with the LIRIS Laboratory in Lyon. From 2008 to 2020, she served as Deputy Director of LAFMIA at CINVESTAV in Mexico and is a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Computing.

An active feminist, she advocates for decolonial approaches to data management, artificial intelligence, and large-scale execution platforms. Her academic background is inherently multidisciplinary, having pursued a dual expertise from undergraduate to PhD level. She studied Latin American Literature and Computer Systems Engineering at the University of the Americas in Puebla, followed by Research on the Imaginary (Comparative Literature) and Computer Science at the MSc and PhD levels at Stendhal University and Joseph Fourier University in France. She coordinates multiple research projects across Europe and Latin America, funded by governmental and industry partners, and actively promotes scientific cooperation between both regions. Committed to gender equity in STEM, she has engaged in think tanks on women’s participation in science and technology, notably Latinas in Computing and the Latin American Conference on Informatics (CLEI).

Genoveva Vargas-Solar leads the DEI database interconference initiative, which brings together major database conferences to advance DEI-focused actions. She serves on the steering committees of leading international and European conferences, including SIGMOD, EDBT, ADBIS, BDA, and AMW. Additionally, she is a member of Tierra Común, a digital activist group, and contributes to the A+I feminist network, which promotes inclusive and feminist approaches to artificial intelligence. Her current research focuses on women’s workforce participation in data science and artificial intelligence across the Global North and South, funded by CNRS AAP and the Gender Institute programs. She also leads projects on fair and responsible computing resource allocation in decentralized data centers, integrating decolonial perspectives.