The Spanish Scientific Society for Informatics awarded the 2015 Aritmel National Prize for Computer Science to Asunción Gómez Pérez, full professor of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the UPM’s School of Computer Engineering at the awards ceremony held on 14 September within the 2016 Spanish Computer Science Congress (CEDI).
The Aritmel Prize is awarded to researchers aged under 55 years for outstanding scientific service within the field of computer engineering. This distinction recognizes her exceptional scientific contributions to this discipline, focusing on the field of ontological engineering, the semantic web and linked data.
Vice Rector of Research, Innovation and PhD Programmes at the UPM, Asunción Gómez-Pérez leads the university’s Ontological Engineering Group. She regards teamwork as the cornerstone of her career. Therefore, this prize is not only an honour but also a recognition of the job she does within this research group. “Research as a team takes precedence over individualism,” she says, highlighting the group’s strong participation as part of multidisiciplinary teams in national and international competitions, hackathons and datathons. “As a result, we have been able to build a research and innovation ecosystem with differing levels of maturity”, while entering into a “close relationship with the national and European higher education and business fabric,” she adds.
Another of the points valued by the jury who awarded this prize is her participation in international research projects and the fact that the articles that she has published have the highest impact factor of all UPM researchers.
She has coordinated five European projects and has participated as a principal investigator of 24 international projects, most of which were funded under the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh European Framework Programmes. She is now participating in three H2020 Programme projects.
A commitment to internationalization has been a feature of the research that Asunción Gómez-Pérez has conducted, ever since, after completing her PhD, she was granted a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s Knowledge Systems Laboratory. “The experiences and skills that I gained at Stanford University and around the Silicon Valley changed my professional career. I came to understand just what an intellectual challenge it is to research on the frontier of knowledge in a very competitive environment, and I learned that it takes a great deal of training, ideas, ability, earnestness and passion and especially funding to be able to compete internationally,” she claims.
Some of the latest milestones in her career highlighted by the prize jury are her participation as principal investigator in the first project to use IBM-Watson at a Spanish university. This project is financed by IBM-USA and was won through the Shared University Research (SUR) Awards. On the other hand, the United Kingdom’s Open Data Institute funded by Tim Berners Lee selected the Ontology Engineering Group as the node’s head office in Madrid.
This distinction is another trophy to add to the 2015 Ada Byron Prize for Women in Technology and the 2015 UPM Research Award.
In this interview, Asunción Gómez-Pérez looks back on her career, analysing the state of research and higher education in this country and outlines her future challenges.
