Vanessa Lopez is a researcher scientist at IBM Research Ireland since 2012 and manager of the AI for Health and Social Care team. Her research interests are to investigate how technology can be made “smarter” to better understand human needs, and support us, as a society, to target complex problems. Her research combines knowledge representation, semantics, natural language and learning technologies to create applications to support healthcare professionals improve the delivery of care for the most vulnerable, reduce healthcare disparities and protect the integrity of vital public health programs. Prior to that she was a researcher at KMI, Open University, where she pioneered research on Question Answering systems over the Semantic Web. She graduated with a master’s degree in computer engineering from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Over the years, she has participated actively in the Semantic Web community and co-authored publications in high impact conference and journals, with over 3700 citations.
