Lora Aroyo (born in

Bulgaria Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedon ...

) is a Dutch computer scientist at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

Research, and formerly a professor at The

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. She is best known for her work in user modeling, digital humanities, and for the CrowdTruth crowdsourcing method. She was the founding head of the user-centric data science (UCDS) research group in the VU Computer Science department, president of the User Modeling Society, a former vice-president of Semantic Technology Institute, Chief Scientist at Tagasauris, and a member of over 100 scientific program committees and editorial boards. She was one of the few female full professors of Computer Science in the Netherlands, and her departure to Google leaves only one woman (out of over 20 full professors) at the VU. After leaving Bulgaria during the aftermath of the fall of communism, Aroyo obtained a PhD in Educational Science and Technology from

University of Twente The University of Twente (Dutch: ''Universiteit Twente''; , abbr. ) is a public technical university located in Enschede, Netherlands. The university has been placed in the top 170 universities in the world by multiple central ranking tables. ...

. She worked with Paul De Bra at

Eindhoven University of Technology The Eindhoven University of Technology ( nl, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven), abbr. TU/e, is a public technical university in the Netherlands, located in the city of Eindhoven. In 2020–21, around 14,000 students were enrolled in its BSc a ...

in the area of intelligent tutoring systems, focusing primarily on understanding and modeling the different needs of users to make the experience more productive. Aroyo moved to the

VU University The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

in 2006 and began her seminal work in cultural heritage, later called digital humanities. With colleagues Guus Schreiber and others, she is credited with pioneering niche-sourcing. In 2013, Aroyo spent her sabbatical working with the

IBM Watson IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder ...

team, just after the famous ''Jeopardy!'' match, where she developed the

Crowd Truth Generally speaking, a crowd is defined as a group of people that have gathered for a common purpose or intent such as at a Demonstration (people), demonstration, a Sport, sports event, or during looting (this is known as an acting crowd), or ...

methodology with

Chris Welty Christopher A. Welty is an American computer scientist, who works at Google Research in New York. He is best known for his work on ontologies, in the Semantic Web, and on IBM's Watson. While on sabbatical from Vassar College from 1999 to 2000, ...

. In 2018, she was listed among the top women semantic web researchers without a Wikipedia page, and was nominated to have this page authored during the Ada Lovelace women in computing hackathon.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aroyo, Lora Dutch computer scientists Dutch women computer scientists Eindhoven University of Technology alumni living people scientists from Sofia Semantic Web people Academic staff of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam year of birth missing (living people)