Sophia Ananiadou

Professor in the Department of Computer Science

Sophia Ananiadou is Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and is the director of The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM)  the only centre of its type in the world.

She has led the development of the text mining tools and services currently used in NaCTeM with the aim of providing scalable text mining services: information extraction, intelligent searching, association mining, etc. She has received the IBM UIMA innovation award 3 consecutive times and is also a Daiwa award winner.

What are some projects or breakthroughs you wish to highlight?

• http://www.nactem.ac.uk/robotanalyst/
• http://www.nactem.ac.uk/pathtext/
• http://www.nactem.ac.uk/big_mechanism/
• http://www.nactem.ac.uk/europepmc/
• http://www.nactem.ac.uk/MHM/

What memberships and awards do you hold/have you held in the past?

1. Director, National Centre for Text Mining (www.nactem.ac.uk) (2005- )
2. Alan Turing Institute Fellow (2018- )
3. Deputy Director, Institute of Data Science and AI, University of Manchester (2018)
4. Distinguished Research Fellow, Artificial Intelligence Research Centre, Japan, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), (2017-)
5. Honorary Professor, Department of Mediterranean Studies, University of the Aegean (2019 -)
6. Honorary Scientific Director, The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (2021-)
7. European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society member (2021-)

What is the biggest challenge in Data Science and AI right now?

• Neurosymbolic approaches for reasoning
• Multimodality and multilinguality
• Natural language understanding using mega NN models
• Rich embeddings & knowledge fusion

What real world challenges do you see Data Science and AI meeting in the next 25 years?

• Human in the loop
• Transfer learning
• Zero shot learning

Find out more about Sophia’s research at Research Explorer.