Speakers & Panellists

Dr Tiina Kupila-Rantala works as Deputy Managing Director in CSC – IT Centre for Science Ltd., Finland. She is responsible for the company governance and strategy work. She belongs to the secretariat − nominated by the Finnish Ministry of the Education and Culture − that envisage how digitalisation and artificial intelligence could support the future development of the universities. She is also in charge of the strategy and business development work package (WP2) of the European Commission project EOSC-hub providing services for the European Open Science Cloud.

 Eva Méndez holds a PhD in Library and Information Sciences (LIS) and is an expert in metadata. She defines herself in her Twitter profile as an ‘open knowledge militant’ (@evamen). She has been a lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), LIS department since 1997.She has been an active member of several international research teams, advisory boards and communities including: DCMI, OpenAire, Metadata2020, RDA, etc. In 2005-06 she was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA).

As Director Global Strategic Networks(Europe) at Elsevier, Federica leads on strategic initiatives and external collaborations with stakeholders in the academic community in Northern Europe and EU. In this capacity, her primary focus is on all matters related to Open Science, research policy and innovation. Her experience in Scholarly communications, earned in fifteen years at Elsevier, spans marketing communications, publishing and business development. Her passion for Publishing traces back to her Master's degree in Literature, Press and Publishing History.

Prof. Franco Niccolucci: director of VAST-LAB at PIN, was professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence until 2008, and later the director of the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center of the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia. With a degree in Mathematics, he started working on Cultural Heritage applications in 1996. Since then he has been the scientific coordinator of a number of EU-funded projects. He is currently the coordinator of ARIADNE and PARTHENOS. Within EOSCpilot, he is the PI of the TEXTCROWD Science Demonstrator.