Panel Title: “Preparing careers after PhD”
September 5, 2022, 10:40 – 12:00
The Doctoral Consortium (DC) is a forum where PhD students can present their research ideas, confront them with the scientific community, receive feedback from mentors and tie cooperation bounds. An essential aspect of the professional career is preparing and choosing the path to follow the PhD.
This year, the ADBIS consortium has prepared a panel to discuss careers after PhD with people who have managed to design very exciting, different, and successful careers in academia, research centres, R&D industry and entrepreneurship.
The questions proposed to the panellists are the following. Each person will choose to develop some of them with their perspectives: When should PhD students start preparing for the “after PhD”? Is this a continuous preparation that began during master’s studies? How is the professional strategy adjusted during the PhD? Must concrete decisions be made during the final stretch of PhD while finishing the dissertation and publishing the consolidated results? What does it mean to be successful? Are metrics the core of the success meter? How to avoid making definitive decisions and remain “elastic” enough to transform your career? How do you weave the different aspects of life within the career plan?
Within a friendly and relaxed environment, PhD students, panellists and other conference attendees discuss careers and will receive inspirational thoughts, hints, and guidelines.
| PANELISTS |
Atia Cortés Martínez, is a recognised researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Barcelona, Spain. She is a member of the Social Link Analytics Group – Life Science Department (BSC). Collaborator of the High-Performance Artificial Intelligence Group – Computer. From the BSC, she leads research on the ethical, legal, socio-economic, and cultural aspects of AI, participating in several projects on the ethical, legal, socio-economic, and cultural aspects of AI. She participates in several projects funded at national (MISIO-NES AI) and European level (H2020 and Horizon Europe). In 2022 she has been recognized as one of the Spain’s top 40 futurists by Forbes.
Shalini Kurapati (https://www.cesaer.org/openness-and-commercialisation/shalini-kurapati/) is the co-founder of Clearbox AI solutions. With her multi-disciplinary expertise at the intersection of Technology, Policy and Management, Shalini leads the strategy, operations and business development at Clearbox AI. Before Clearbox AI, she successfully co-founded an AI consultancy in the Netherlands and was in the pilot team of the data stewardship project at TU Delft. She currently holds an adjunct fellowship in Open Science and RDM at Politecnico di Torino, Italy.
Shalini comes from a strong research background and is an expert of data management, data privacy and data stewardship. During her past experience as a data steward she worked on the transparency, privacy and fairness issues across data life cycles. She is now translating her experience to fairness and transparency of ML algorithms.
She has wide ranging international professional experience in the Netherlands, Sweden, India and United States. She is an effective communicator and can engage with both technical and non-technical audiences. She worked as a freelance journalist for the Times of India, the largest circulating English newspaper in India. Shalini has also been invited to speak at conferences on research data management and transparency of data life cycles across Europe.
Simona Rombo is Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI) of University of Palermo. Her main research contributions focus on the design and development of efficient algorithms for the analysis of biological networks, sequences, and structures. Simona was co-PI for the research project “Compositional approaches for the characterization and mining of omics data”, financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research under the program “Research Projects of National Interest (PRIN) 2012” (Partners: University of Padua and University of Calabria). She was PI for a Microsoft Azure Research Award of 1 year on Biological Big Network Analysis, and for several other research projects financed by the National Institute of High Mathematics F. Severi under the program “Research Projects of the National Group for Scientific Computation”. She leads a research group involved in technological transfers with a software platform for decision support on Precision Medicine (they are among the winners of StartCup Palermo 2019).
Massimo Ruffolo is researcher at ICAR-CNR, Founder Altilia / Altilia; ICAR-CNR. Massimo is an innovator with 20+ years of experience as researcher and entrepreneur. He is member of the High-Performance Computing and Networking Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). His research interests are: Artificial Intelligence, Databases and Big Data, Semantic Technologies, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing. Massimo has led many R&D projects, is author of papers appeared in international journals and conference proceedings, is reviewer and program committee member of many international conferences and journals and has been adjunct professor at the University of Calabria. The most recent of Massimo’s entrepreneurial initiatives is Altilia where he is the founder/CEO/CTO. He contributes to shape product, marketing and business strategies directly executing R&D, product development, and sales activities. Altilia is now one of the most important Italian players in the areas of artificial intelligence and big data analytics.
Domenico URSINO is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Department of Information Engineering (DII) at the University Politecnica of Marche. (https://www.univpm.it/Entra/Engine/RAServePG.php/P/320710010421/idsel/754/docname/DOMENICO%20URSINO)
He received the MSc Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Calabria in July 1995. He received the PhD in System Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Calabria in January 2000. From November 2000 to December 2004, he was an Assistant Professor at the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria. From January 2005, he was an Associate Professor at the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria. From November 2015, he is a Vice Rector, Responsible for Information Technology, of his university. He is author of more than 160 papers. His research interests include Neurological Network Analysis, Social Internetworking, Social Network Analysis, Knowledge Extraction and Representation, Source and Data Integration, Multi-Agent Systems, Recommender Systems.
| MODERATORS |
Genoveva Vargas-Solar is a principal scientist of the French Council of Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the DataBase group of Laboratory on Informatics on Image and Information Systems (LIRIS). She is a regular member of the Mexican Academia of Computing. She contributes to the construction of service-based database/data science management systems. She proposes query evaluation methodologies, algorithms, and tools for composing, deploying, and executing data science functions on just in time architectures (disaggregated data centres). She promotes gender equality and diversity and inclusion (D&I) actions. She is a member of the gender equality committee at LIRIS and she represents EDBT in the inter-conference group D&I databases. She leads the SINFONIA and JOWDISAI projects on women’s work in AI and DS. She actively promotes scientific cooperation in Computer Science between Latin America and Europe, particularly between France and Mexico.
Ester Zumpano is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the Department of Computer Engineering, Modeling, Electronics and Systems (DIMES) and Research Associate at the CNR-NANOTEC. She received a PhD in Computer Science in 2003. Her areas of research include health information systems, data integration, logic programming, view updating, artificial Intelligence, database management. She is member of the Steering Committee of ADBIS Conf. She is member of the Scientific Board of the Ph.D. Course in Information and Communication Technologies, University of Calabria, Italy. She is the promoter of a teaching/research agreement between UNICAL and the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology (YunTech), Taiwan and between the DIMES and the Computer and the Communication Engineering/ SCIT/FOE of the MANIPAL UNIVERSITY JAIPUR, India and. She is founding member of ITACA S.r.l. spin-off. She participated in many R&D projects, program chair/PC member of many international conferences/workshops; member of the Editor Board of the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems and the Journal of Big Data and Cognitive Computing; guest editor for Intelligent Systems with Applications, Journal of Logic and Computation (JLC) and Information Systems Journal.
