International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022
Posted on: 11 February 2022 in Blog posts
The International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated on 11th February aims to promote women and girls in science. This Day is an opportunity to promote full and equal access to and participation in science for women and girls.
To celebrate we want to share two of our brilliant female academics, and look at their research and achievements:
Dr Valentina Tamma
Department of Computer Science
My research interests lie in the area of Ontologies in open and distributed environments, such as Multi-Agent systems, Semantic Web and Grid environments. My research is about understanding how systems, services, and devices can work intelligently with each other within an dynamic or transient environment.
Within this context. I am interested in the use of Artificial Intelligence methods in order to investigate mechanisms for dynamic knowledge evolution and adaptation; i.e. how agents can dynamically establish common grounds for communication, and once they have achieved consensus on the ontology to use how this commitment can cause changes to the agent’s knowledge, and possibly in turn to its beliefs. In this context I am investigating Ontology design, ontology management, semantic integration, ontology evolution, and knowledge acquisition.
I have authored several papers in the areas of Ontologies and Knowledge Sharing, Formal ontologies, and Knowledge Management, and I have been involved in a number of EU and UK projects on these topics.
During OWLED 2014 was elected on the OWLED steering committee, that is responsible for carrying out policy determined at the OWLED business meetings and otherwise assisting the organizers of the OWLED workshops.
I was general chair of OWLED 2015 and I was Programme Co-Chair for the Resources Track at ISWC 2017 and for the Research Track at ISWC 2020.
In 2018/19 I edited the Journal of Web Semantics special issues on Ontology Engineering and on Benchmarking Semantic Web Solutions and I am currently an area editor for the Journal of Web Semantics.
Dr Heba Lakany
Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics
Dr Heba Lakany has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in artificial intelligence and is a senior member of the IEEE.
She joined the University of Liverpool in October 2019 as a Reader in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics.
Previously, she worked as an academic and a researcher at the Universities of Edinburgh, Essex and Strathclyde.
Her research interests focus on human movement and development of technologies for assistance, augmentation and rehabilitation of human movement. For this she collaborates nationally and internationally with clinicians and industry.
Dr Lakany has an extensive publication record in developing artificial intelligent and machine learning methods and technologies in medicine and engineering.
She has successfully attracted funding from EPSRC, MRC, Dunhill Medical Trust, Innovate UK and other funding bodies and is currently working on a project funded by Stoke Mandeville Spinal Research to assess upper limb robotic exoskeleton for rehabilitation of spinal cord injured survivors.
Getting girls involved in STEM
The School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science is committed to giving young people the opportunity to experience STEM subjects in a Univeristy environment. Researchers, academic staff and students deliver a wide range of hands-on and interactive STEM activities for various ages.
If you would like to get involved with our outreach activities, visit our webpages here