Natalia Villanueva Rosales
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Associate Professor, Computer Science
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The amount of scientific data has dramatically increased with the development of faster and cheaper technology. In 2020, 44 trillion gigabytes are expected to be found as digital data. The manual processing of scientific data is no longer scalable. Dr. Villanueva Rosales' research aims to improve the automated discovery, integration, analysis and interpretation of scientific data by providing context or meaning to information using Semantic Web technologies. This context, encoded in ontologies, can be used by computers to identify data and models required to answer a specific research question. The impact of her work can be clearly appreciated when it is applied to interdisciplinary research, where a key challenge is the integration of data and reusability of models initially created for a different purpose. Two distinctive areas of her research include data- and ontology-based knowledge negotiation and the creation of trust models for interdisciplinary teams. Her work has been applied in the areas of pharmacogenomics, ecology and climate change.