Awards

Since its creation in June of 2020, ELLIS Alicante has received the following awards as an institution:

1. Top100 of projects about AI for Sustainable Development by IRCAI under the auspices of UNESCO for the project ValenciaIA4COVID
2. The Spanish Association of Foundations awards ELLIS Alicante with the Social Innovation Award 2022 for the successful practical application to social innovation of its research work in Artificial Intelligence in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. The award ceremony took place in Madrid on November 29th 2022 at the Spanish annual Conference of foundations and civil society #Demos2022. ELLIS Alicante awarded the Social Innovation Prize by the AEF
3. The Social Council of the UA awarded ELLIS Alicante for its sociocultural merits at its annual awards gala held on November 10th 2022 at Casa Mediterráneo (Alicante) in recognition of its commitment and spirit of collaboration with the University of Alicante. ELLIS Alicante awarded the University Engagement Award 2022 by the Social Council of the University of Alicante

Since the creation of ELLIS Alicante, different members of our growing team have earned the following individual honors — a reflection of the caliber of talent ELLIS Alicante has attracted:

2026

• Nuria Oliver
  • Female computer scientist in Spain with the highest scientific impact (d-index), Research.com
  • Included again in Stanford's World's Top 2% Scientists
  • Chief in AI 100, among the 100 executives most shaping how AI is built and deployed
  • Named among the 25 Most Influential People in Spain in Science and Technology
  • Selected for the Top 100 Women in AI list

2025

• Lucile Favero — Led the ELLIS Alicante team to win the ACL 2025 Critical Questions Generation Shared Task
• Adrian Arnaiz — Best scientific paper and best poster, MLG workshop, ECML-PKDD 2025
• Piera Riccio & Adrián Arnaiz — "Sobresaliente cum laude" (highest honors) on their doctoral dissertations
• ELLIS Alicante — San Alberto Magno 2025 Award, Faculty of Sciences, University of Alicante
• Nuria Oliver
  • Top33 Global Leader in responsible AI, She Shapes AI
  • Computer Science Leader Award, Research.com
  • Female computer scientist in Spain with the highest scientific impact (d-index), Research.com
  • Extraordinary Award to Excellence, Iñaki Berenguer Foundation
  • Top 10 AI Leader in Europe, AI Magazine
  • Selected for the LaIA 2025 list of leading women in technology, DonaDigital
  • 2025 Julio Rey Pastor National Research Award, Mathematics and ICT
  • Talgo Award for Excellence of Women in Engineering 2025
  • Social Distinguished Individual of 2025, Haz magazine

2024

• Erik Derner
  • CTU FEE Dean's Prize for a Prestigious Dissertation Thesis
  • Werner von Siemens Award for the best thesis on Industry 4.0
• Nuria Oliver
  • Hipatia Award, Academia Europaea and Barcelona's townhall
  • Trifermed Award for social impact
  • Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA)
  • ICMI Ten-year Technical Impact Award, for her 2014 paper "Once upon a crime: towards crime prediction from demographics and mobile data"
  • Digital Transformation Minerva Award, INECO and the Spanish Ministry of Transportation

2023

• Nuria Oliver
  • Gamechanger, Forbes magazine
  • Honorary Gold Top100
  • Largest D-index among female Computer Science researchers in Spain (2023–2024), Research.com
  • Technology Leadership Award, Empren Dona

2021

• ELLIS Alicante team — ECML-PKDD 2021 Best Paper Award (Applied Data Science), for Open Data Science to Fight COVID-19
• Nuria Oliver
  • Co-leader of the winning XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge team, ValenciaIA4COVID
  • Honorary Top100
  • King Jaume I Award in New Technologies
  • Abie Technology Leadership Award, AnitaB.org

2020

• Nuria Oliver
  • Data Scientist of the Year Award, ESRI
  • "Woman to Follow", Mujeres a Seguir
  • Recognized in Stanford's World's Top 2% Scientists every year since 2020