Dr Valentina Tamma

Can you tell us about your career pathway?

Currently, I am Senior Lecturer in the Department of Compuer Science. This has come about by me always being interested in computing and how this can be used to make an impact in society. Studying computer science allowed me to engage in critical thinking and creative-problem solving.

Do you have an area of expertise / research?

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 a dynamic or transient environment. 

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. I have authored several papers in the areas of Ontologies and Knowledge Sharing, Formal ontologies, and Knowledge Management, and have been involved in a number of EU and UK projects on these topics.

During OWLED 2014 I was elected onto 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 also general chair of OWLED 2015 and 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.

Do you have any advice you'd like to share?

One of the best pieces of advice I was given is to embrace failure as an opportunity for learning. If an experiment does not confirm the initial hypotheses there is still a lot to learn. Never lose curiosity and keep reading articles, especially outside the personal area of expertise.

Why are you so passionate about your subject and STEMM?

Working in ontologies in general, and ontology engineering in particular involves engaging with diverse fields of artificial intelligence, linguistics, and cognitive science, which I find very interesting.

To find out more about Valentina visit here.