Dr Edlira Vakaj

Dr Edlira Vakaj is an Associate Professor of Neuro-Symbolic AI, Academic Lead for Research, Innovation and Enterprise at the College of Computing and leading the Natural Language

Processing at Birmingham City University, UK. She conducts research in multidisciplinary projects focusing on Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs, AI, and Semantic Data Spaces. Edlira is the principal investigator of the ACCORD Horizon project and engaged in several European and UK-funded projects of various domains where Semantic Web Technologies are applied, such as Renewable Energy (FP7 RENESENG), Industrialised Construction and Industry 4.0 (Innovate UK DfMA, Knowledge Transfer Partnership), Higher Education and Youth (Erasmus + Capacity Building, Learning mobility of individuals, Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices action).

She is acting as the Academic Lead of several Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) projects. She is a Professional Member of the British Computer Society, a Fellow and AURORA of Higher Education Academy UK, and a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher Fellow from the University of Surrey.

Edlira is an active member of various communities, such as The Alan Turing Knowledge Graph Community, Linked Building Data, Knowledge Graph Creation, and Common Action. She organized the 1st NLP4KGC workshop in conjunction with the WWW 2023 conference and the 2nd NLP4KGc workshop in the SEMANTICs 2023 conference. She sits on various Editorial Boards (MDPI Journal of Image), Program Committees (INTAP 2020, ICICT 2021, ICICT 2022 etc.), Conference Chair (ISCIM2011, ISCIM2013, SIMULTECH etc.), Hackathon organizer (NASA APP Space 2018-2022) and mentor, skills competitions (World Skills), and various academia-led research seminars and workshops.