Professor Aline Villavicencio

Professor Aline Villavicencio is the Director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDSAI) and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the University of Exeter. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil). She is a distinguished scholar in the field of computational linguistics, with a significant impact on both academic research and the broader computational language community. 

Before joining Exeter in 2024, Professor Villavicencio worked at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Sheffield where she was Chair in Natural Language Processing. Together with Professor Kalina Bontcheva, she is the Principal Investigator on the ATRIUM (Advancing fronTier Research In the arts and hUManities) Project (2024-27) at the University of Sheffield. Funded by the European Union (HORIZON-INFRA-2023-SERV-01-02), this project aims to bridge leading research infrastructures in arts and humanities, archaeology, languages, and open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities.

From 2005 to 2021, Professor Villavicencio worked at the Institute of Informatics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and held a Research Fellowship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) from 2009 to 2017.