Speaker bio

Anna Fensel is Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands. Previously, she held positions at the University of Innsbruck, Austria; FTW – Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Austria; and the University of Surrey, UK. She earned her habilitation and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck and her Specialist Diploma, MSc-equivalent, in Mathematics and Computer Science from Novosibirsk State University, Russia.

Her research focuses on semantic technologies, linked data, and knowledge graphs, and their adoption across domains including sustainability, energy efficiency, production, food and health, and social sciences. She has coordinated EU and national projects and served as principal investigator in more than 20 projects. She has contributed to over 100 scientific events, chaired major conferences, serves as journal editor and reviewer, and evaluates research proposals. She has co-authored around 170 refereed publications and received several best paper awards.

Abstract

The integration of knowledge graphs and semantic web technologies in interdisciplinary research presents a transformative opportunity for research progress, particularly when combined with FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — and generative AI.

While symbolic AI and semantic web methods offer robust solutions for data integration and interoperability, a persistent challenge remains: the lack of high-quality, semantically rich data. Current FAIR data implementations often still fall short, which limits their usability in machine learning and deep learning analysis and applications.

This issue is especially relevant in complex interdisciplinary fields such as agriculture, health, food and social sciences, where heterogeneous data must be efficiently linked to address multi-faceted challenges such as sustainability and climate adaptation. Data ownership concerns, legal compliance, including GDPR and the AI Act, and fragmented governance frameworks also hinder collaboration and innovation.

To overcome these barriers, specialized research infrastructure is needed to enable responsible data sharing and reuse while ensuring legal and ethical compliance. This talk presents knowledge graph-enabled strategies and solutions to enhance FAIR and CARE data practices and explores their role in generative AI applications for advancing agri-food-related research and sustainable and healthy development.

Speaker bio

Néstor Duch-Brown is a scientific officer and team leader at the Digital Economy Unit of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. Before joining the JRC in 2012, he was an associate professor at the University of Barcelona and researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Economics.

His current research focuses on digital economics, with particular emphasis on online platforms, the economics of digital data and the economic implications of artificial intelligence. More broadly, his research interests are oriented towards the quantification of the economic impact of digital and ICT technologies on markets, firms’ strategies and consumer behaviour.

As a public policy economist in an EU policy research institute such as the JRC, his main goal is to contribute economic insights for policy design and evaluation. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Barcelona.

Speaker bio

Ulf-Dietrich Reips is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Konstanz, where he holds the Chair for Psychological Methods, Assessment, and iScience. For three decades he has worked on Internet-based research methodologies, the psychology of the Internet, measurement, assessment, privacy, social media, big data, cognition and digital science.

During his PhD student years at the University of Tübingen in 1994, he founded the Web Experimental Psychology Lab, the first laboratory for conducting real experiments on the World Wide Web. His 2002 article “Standards for Internet-based experimenting” in the journal Experimental Psychology helped define the field.

Ulf was elected the first non-North American president of the Society for Computers in Psychology and recently became the first non-North American Editor-in-Chief for Psychological Science in the Public Interest. He was the founding editor of the International Journal of Internet Science. Many of his more than 200 scientific publications are among the most highly cited in their journals, and the Stanford study lists him as one of the top 2% cited researchers worldwide with career-long impact and a below-average self-citation rate.

Ulf has worked, lived and studied in California, Colorado, Israel, Germany, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. In 2025 he received the Catalyst Leaders Fellowship award by the Royal Society of New Zealand and will be hosted each year from 2026 to 2028 at the University of Auckland. He will also co-receive the Quality of Life Prize by the Lilly Foundation in May 2026 for the PICTURE project study on PTSD treatment after intensive care.

Ulf and his team develop and provide free web tools for researchers, teachers, students and the public. They have received numerous awards for their web applications and methodological work serving the research community.