José Luis Aznarte Mellado

A professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the UNED, he encourages a critical examination of the social impacts of data-driven technologies. In the years prior to his appointment as director of ANECA’s Teaching and Institutions Division, he served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Digitalisation and Innovation and for Educational Innovation, co-leading UNED’s institutional ED3 project (Digital, Distance and Data-driven Education). As part of that project, he spearheaded the Ethical Framework for the Use of Big Data at UNED, the result of a participatory process open to the university community.

Before joining the UNED, he worked as a postdoctoral research engineer in the renewable energy research group at the prestigious French engineering school Mines ParisTech, where he was involved in research and project management for the European projects ANEMOS.Plus (FP6) and SafeWind (FP7). He was awarded a Ramón y Cajal grant in 2013 and subsequently obtained the I3 certificate. He has taught courses in data mining and machine learning at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and supervised postgraduate dissertations and doctoral theses. He is the author or co-author of several dozen publications in high-impact journals.

His research focuses on time series forecasting and its applications to non-financial fields such as air quality, traffic and other public health issues. He coordinated the development of SOCAIRE, the Madrid City Council’s air quality forecasting system, as well as PreCoV2.org, a predictive tool for the coronavirus pandemic that was included in the COVID-19 European Forecasting Hub. He headed the EMT/UNED Chair in Air Quality and Sustainable Mobility, promoted by the Madrid Municipal Transport Company, and has collaborated in the creation of the Chair in ‘Science, Territory and Cooperativism’, sponsored by Zoocánica.