Prof. Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet

Bar-Ilan University

Head of Laboratory

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Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet is an Associate Professor and a senior faculty member in the Department of Information Science since 2006. Her doctorate was in the field of Natural Language Processing from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She developed novel algorithms for automatic ontology construction from large textual corpora. She also holds a B.A. in Hebrew Linguistics. Her current research interests and expertise are in the areas of ethical data modelling, ontologies, data-driven research and their applications in digital humanities and social sciences. She has formulated an ethical approach to the representation, organization, and analysis of information based on multi-view ontologies. Her investigations center around the creation of ethical ontological models that serve as instruments for identifying and analyzing opinions, as well as for automatically evaluating biases within extensive textual corpora. She serves as an Associate Editor of the Frontiers in AI: Language and Computation journal since 2018. She has won several awards for her publications and research projects, the last one is the prestigious PICCASO privacy award of 2022 for the best innovative privacy research. In the last years, Prof. Zhitomirsky-Geffet has received ten research grants from competitive funding institutions, such as Israel Science Foundation, Israel Ministry of Science & Technology, and Horizon 2020. She wrote over 80 scientific articles that were published in prominent journals and conferences such as PLOS ONE, Helyion, JASIS&T, DSH and others.

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