Bio

Dr. Richard Benjamins is Chief AI & Data Strategist at Telefonica. He is among the 100 most influential people in data-driven business (DataIQ 100, 2018). He is also co-founder and Vice President of the Spanish observatory for ethical and social impacts of AI (OdiseIA), and member of the board of directors of environmental non-profit CDP-Europe. He is part of the advisory board of the Centre for Digital Culture at the Vatican and of MIT-Sloan's panel on Responsible AI. He was Group Chief Data Officer at AXA (Insurance) and before that held for 10 years executive positions at Telefonica on Big Data and Analytics. He is the founder of Telefonica’s Big Data for Social Good department, expert to the EP’s AI Observatory (EPAIO), member of the B2G data-sharing Expert Group of the EC, and a frequent speaker at Artificial Intelligence events. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, has published over 100 scientific articles, and is author of the books “The myth of the algorithm: tales and truths of artificial intelligence” (Spanish) and “A Data-Driven Company”. He is strategic advisor of several start-ups, including BigML, Focus360 and Nexus Clips. Before joining Telefonica, he was director and board member at iSOCO, which he co-founded in 1999. Based on his work, iSOCO were granted the National Award for Computer Science. Benjamins held positions at the Technical University of Madrid, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the University of Paris-South, France, and the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona. He is a founding member of the editorial board of the Springer's AI Ethics Journal, member of the ETNO task force on Artificial Intelligence, and of the GSMA task force on AI for Impact.