The professor of the Institute Karina Gibert receives the honorable mention of the Creu Casas award

Karina Gibert is a professor at the UPC, director of the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence research center (ideai.upc.edu) and a researcher at the UPC Institute for Research in Sustainability Science and Technologies. On April 23, the Sant Jordi Awards of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans were presented, in its 90th edition and Karina Gibert received the honorable mention of the Creu Casas Award, women to change the world, which the IEC grants to a woman in recognition of her career in disseminating and approaching technology to female students in any field (engineering, architecture, computing, telecommunications, etc.), especially valuing her inspiring and entrepreneurial profile and the contributions she has made to promote laws that prevent gender discrimination in technological fields. She is currently vice-dean of the presidency of the Official College of Computer Engineering of Catalonia.

Graduated in Computer Science from the Barcelona School of Computer Science, where she has been teaching for more than 30 years, she is aware of the problems linked to the lack of female vocations in the field of computer science and technology in general. From her position as vice-dean of Big Data, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Official College of Computer Engineering of Catalonia, in 2018 she founded the College's gender commission, donesCOEINF, and later the vice-dean of the presidency that she currently holds for Equality and Ethics. A year later, she founded the gender chapter of the Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (of which she is a founding member).

This mention is a recognition of the intense work carried out to close the gender gap in technology and especially in computer engineering, work carried out by these gender commissions, its participation in the women's and equality commission of the intercollegiate .legial, the Forum Hipatia and as co-ambassador of Women in Data Science at Standford in Barcelona, among others. Among the projects that it has launched, we could highlight the creation of the PrEInf portal (preinf.dones.coeinf.cat/) that makes female computer engineers visible and is linked to the websites of many university degrees in computer science in Catalonia, or the Top Secret Rosies project (topsecretrosies.soko.tech) for the training of female talent in AI, launched on April 22, International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Karina Gibert is one of the leading scientists in the UPC’s aquiSTEAM program and actively participates in UPC activities to close the gender gap.

The IEC grants him this distinction "for his relevant and outstanding academic career, with which he has contributed to generating a model and benchmark for future generations."