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Richard Benjamins

Dr. Richard Benjamins is Data & AI Ambassador at Telefonica, LUCA where he is responsible for making Data & AI sustainable from a societal and ethical perspective. He is among the 100 most influential people in data-driven business (DataIQ 100, 2018). He was Group Chief Data Officer at AXA (Insurance) and worked for 10 years at Telefonica occupying several management positions related to Big Data and Analytics, touching all areas of the value chain. His passion lies in creating value from data. Business value, but also value for the society: he is the founder of Telefonica’s Big Data for Social Good department. He currently works on how to make Data & AI sustainable from a business, societal and ethical perspective. He is member of the B2G data-sharing Expert Group of the EC, and a frequent speaker on Data and Artificial Intelligence events. He is also a strategic advisor to BigML – “Machine Learning made easy”. He was co-founder and director at iSOCO (1999-2007) and has held positions at the universities/research institutes in Madrid, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Paris, and Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science / Artificial Intelligence from the University of Amsterdam.

Richard Benjamins

Can machines think? Or are humans machines?

This is the last in a series of three post about some fundamental notions of AI. The objective of these series of three posts is to equip readers with...

Richard Benjamins

How “intelligent” can Artificial Intelligence get?

This post is the second in a series of three posts, each of which discuss the fundamental concepts of Artificial Intelligence. In our first post we discussed AI definitions,...

Richard Benjamins

Artificial Intelligence: What even is that?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the hottest topic out there at the moment, and often it is merely associated with chatbots such as Siri or other cognitive programs such as...

Richard Benjamins

Open Data and Business – a paradox?

While Open Data has a wide range of definitions, Wikipedia provides one of the most commonly accepted: “Open Data is the idea that some data should be freely available...

Richard Benjamins

Big Data and Elections: We shine a light on Trump and Clinton

Twitter is widely used as a tool to understand and predict phenomena in the real world. Today on our blog, we have been using Twitter to understand the US Presidential...

Richard Benjamins

Telco Data Analytics: what’s next in Big Data for Telcos

By Lora Mihova, Strategy Manager at LUCA and Richard Benjamins, Director External Positioning and Big Data for Social Good at LUCA. The European version of Telco Data Analytics Conference took place on...

Richard Benjamins

The 6 challenges of Big Data for Social Good

Many of us are familiar with the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations for 2030 and increasingly more and more companies and organizations are contributing to their achievement. However, there...

Richard Benjamins

Big Data Week 2016: Forget Big Data, Artificial Intelligence is the new kid on the block

Yesterday, the LUCA team attended the first day of Big Data Week. BDW is a global community that organizes an annual event focusing on the social, political, and technological...

Richard Benjamins

From Data Exhaust to Data-Driven: How CEOs face Big Data

Since Big Data became a buzzword in the board room of companies some years ago (thanks to McKinsey’s report “Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity”), many...