Rate My Professor Elena Simperl

Elena Simperl is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, a position she has held since 2020. She co-directs the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, appointed in May 2025. She previously served as Associate Professor at the University of Southampton after moving to the UK in 2012. An engineer by training who studied in Germany, she is also Director of Research at the Open Data Institute, Fellow of the British Computer Society and Royal Society of Arts, Hans Fischer Senior Fellow, and president of the Semantic Web Science Association. She co-chairs the Croissant working group in MLCommons, developing standards for machine learning dataset portability, discovery, and use.

Professor Simperl’s research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and social computing, spanning knowledge engineering, knowledge graphs, semantic technologies, human and social computation, crowdsourcing, open data, human data interaction, data storytelling, and human-centric AI. She has been recognized in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade, the Women in AI 2000 ranking, as an ACM Distinguished Member in 2024 for contributions to knowledge engineering, knowledge graphs, and the semantic web, and received a Siemens fellowship in 2023 to advance trustworthy AI. Key publications include “Dataset search: a survey” (2020), “T-REx: A large scale alignment of natural language with knowledge base triples” (2018), “Reusing ontologies on the Semantic Web: A feasibility study” (2009), “CrowdMap: Crowdsourcing Ontology Alignment with Microtasks” (2012), and “An investigation of player motivations in Eyewire, a gamified citizen science project” (2017). She leads projects such as PHAWM on participatory harm auditing for AI systems and Impetus on citizen science platforms. Professor Simperl serves on OpenUK’s AI Advisory Board, delivers public lectures on knowledge graphs and responsible AI, and contributes to initiatives aligning AI with regulation and sustainability.