Luz Rello Sánchez

Luz Rello is Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Department at IE University as well as founder of the social company Change Dyslexia. She was the first Spanish person to receive the European Young Researchers’ Award, and her research, focused on emergent technologies for dyslexia, has been recognised by numerous awards including Ashoka Fellow, the MIT Technology Review ‘Innovators under 35 Award, Princesa de Girona Award, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list or Google’s Women Techmakers. Her tool, Dytective, combines machine learning and computer games to screen and treat dyslexia; it has been used over that 250,000 times, becoming the most used online dyslexia test. Currently the tool is being adopted the public schools of the Council of Education of Madrid.

She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, a degree in Linguistics, and a Master’s degree in Natural Language Processing. From 2014 to 2018 she was Special Faculty at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University and since 2019 she is also an accessibility consultant for Apple Inc. She has also collaborated as an invited expert for Understood.org, for  the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and for the National strategy of Artificial Intelligence from the Government of Spain.

She is author of 2 books, 7 indexed journal papers, 36 refereed conference papers, co-author of 46 other publications and one patent application. Her publications are co-authored with 71 researchers from 32 institutions and according to Google Scholar there are around 1,500 citations to her work with an h-index of 21. Her research interests include e-Health, Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, and Accessibility.

During her free time she enjoys writing children books (two published), designing ambigrams, running across Retiro’s park, and painting reproductions of Joan Miro’s works. More information at www.luzrello.org.

ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE

• Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Department, IE University, 2019 – Present

• Systems Scientist at Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, 2016 – 2018

• Postdoctoral Researcher at the Human Computer Interaction Institute. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, 2014 – 2016

• Visiting Researcher at IDEIAS Lab in Departamento de Informática da Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2013

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Department of Information and Communication Technologies. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, 2014

• M.A. Master in Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology. University of Wolverhampton, UK, 2010

• B.A. in Linguistics. Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, 2008

CORPORATE EXPERIENCE

• Founder and CEO of Change Dyslexia, Spain, 2015-2019

• Accessibility Consultant at Apple Inc., USA, 2019

• Co-founder and Research Leader of Piruletras, Spain, 2012 – 2015

• Computational Linguist at the startup Molino de Ideas, Spain 2009-2010