Alejandro Bia

Alejandro Bia is deputy director of the Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science and a researcher at the Operations Research Center (CIO), both at the Miguel Hernández University (Elche, Spain).

He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Alicante, a MSc and a BS in Computer Science from ORT University, a Diploma in Computing and Information Systems from Oxford University, and a Universitary Expert in Technological Innovation in Education from the Miguel Hernández University.

Apart from UMH, he has also lectured for the Cultural Heritage Digitization Course at FUNED (2013-2015), the Master in Digital Humanities (2005-2011), and the Master in Web Technology (2005-2007), at the University of Castilla La Mancha, for the Department of Languages and Information Systems (2002-2004) and the Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis (2002) of the University of Alicante, and at ORT University (1990-2004).

He is a frequent instructor of XML-TEI workshops and seminars in, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Uruguay.

His lecture topics are: text markup using XML and TEI, web application design, digital libraries, software engineering, project management, computer crime, computer forensics, information security, concurrent programming, operating systems, computer architecture, computer networks and English for computer sciences.

He has participated in several publicly funded projects: CHispa (program of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche de France and program ECOS of the Embassy of France in Uruguay - 2016-2017), the TRACEsofTools project: software tools for contrastive text analysis in parallel bilingual corpus (principal investigator, 2013-2016), the Digital Humanities Workbench (principal investigator, DHW) project (2012-2013), the Atenea project (University of Málaga, 2009-2012), the Bibliotheca Europa project (University of Alicante, 2006-2008), Digital Library of the National Library of Spain (as consultant, 2005) and the in the METAe: Metadata Engine project (EU funded, 2000-2003).

From 1999 to 2004, he has been Head of Research and Development of the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library at the University of Alicante, the biggest digital library of Spanish literary works and one of the first projects to use TEI in XML format. Previously, he has worked as Special-Projects Manager at NetGate (1996), and as Documentation Editor of the GeneXus project at ARTech (Advanced Research and Technology) (1991-1994).

His current research interests are text alignment, text-mining, stylometry and visualization methods applied to text corpora. Previously, he worked on the application of software engineering methods and techniques to digital libraries (his PhD Thesis topic), to enhance document structure design, multilingual markup languages, digitisation automation by computer means, digital preservation and digitisation metrics and cost estimates. He also worked on neural networks training and developed the ALOPEX-B optimization method.

He is a long-time member of the DH community (since 1999), and has been elected member of the TEI Council for three periods (2002-2004, 2004-2006 and 2017-2018) and of the Executive Committee of the former Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, now EADH, for two periods (2004-2008 and 2008-2011). Currently, he is the secretary of the HDH association (Hispanic Digital Humanities), and a member of the TEI Council (Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative), the AIPO (Iberoamerican Association for Human Computer Interaction), and the Internet Society (Spanish chapter).