Alejandro Benito-Santos

Hello! I am Alejandro, a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the University of Salamanca (Spain). I completed my BSc in Computer Engineering at the same university, from which I also obtained an MSc in Intelligent Systems in 2016. Before, I worked in UK and Spain as a freelance mobile developer and UX designer.

I am a member of the Visual Analytics and Information Visualization Group VisUSAL (within the Recognized Research Group GRIAL), where I completed my PhD thesis “Supporting Methodology Transfer in Visualization Research with Literature-Based Discovery and Visual Text Analytics”. In my thesis, I developed novel visual text analytics methods to assist interdisciplinary researchers in finding visualizations that can be reused across different knowledge domains such as digital humanities, sports science, linguistics, and bioinformatics. To this aim, I combined several state-of-the-art techniques in the fields of NLP, recommender systems, scientometrics, information theory, and visualization. I obtained the grade of Summa Cum Laude for my work (thesis, presentation slides).

My other research interests lie in the areas of human-computer interaction, design, statistics, and education. During my time as a PhD student, I had the chance to teach HCI and introduction to Python programming for statisticians at the Faculty of Sciences of Salamanca, which I enjoyed a lot. More recently (2020-2021), I gave two courses (introduction to programming and computational tools, respectively) in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Specialization of the University of Salamanca. Finally, I try to be an active member of the scientific community, and I reviewed for a variety of journals and conferences, such as IEEE VIS, the ADHO Digital Humanities Conferences (DH), IEEE Access, or the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), among others.

Click here to download my CV.