Zoi Roupakia is a research associate at the University Commercialisation and Innovation (UCI) Policy Evidence Unit at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), University of Cambridge. The Unit supports governments and university leaders in delivering a step-change in the contributions universities make to innovation and economic prosperity – nationally and locally – through their commercialisation and other innovation-focused activities and partnerships.

Zoi’s research focuses on improving the quality and robustness of data and metrics available on university commercialisation and innovation for public policy, in particular on university spinouts and R&D/innovation partnerships. She is highly interested in leveraging machine learning/data science techniques to address the lack of timely data, create novel datasets and tackle the data bias issues around this policy area.

Before joining the UCI at IfM, Zoi was a freelance machine learning/technology consultant with several years of experience carrying out multidisciplinary consulting work, including: data science advice to inform industrial innovation policy projects for Policy Links (IfM, University of Cambridge); enterprise digital transformation for construction companies;  machine learning engineering and data science for companies, such as a melody-recognition start-up, and speech synthesis at Google, among others.

Between 2007 and 2013, she was a member of Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Speech Group, at the University of Cambridge and has postgraduate and industrial research experience in large-vocabulary speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. She is a Google patent co-inventor on voice conversion and author of published work in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.  She holds an MPhil in Computer, Speech, Text and Internet technology (Speech and Natural Language Processing) from the University of Cambridge and was awarded the “Kate Bertram Prize for Distinction Result in MPhil in Computer Science”.  She studied electrical and computer engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

After office hours, Zoi is a founder/manager of an award-winning art business working on AI creativity and dedicates time to art, technology, and Formula 1.