Bente Maegaard has been appointed chair of the SWG on Social and Cultural Innovation for three years, starting 1 January 2019.
The Social and Cultural Innovation SWG proposes possible solutions (related to Research Infrastructures) that are able to help tackle the Grand Challenges facing society, such as health or demographic change, or the “Inclusive, innovative and secure societies” challenge from the third pillar of Horizon 2020, called “Tackling societal challenges”. It establishes possible methods through which social sciences and humanities could be used as an evaluation criterion for the activity of other Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the ESFRI roadmap (e.g. social impact, etc.). It also explores how RIs can contribute to social innovation or better knowledge transfer towards society.
Bente Maegaard: “I am looking forward to this new challenge and I hope to be able to use some of the experience I have from CLARIN. Apart from the obvious tasks such as contributing to the next roadmap, I hope to be able to promote the RIs in our field and also to establish collaboration with RIs from other fields where possible, not least when it comes to impact studies.“
Bente Maegaard is vice Executive Director of CLARIN . Bente is also employed at the University of Copenhagen, at the Centre for Language Technology. Her areas of expertise are in particular research infrastructure, language resources and tools, and machine translation. Bente has been project coordinator of many national and European research projects. She has been a member of the ESFRI SWG since 2012.