Zoi Roupakia
Zoi is an AI/machine learning and policy expert committed to bridging AI, policy, and innovation. As the Policy and AI Research Lead at UCI (University Commercialisation and Innovation Policy Evidence Unit, University of Cambridge), she leads a dual research programme on university innovation commercialisation and responsible AI for policy.
Her work on university commercialisation addresses key challenges in translating research into spinouts, their scale-up pathways, and gender disparities. As part of this strand of work, Zoi has actively provided evidence to inform government discussions on this topic, working with UK government departments and agencies such as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Research England.
Her second strand of work delves into responsible AI for policy and policy for AI. Zoi investigates how AI can be used to extract evidence for university commercialisation policymaking while critically examining potential biases, explainability limitations, accuracy concerns, and strategies for bias mitigation and accuracy benchmarking. She is interested in exploring the impact of emerging AI regulations and principles on AI use in policy, aiming to contribute to the development of guidelines for responsible AI in this policy area.
In 2021, Zoi was appointed as a member of the Knowledge Exchange Framework metrics expert group by Research England. In 2023, she was awarded an InterAct ECR Fellowship to study AI’s social and economic impact on manufacturing. Her work in gender disparities was recently recognised by receiving the IfM 2023 Post-Doctoral Award for Excellence in Academic Citizenship.
Zoi collaborates closely with the Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy (CIIP) group, providing evidence for industrial innovation policy projects for stakeholders such as the United Nations Development Organisation (UNIDO), Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF), the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit (GMIS), and the UK government. Recent work in this role has included co-authoring the Manifesto for Global Industrial Safety, developed by a Global Industrial Safety Coalition led by UNIDO, LRF, CIIP, and GMIS, marking a significant development in global industrial safety.
Before joining UCI, Zoi’s diverse experience included freelance machine learning and technology consulting, data science, enterprise digital transformation, machine learning engineering for start-ups, and speech synthesis at Google.
Zoi was a member of the 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.” Prior to this, Zoi completed a five-year degree (bachelor’s and master’s degree) in electrical and computer engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.
Beyond her technical expertise, Zoi is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion and is actively involved in initiatives like the Women in Manufacturing Initiative. Zoi is also the founder/manager of an award-winning art business.
