Ilria Tiddi successfully defended her PhD on 16th June 2016. During the viva and in her thesis ("Explaining Data Patterns with Knowledge from the Web of Data"), she described her work at the intersection of knowledge discovery and semantic web research, using the Web of Data to generate explanations for patterns found in data through data mining techniques. 

The examiners, Frank van Harmelen (VU Amsterdam) and Harith Alani (KMi) were impressed by Ilaria’s research, using a range of techniques from machine learning, data modelling and knowledge engineering to tackle an original and very complex problem.