Dr Seppälä is a Lecturer in Business Analytics in the Department of Business Information Systems. She specialises in Natural Language Processing (NLP), applied ontology, terminology, and corpus studies with applications in linguistics, legal informatics, biomedical informatics, and education. She teaches business data analysis and visualisation, and Python for business analytics to postgraduate students in the MSc Business Analytics programme, as well as introduction to programming with Python to first-year Business Information Systems students.

Her research focuses on developing AI technologies that combine Large Language Models and other NLP techniques with curated ontologies to enhance data quality, transparency and trustworthiness in information systems. She currently leads the AI-LIEN project, which uses AI-powered technologies for learning analytics, and collaborates on projects investigating the impact of AI on organisations and legislative review. Her research has resulted in 43 publications in outlets of international standing and 27 open-source research artefacts, and she has secured approximately €500,000 through competitive research grants.

Dr Seppälä was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Career-FIT Fellow (2019-2022) at UCC investigating NLP methods for a computer-assisted definition authoring system for legal experts in partnership with a RegTech company. She worked as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at UCC's Governance, Risk and Compliance Technology Centre (2017-2019), and conducted postdoctoral research in biomedical informatics and applied ontology at the University of Florida (2016-2017) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (2012-2016). She holds a PhD in Multilingual Information Processing from the University of Geneva (2012) and a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from UCC (2022). 

Dr Seppälä serves on the editorial board of Applied Ontology (IOS Press) and as Communication Co-officer and Substitute Auditor for the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA). She actively contributes to her academic community by serving as a reviewer for journals including the European Journal of Information Systems and Terminology, and regularly participates in programme committees for international conferences focused on computational linguistics, natural language processing, applied ontology, and financial technology applications. She co-supervises two PhD students in the areas of accessibility of mobile banking applications, and Information Systems, Explainable AI, NLP and Applied Ontology. She actively contributes to UCC through the development of the CUBS Canvas Template and her membership in the CUBS Digital Learning & Teaching Committee.

• AI
• Applied Ontology
• Natural Language Processing
• Impact of AI in Organisations
• Learning Analytics

2022-Present

• IS4470: Final Year Project
• IS6051: Business Data Analysis and Visualisation
• IS6061: Python for Business Analytics

2022-2026

• IS1110: Introduction to Programming for BIS 1
• IS1111: Introduction to Programming for BIS 2
• IS6051: Business Data Analysis and Visualisation
• IS6061: Python for Business Analytics

2023-present

• BIS summer camps

Academic Qualifications

Continuous Education