Laure Le Bars is Research Project Director at SAP. She coordinates a Quantum Computing initiative at SAP. She is member of the Governing Board and President of the European Quantum Industry Consortium, since February 2021 (QuIC). She works on several projects like Big Data Value Association (BDVA/DAIRO Board of Directors and Vice-President www.bdva.eu ), Smart Data Innovation Lab (deputy coordinator www.sdil.de), EIT Digital (SAP project coordinator; principal of staff, office of the CEO 2010-2013) or Academy Cube. She was also involved in the French-German cooperation on Digital Economy.
Before that, she was SAP Labs Canada Managing Director since its inception in 1997 until 2008. In parallel, she conducted an analysis for a lab in Central & East Europe in 2004, established the lab in Budapest and was the Managing Director of SAP Labs Hungary until 2007. She joined SAP as a development consultant in Canada and in the US in 1995 and was responsible for establishing the Montreal Labs. She won in 2007 the Stevie Award for Women in Business in category “Best executive–non-services-under 2500 employees”.
She was on the Industrial Advisory Board of SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge www.swebok.org), a joint initiative of IEEE Computer Society and UQAM to achieve international consensus on the body of knowledge in software engineering.
She holds degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science and Economics from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique pour l’Industrie et l'Entreprise (France). Her thesis dealt with Operation Research for Artificial Intelligence at GERAD in Montréal, Canada.
