Alejandro Bia is now deputy director of the Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science and a researcher at the Operations Research Center (CIO), both at the Miguel Hernández University (UMH) en Elche, Spain.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Alicante, a MSc and a BS in Computer Science from ORT University, a Diploma in Computing and Information Systems from Oxford University, and a diploma of Expert in Technological Innovation in Education from UMH.
Apart from UMH, he has also lectured for the Cultural Heritage Digitization Course at FUNED (2013-present), the Master in Digital Humanities (2005-2011), and the Master in Web Technology (2005-2007), at the University of Castilla La Mancha, among others. He is a frequent instructor of XML-TEI workshops and seminars in, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Uruguay.
His lecture topics are: text markup using XML and TEI, web application design, digital libraries, software engineering, project management, and information security.
He has participated in several publicly funded projects: TRACE: software tools for contrastive text analysis in parallel bilingual corpus (2013-2016), DHW, the Digital Humanities Workbench project (principal investigator, 2012-2013), the Atenea project (University of Málaga, 2009-2012), the Bibliotheca Europa project (University of Alicante, 2006-2008), Digital Library of the National Library of Spain (as consultant, 2005) and the in the METAe: Metadata Engine project (EU funded, 2000-2003). From 1999 to 2004, he has been Head of Research and Development of the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library at the University of Alicante, the biggest digital library of Spanish literary works and one of the first projects to use TEI in XML format.
His research interests are: text alignment, text-mining, stylometry and visualization methods applied to text corpora, software engineering, digital libraries, document structure design, multilingual markup languages, digitisation automation by computer means, digital preservation and digitisation metrics and cost estimates.
He is a long-time member of the digital humanities (DH) community (since 1999), and has been elected member of the TEI Council for three periods (2002-2004, 2004-2006 and 2017-2018) and of the Executive Committee of the former Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, now EADH, also for two periods (2004-2008 and 2008-2011).