Laure Le Bars is a Research Project Director at SAP Research & Innovation. She started an initiative on Quantum Computing @SAP. She is working on several projects like Big Data Value Association (Board of Directors and President; BDVe project manager), and Smart Data Innovation Lab (deputy coordinator until 2016), EIT Digital (principal of staff, office of the CEO; SAP project coordinator) or Academy Cube. She is also involved in the French-German cooperation on Digital Economy.

Before that, she set up SAP Labs Canada and was the Managing Director of the lab 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 won in 2007 the Stevie Award for Women in Business category “Best executive–non-services-under 2500 employees”; and was nominated in category “Best Canadian Executive”.
She was sitting on the Industrial Advisory Board of SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge), a joint initiative of IEEE Computer Society and UQAM to achieve international consensus on the body of knowledge in software engineering.

Laure Le Bars holds degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science and Economics from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique pour l’Industrie et l’Entreprise, Groupe Centrale, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, in France. Her thesis dealt with Operation Research for Artificial Intelligence at GERAD (Groupe d’études et de recherche en analyse des décisions) in Montréal, Canada.