URJC Artificial Intelligence Research Awarded

Doctoral students Juan David Quintana and Sergio Pérez Peló have been awarded for their work at the XVIII Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA).

Juan David Quintana is a second-year doctoral student who is working on an algorithm that “finds the connections that can be saved within an internal circuit that has flaws in its manufacturing process,” Quintana pointed out. This research has allowed him to obtain the award for the best communication of a doctoral student at the XIII Spanish Congress of Metaheuristics, Evolutionary and Bioinspired Algorithms (MAEB 2018), held within the framework of the Conference.

For Quintana, this award “is a great recognition, especially when starting with the doctorate.”

The applications of Juan David Quintana’s work could range from improving the optimization of the operation of an assembly line or identifying the phylogenetic tree, something that, as this young researcher affirms, “is pure biology”.

Juan David Quintana can dedicate himself “completely to the doctorate” thanks to a FPU grant from the Ministry of Education. This young man is a student who has been at URJC for a long time, since he graduated in Computer Engineering from ETSII and did a master’s degree in Computer Vision.

For his part, Sergio Pérez, also a doctoral student who has just started these studies, is investigating, through the analysis of characteristics of social networks, the frequencies of interaction of different groups of users.

This research has earned Sergio Pérez the award for the best communication of a doctoral student at the I Workshop on Data Science in Social Networks (CiDReS 2018), held at CAEPIA. For this PhD student, “receiving this award is great, considering that I have just started at the International Doctoral School.”

As Sergio explained, at the moment “the research is at a theoretical level, and in theoretical networks it works very well” and has added that these studies could be used “to detect the radicalization of network users or anticipate electoral trends”, although these applications are more complicated because it requires “to carry out a language analysis on social networks”.

Sergio studied the Double Degree in Computer Engineering and Software Engineering and a master’s degree in Cybersecurity at the UOC and is completing his doctorate thanks to a research grant from the Community of Madrid. Sergio Pérez has recalled the important role of his “two good thesis directors: Jesús Sánches and Abraham Duarte” and has pointed out that the problems they pose allow him to advance in his research.

Both Juan David and Sergio belong to the URJC Research group, Grafo. This group is located in the Department of Computer Science, Computer Architecture, Computer Languages ​​and Systems, and Statistics and Operations Research of the ETSII.