Alejandro Ramos, SCIE-Fundación BBVA Research Award
The new awards, jointly created by the Scientific Computer Society of Spain (SCIE) and the BBVA Foundation, recognize the "creativity, originality, and excellence" of new PhD graduates.
"The most beautiful thing that has happened with my thesis is that it has acquired a dimension of real usefulness." Alejandro Ramos Soto did not hide his joy upon receiving the news: the jury recognized the CiTIUS postdoctoral researcher as one of the six doctors distinguished at a national level in the First Edition of the Spanish Scientific Society of Informatics - BBVA Foundation Research Awards.
Aimed at doctors under the age of 30 who developed their thesis at a university or scientific center in Spain, the new awards aim to serve as a stimulus to their work, publicly recognizing the quality of their projects and highlighting "their creativity, originality, and excellence."
A New Paradigm
Alejandro Ramos earned his doctorate in Information Technologies last December, after successfully defending his thesis developed over the past few years in the Intelligent Systems Group at CiTIUS.
The study's main contribution is that, for the first time, fuzzy set theories (or fuzzy sets) were applied to the field of data-to-text translation technologies (Data-To-Text technologies - D2T); a new paradigm that resulted in a system capable of automatically converting the numerical-symbolic language data used by MeteoGalicia, the Galician meteorological agency, into natural language.
Thus, the GALiWeather tool – which has already accumulated over 13 million online visits – 'translates' the weather forecast daily for the 314 municipalities in the community in a flexible and accurate manner, attending to nuances very much like a human expert would.
The thesis also represented a very significant scientific contribution in the theoretical field, as it proposed for the first time the collaboration of two disciplines that traditionally had not worked together: computational intelligence (more specifically, fuzzy logic) and natural language generation (Natural Language Generation - NLG). "They have a relational potential that has not been exploited until now," says Alejandro Ramos. The work opened a line of international collaboration with the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), which the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Malta will soon join.
Supporting Excellence to Retain Talent
"Spain cannot fall behind in providing innovation for the digital age. There is a lot of talent, and we must take advantage of it." This is how convinced Antonio Bahamonde was, the president of the federation grouping the eight scientific societies created around the various areas of computer engineering: the *Spanish Scientific Society of Informatics (*SCIE)_. "We are witnessing times of great challenges for Information Technologies; we must support excellence in research," he assures.
Meanwhile, the jury president Francisco Tirado Fernández, professor of Computer Architecture and Technology at the Complutense University of Madrid, highlighted the high quality of the applications and the diversity of competing areas: "these awards help identify and give visibility to new excellent researchers," he states. He particularly points out the impact they can have on the careers of new scientists: "at the current moment, this recognition can be very important, considering the risk that the Spanish academic field may not be able to accommodate them due to the difficulties universities and research centers face today in offering stable positions," he concludes.
"The most beautiful thing that has happened with my thesis is that it has acquired a dimension of real usefulness." Alejandro Ramos Soto did not hide his joy upon receiving the news: the jury recognized the CiTIUS postdoctoral researcher as one of the six doctors distinguished at a national level in the First Edition of the Spanish Scientific Society of Informatics - BBVA Foundation Research Awards.
Aimed at doctors under the age of 30 who developed their thesis at a university or scientific center in Spain, the new awards aim to serve as a stimulus to their work, publicly recognizing the quality of their projects and highlighting "their creativity, originality, and excellence."
A New Paradigm
Alejandro Ramos earned his doctorate in Information Technologies last December, after successfully defending his thesis developed over the past few years in the Intelligent Systems Group at CiTIUS.
The study's main contribution is that, for the first time, fuzzy set theories (or fuzzy sets) were applied to the field of data-to-text translation technologies (Data-To-Text technologies - D2T); a new paradigm that resulted in a system capable of automatically converting the numerical-symbolic language data used by MeteoGalicia, the Galician meteorological agency, into natural language.
Thus, the GALiWeather tool – which has already accumulated over 13 million online visits – 'translates' the weather forecast daily for the 314 municipalities in the community in a flexible and accurate manner, attending to nuances very much like a human expert would.
The thesis also represented a very significant scientific contribution in the theoretical field, as it proposed for the first time the collaboration of two disciplines that traditionally had not worked together: computational intelligence (more specifically, fuzzy logic) and natural language generation (Natural Language Generation - NLG). "They have a relational potential that has not been exploited until now," says Alejandro Ramos. The work opened a line of international collaboration with the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), which the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Malta will soon join.
Supporting Excellence to Retain Talent
"Spain cannot fall behind in providing innovation for the digital age. There is a lot of talent, and we must take advantage of it." This is how convinced Antonio Bahamonde was, the president of the federation grouping the eight scientific societies created around the various areas of computer engineering: the *Spanish Scientific Society of Informatics (*SCIE)_. "We are witnessing times of great challenges for Information Technologies; we must support excellence in research," he assures.
Meanwhile, the jury president Francisco Tirado Fernández, professor of Computer Architecture and Technology at the Complutense University of Madrid, highlighted the high quality of the applications and the diversity of competing areas: "these awards help identify and give visibility to new excellent researchers," he states. He particularly points out the impact they can have on the careers of new scientists: "at the current moment, this recognition can be very important, considering the risk that the Spanish academic field may not be able to accommodate them due to the difficulties universities and research centers face today in offering stable positions," he concludes.