She is a telecommunications engineer from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and an electronics engineer from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). She did her doctorate at the UPC-MIT, and has collaborated with NASA , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) in Boston and Google in the field of artificial intelligence applied to satellites. Very committed to education and STEM, she was the co-founder of the UPC nanosatellite laboratory, where she has been teaching since 2016. She also frequently participates in initiatives such as Women in STEM in secondary and university education centers.
She has directed four industrial doctorates with Vilynx, with offices in Barcelona, New York and California, and has managed to establish this program for the first time at Apple. She has received many recognitions such as the Young Entrepreneur award from the Association of Young Entrepreneurs of Catalonia (Aijec), has been awarded by Thales , GMV and Google and has recently been distinguished with the Fundació Princesa de Girona Empresa 2022 award.
First of all, congratulations on the Princess of Girona Foundation Enterprise 2022 award. The media is talking about you as a global leader in the field of science and technology. What motivated you to become an engineer?
I was one of those girls who was very clear from the beginning that mathematics was my field: mathematics, engineering, technology and mechanics interested me a lot. What I wasn't clear about was which engineering, but I knew it was engineering, for sure. Then I ended up in telecommunications because there was a little bit of everything: a little bit of electronics, programming, signal processing and antenna technology. All of those things.
When you studied telecommunications there weren't many girls, I imagine.
There were very few of them. In my time, there must have been three or four girls in my class, out of a class of a hundred. There are two types of girls. On the one hand, there are those girls like me, who are very clear that they don't care about the stigma of being a geek; but there are many girls, the majority of girls, who might do engineering; even so, they don't have that clear vocation to think "I don't care about anything, technology is what I want to do, I'll do it no matter what". They have the feeling that there is a bit of a stigma that, because you are a girl and do engineering or do technology, you have to be a geek, hacker or weirdo.
It's a very silly prejudice. However, it's very present and, on the other hand, when boys don't know what to do, they all go to engineering: because it has options, because it will be good, because it does, etc. And this is a bit of the basic problem we have: yes, there are girls who, like me, are very clear about it and we end up there, but there are many who we lose along the way who could contribute a lot.
"There is a feeling that there is a certain stigma that, because you are a girl and do engineering or technology, you have to be a geek, hacker or weirdo, but that is not the case."
You just have to see how far you have come yourself. How did you experience the Princess of Girona Foundation Enterprise 2022 award? It is a great recognition of your career.
It is a very important recognition and I receive it with great humility and great joy. Because when you look at the awards from previous years or the women awarded this year, you feel very proud to be awarded. I think it is a very good recognition of all the work that the entire Vilynx team has done, which has been a lot for eight or nine years. We started very early, there was a lot of belief in this idea and people worked hard to make it happen. For me it is a recognition for everyone.
What's behind the name Vilynx?
The name Vilynx is a bit strange, and comes from a well-known expression: "to have the eye of a lynx". It is a name made up of two words: "vi" which would come from sight and "lynx" for the animal. The idea is that, if you have the eye of a lynx, you will be able to understand the content much better or see better what is in the content.
Your PhD was about artificial intelligence. Do you think that citizens are aware of its usefulness?
I think one of the great things about artificial intelligence is that it can go unnoticed. In a way, it humanizes machine interfaces. A very clear example is car navigation, which many people might not use, but because it's a very simple voice system, everyone ends up using it. You address your navigation system as if it were an artificial person; artificial intelligence allows us to do things like that. So I think it's true that many people are not aware of the uses that artificial intelligence has right now.
In a way I think it has this positive character because it naturalizes interfaces, but without it being noticeable. And I think that's very good, it's a beautiful thing that artificial intelligence has. We also have to keep in mind the whole issue of accessibility. There are many uses of artificial intelligence in this field that are also very important. Ultimately, it allows us to make technology accessible to more people, and to more diverse people.
"In some way, artificial intelligence humanizes machine interfaces"
Has the research you did in artificial intelligence during your PhD become obsolete?
The speed with which artificial intelligence systems become obsolete is very high, because we have so many people working at the same time and that is a very good thing. Perhaps, saying that it becomes obsolete would be like saying that it is no longer useful. It always advances, it is a fact.
While you are doing a doctorate or an industrial doctorate, you are evolving in a line of knowledge that humanity has, but the evolution you make as a person and the resources or methodologies you learn, which you will then continue to use for the rest of your life, are also important.
Let's talk about our home now. Do you consider Barcelona a benchmark in the field of artificial intelligence?
Yes, I believe that Barcelona is a benchmark in the field of artificial intelligence , and it is for many reasons. Historically, we have had very good training here in communications engineering, which is the basis of many artificial intelligence systems. The UPC and UPF have very renowned experts in artificial intelligence, and we are seeing how a knowledge center is being created around the city. This is seen both in the migration of talent that returns to Barcelona and in those who come to Barcelona for the first time to work in this field. We also see it in the number of emerging companies that we have that use different artificial intelligence systems.
We have a very large talent pool thanks to our entire university network, which is very powerful. At the same time, we are at a very nice point in the ecosystem, where there are many emerging companies and new projects in artificial intelligence that are very successful.
"Barcelona has a very large talent pool in artificial intelligence thanks to the powerful university network we have"
Awards like the Princess of Girona award recognize emerging young talent. How important is this talent in the industrial doctoral projects you have led?
I think it's the most crucial thing. It's obvious that without talent you can't do absolutely nothing. At Vilynx, one of the things we did was have the first offices within the UPC campus, to attract talent in the easiest way possible and have direct access to it. There is no innovation without talent, and not only in terms of innovation, but also in terms of execution. Vilynx was a project made by and for a team.
Do you think that industrial doctorates are a good instrument for training this talent?
It's great, because as a company you always aspire to attract the best talent possible, and retain them in some way: so that they are so good that they don't want to leave. But when you have very powerful talent in the academic field, it's very normal for these people to want to follow their vocation at higher levels. They start working in an emerging company and after a few years they think that maybe the progress of their career involves doing a doctorate. So, the opportunity that industrial doctorates provide is to allow them to work in the company and at the same time allow themselves to have this recognition at the doctoral level, and continue to advance in their academic career. I think it's a luxury to have this program, and it's wonderful for retaining talent, but also for workers who want to continue their career without deciding whether to stay in industry or go to academia.
Jorge Wagensberg said that "innovation requires three things: having a good idea, realizing that it is, and convincing others of it, and it is almost never the same person who achieves all three." After leading four industrial doctoral projects, do you agree with this statement?
Totally agree. You don't just have to convince, then you have to execute the idea. In all cases, you will certainly need a group of people with different capacities and strengths. Absolutely agree with this sentence from Wagensberg . I think that everything that is done in innovation processes is never the work of one person; when we really see excellence and see results it is when we have teams focused on this innovation. We are talking about an industrial doctorate in a context: a research team, a team at the university and in the company, support, etc. This is where we see that the breeding ground is created for ideas to emerge and then also be executed. It is never the work of a single person.
It's a paradigm shift. We've moved beyond the era of inventors, now to innovate we need to collaborate.
This happens for two reasons. The first is that the complexity of systems has increased dramatically. It is now impossible to find someone who understands an entire complex system. The second reason, which is also important, is specialization. Each subsystem is part of a larger and increasingly specialized system. Therefore, if you want to innovate, you need highly specialized talent.
What do the four projects you have led have in common?
They are different projects. We have some on natural language thinking, some on computer vision, and we also have projects on automatic voice recognition. They are different from each other, although they are also parts of a complex system, like the one we mentioned before.
Projects to automatically analyze, index, and tag video content. What is this technology?
The core technology we were doing at Vilynx was self-learning systems. When we started, most research groups and companies were doing supervised learning. What does that mean? Basically, you create a dataset and you tell it, for example, that you want to recognize cats and dogs; then the AI system takes images from the dataset and then says that it's a cat or that it's a dog. But when an image of a zebra comes in, which is neither a cat nor a dog, the system doesn't know what to do. What we were doing at Vilynx was unsupervised self-learning: a zebra is neither, but it also seems to have four legs, it also has hair, and it has some characteristics that are similar. The AI won't give it a name because it doesn't know; but it can still tell the difference between a zebra and a cat and a dog that it already knows.
Can all videos on the internet be indexed?
They can be indexed, and that's it! That's precisely what we wanted at Vilynx.
And in the future, how do you think information will be organized?
We always start from a duality: humans work with unstructured data and computers work with structured data. There are more and more artificial intelligence systems that help structure data to resolve doubts, to be able to search for things at home, etc. But these systems are also dedicated to normalizing structured data again so that the interface is as human as possible.
"There are more and more artificial intelligence systems that help structure data to resolve doubts"
Will we always have this duality between humans and machines?
This is because humans communicate in an unstructured way, and we don't yet have any software that literally works like this. That is, we first store it in the system as values and variables and then translate it back into human language.
How do machines learn?
When we talk about learning, I think it's important to make it clear that what we're trying to do is get machines to have naturalized behaviors. What does deep learning allow us to do? Well, to do precisely the translation that we were talking about before between structured and unstructured language.
How has the experience been with industrial doctorates?
I am a big supporter of these projects, and I am delighted with the Industrial Doctorate Program, because for Vilynx it was a turning point. We were at a point where we were lucky to have a very leading team. But we also saw that, for the team to continue being happy doing what they were doing, we needed to offer an exit to be able to do a doctorate. For us it has been very enriching. It has helped us a lot to retain talent, and also to ensure that this talent is comfortable and can continue their academic training. They have also created a very nice dynamic of innovation and research. Although the basis of companies like Vilynx is R&D&I, the industrial doctorate projects have strengthened this basis, they help to establish a commitment to this type of research. It has been very enriching for everyone.
