I’m an assistant professor at Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull and member of the Research Group in Intelligent Systems of the same university. My current job mainly involves teaching and research.
Teaching
I’m currently giving two subjects: advanced programming, in the undergraduate school, and artificial intelligence, in the graduate school. In advanced programming, students are introduced to advanced topics in programming and algorithms such as cost of algorithms, recursive design, and formal verification of programs. In artificial intelligence, students go through four of the key aspects in building smart machines: search and optimization, knowledge representation, machine learning, and planning.
Research
I graduated from the Universitat Ramon Llull with a PhD in information technologies and its management in 2008. My thesis, entitled “New challenges in learning classifier systems: Mining rarities and evolving fuzzy models”, basically analyzed learning classifier systems (LCSs) – machine learning techniques that combine genetic algorithms (GAs) with apportionment of credit algorithms to evolve rule sets online – in domains with rare classes and introduced fuzzy logics into the representation and reasoning mechanisms of these types of systems. The largest part of my thesis was developed in collaboration with the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (IlliGAL), directed by Prof. David E. Goldberg, which I visited several times during my PhD lifetime (and I hope to visit the lab more times in the future!). Also, I have been in collaboration with the Soft Computing and Intelligent Information Systems Group (SCI2S), directed by Prof. Francisco Herrera. In addition to our collaboration with the KEEL project, I also collaborated with Jorge Casillas in developing a genetic-based machine learning system for supervised learning that introduces concepts of fuzzy logics.
After finishing my thesis, my research has been extended to new fields such as data mining and clustering, always incorporating a flavor of GAs and LCSs when dealing with new challenging problems. Right now, I am especially concerned with
- the application of LCSs to challenging real-world problems
- the extraction of fuzzy association rules online
- the analysis of data complexity and the generation of artificial supervised learning problems with bounded difficulty
- multi-objective clustering
See my latest publications to know more about my research.