About Me

I am an Associate Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. I work at the Computer Science and Engineering Department, in the Planning & Learning Group (PLG). I am also Director of the Master in Technologies in the Financial Sector: FinTech. My main research interest is classical planning and robotics.

Short bio

My research career began in 1999 when I started my PhD on Telemedicine at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). During that stage I participated in a total of 6 research projects, three of them funded by the European Union Framework Program and the remaining three ones by the Spanish Government, with more than one million of Euros of total funding. In my PhD I developed a Telemedicine system for the shared care of diabetic patients, which received in 2004 the Innovation in Telemedicine Prize awarded by the Telemedicine Chair of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela and Telefónica. The system proved to improve the metabolic state of patients in a clinical trial at Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona (2002-2003) and was used in clinical routine for almost a decade. During my PhD I performed three short research stays at the University of Athens.

In fall 2004 I joined Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, first as Visiting Professor and from April 2022 as Associate Professor (Profesor Titular). Here I started working on a totally different research field: Artificial Intelligence, and specifically Automated Planning. During this second part of my academic career I have been Principal Investigator of 6 research projects: two national projects, one funded by the eContentPlus EU program, another one funded by the European Space Agency and two Comunidad de Madrid regional projects. Total funding obtained by these projects has been about 250.000 €. I have also participated in 7 research projects: 4 national ones, one belonging to the 7th Framework Program, and 2 regional ones, funded in total with more than 900.000 €. In this second research stage I received the best paper award of the Conferencia de la Asociación Española para la Inteligencia Artificial, in 2011.

I have supervised three PhD theses (2010, 2014 and 2020). I am a member of the program committee of some of the most important conferences in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Automated Planning, like AAAI, ICAPS and IJCAI. I have also organized the International Planning Competition (2011), a workshop in ICAPS 2012, a special session in Robot 2017 and the International Workshop on Physical Agents 2018.

I have performed research stays at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, USA (2009 and 2010), Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Ecuador (2013 and 2014), University of Macedonia, Greece (2022), and University of Auckland, New Zealand (2023 and 2024)