Two profesores of the FIB, recognized by the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència 2025 Program

The professors of the FIB Romualdo Pastor y Luis Domingo Velasco, have been recognized by the Academia d’Excel·lència Program 2025, as a part of the 13 UPC researchers awarded this year. 

Romualdo Pastor Satorras is a researcher at the Condensed, Complex and Quantum Matter Group (CCQM) and a professor at FIB. His project studies how groups —from animal collectives to human societies— make shared decisions through local interactions and networked communication. To achieve this, he combines theoretical modeling, data analysis, and controlled experiments to understand the principles driving coordination, leadership, polarization, and the spread of opinions or behaviors. By linking collective movement, social decision-making, contagion models, and complex network structures, the project aims to build a comprehensive framework to understand decentralized collective intelligence.

Luis Domingo Velasco Esteban is a researcher at the Optical Communications Group (GCO) and the Broadband Advanced Communications Center (CCABA), affiliated with FIB. With this grant, he will work on cloud architectures for telecommunications capable of providing services with hundreds of gigabits per second of throughput, such as federated learning and generative artificial intelligence. He will also study other services requiring end-to-end latencies of hundreds of microseconds and 7-nines availability, as needed in industrial applications and robotics.

A total of 50 professors and researchers from the Catalan university system have been selected in the latest call for the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència grants (formerly ICREA Acadèmia), 13 of whom are researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC). With a budget of €200,000 per project, the program will allow them to intensify their research over the next five years.

For more information, see the news on the Sala de Premsa UPC