Research News

Julia Múgica Gallart defended her thesis co-directed by Romualdo Pastor-Satorras and M. Carmen Miguel López on June 7, 2023 at the North Campus. Entitled "Collective Motion and Collective Decision-Making in Animal Groups: From Schooling Fish to Swarming Robots" the thesis focuses on empirically and theoretically investigating collective movement in shoals of fish, and collective decision-making in a swarm of robots emulating the selection of a new nesting site for bees.

Sergi Mas-Pujol defended his thesis co-supervised by Dra. Esther Salamí and Dr. Enric Pastor on May 12, 2023 at the Baix Llobregat Campus. Entitled "Deep Learning techniques for Demand-Capacity Balancing", the thesis studies the use of artificial intelligence techniques to improve the detection of air regulations and how to smooth traffic in periods of high demand, proposing different models that have takes into account the needs of the main parties involved (network management entity and airlines) and a reinforcement learning model based on the use of images.

Seyedeh Leila Panahi defended her thesis co-supervised by Pere Bruna and Eloi Pineda on May 8 at the campus Castelldefels. Entitled “Study of relaxation phenomena and local structure evolution in metallic glasses by means of Mossbauer and mechanical spectroscopy”

An international collaboration between researchers from Denmark, Spain and Austria, which includes the postdoctoral researcher at UPC, Juan Sánchez Baena, as first author, shows that heating does not always melt a solid material. Their discovery reveals how increasing the temperature of an ultracold quantum fluid can trigger its phase transition to a solid state.

Maria Teresa Alonso defended her thesis co-supervised by Jaume Sanz Subirana and Adrià Rovira Gracía on May 31 at the North Campus in Barcelona. Titled Galileo Broadcast Ephemeris and Clock Errors, and Observed Fault Probabilities for ARAIM. The thesis presents the characterization of the orbit and clock errors of the satellites of the European positioning system Galileo, and determines, observationally, their probabilities of failure.

Cristhian Timoté defended his thesis co-supervised by Dr. Guillermo González-Casado and Dr. Miquel Escudero on March 27 at the North Campus. Entitled "Contributions to real-time monitoring of the ionosphere using GNSS signals", the thesis presents the set of algorithms implemented in real time to be able to model the ionosphere and offer high-precision corrections to GNSS users

Jonathan Ordóñez defended his thesis coadvised by Jose Eduardo García and Michel Venet on the 24th of March in Campus Nord. Entitled "Theoretical and experimental investigation on the visible-light controlled functional properties in charged domain wall ferroelectrics", the thesis focuses in overcome some questions that remained to be solved concerning light-activated phenomena in ferroelectric materials.