Fitxa persona

Miguel Arevalillo is a Full Professor In Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. He has gained recognition for 5 six-year quality research periods, one of them based on successfully established knowledge transfer partnerships. He has published 50 papers in journals indexed in JCR (24 of them in the first quartile -all of them since 2009- and 16 in the second). He has been the first author of 27 of these papers. Since 2008, he has also published over 20 papers indexed in categories A or B of the CORE conference ranking (top conferences in the computing field), and various others in conferences related to education. He has an h-index of 17 according to Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). We highlight the variety in the subject of his publications, which provides evidence of both his cross-disciplinary experience and his capacity to join existing research lines in the 3 universities he has worked for. He has received 1221 citations according to WoS, and 1510 according to Scopus.

Miguel Arevalillo has been the principal investigator in 7 research projects, including 4 from the national plan; and collaborated in 3 European ones, a CONSOLIDER, and more than 10 others at local, regional and national levels. In addition, he has built a large international network of contacts by collaborating on international research projects and participating in a large number of research stays in different countries (Scotland, France, England and Spain). He was a member of the University Research Board, representing the IT area, and is now a member of the ValgrAI (Valencian Graduate School Research Network Artificial Intelligence) initiative, a Regional project financed with 2 million euros to attract talent in AI and transfer knowledge to the industry in the Valencian region.

Regarding knowledge transfer, he worked in the private industry on unpaid leave from Liverpool John Moores University. During this period, he joint TISSAT (Valencia, Spain) and MEZZO NET (Majorca, Spain, as a part of the German company Media Service Group), gaining an industry vision that had a significant impact on his research. He has participated in several research contracts with companies, including the development of simulation engines for over 130.000 euros; and an agreement with EADS Astrium Gmbh, a subsidiary of Airbus SE, to allow them to integrate one of his algorithms in their optical simulator BEAMWARRIOR. He has also led very recent industry projects, including a contract with Leb Creative Society, SL for 139.774 euros to develop a multimodal system for emotion recognition; and collaborated with Cecotec SL through 3 industry stays financed with 120.000 euros, applying Natural Language Processing algorithms to improve their online customer service, Computer Vision methods to support the operation of the Conga cleaning robot and Deep Learning techniques to model user preferences. The impact of his research in industry is also supported by the wide use of his research results. For example, one of his unwrapping algorithms has received over 650 citations and has been adopted by well-known python libraries, such as scikit.

The applicant is the founder and coordinator of the research group 'Intelligent Systems and High Performance'', currently composed of 17 members and officially recognized by the Universitat de València. He has successfully supervised 8 PhD students (7 of them in the last 7 years), and currently supervises 2 more, both of them with full PhD funding gained on prestigious competitive national/regional calls. He is also the director of several post-doctoral contracts, all obtained in highly valued competitive national calls: 2 Ramon y Cajal and 1 Margarita Salas. He has supervised 3 MSc and 47 degree projects, all of them in official programs. All PhD candidates that completed the PhD under his supervision now work on permanent contracts for the University, are well-positioned in the public or private sectors or continue their research career under a post-doctoral contract.

In addition, he has served as a reviewer for important journals in both the computing and education fields, including Computer Applications for Engineering Education, Knowledge-Based Systems and Applied Soft Computing (among many others); and frequently participated as an evaluator and/or member of national and regional evaluation committees (Ministry of Science and Innovation and IVACE), evaluating more than 80 research projects.