Fitxa persona

I obtained a Bachelor's Degree and a PhD in Physics at the University of Valencia in 1993 and 1999 respectively, specializing in human vision models and their applications to image and video coding. My experimental work in physiological optics, awarded with the European Vistakon Research Award, allowed me to finance my predoctoral fellowship. After defending the Thesis, I was a Fulbright Postdoc in the Human Vision Group (with A.B. Watson) of the NASA Ames Research Center, USA, in 2000 and 2001; and Visiting Researcher at the Lab of Comput. Vision (with E.P. Simoncelli) from the Center for Neural Science, NYU, USA, for one semester in 2001, where I was hired again for another semester in 2013. I was invited as Benjamin Meaker Distinguised Profesor at the University of Bristol for 3 months in 2024.
Regarding scientific production, I am co-author of more than 70 refereed international publications, 39 of them in journals in the first quartile of the JCR. I have patented a bio-inspired method for image and video coding that improves on JPEG and MPEG standards. Since the research has been financed with public funds, most of the techniques are available in open source at http://isp.uv.es. Regarding my activity in the community, I have been a member of technical committees in various societies: Int. Assoc. Patt. Recogn. (IAPR), Inst. Electr. Electronic. Eng. (IEEE), Opt. Soc. Am. (OSA), Int. Telecom. Union (ITU), and Comm. Int. Eclar. (CIE). Likewise, I have been editor of three international journals of the first JCR quartile: in the period 2009-2013 I was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IF=10.8), dealing with articles on image statistics and human vision models; since 2014 I am Academic Editor of PLoS ONE (IF=2.9) in the same subject; and since 2017 I am Associate Editor of Frontiers in Neuroscience (IF=3.2). Since 2006 I have belonged to the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective. Regarding scientific leadership, I have been Princ. Investigator of seven projects of the State R&D Plans, PI of a project of the Foundations of Science program of BBVA, PI of a contract with the Ministry of Defense (Prog. DN 8644), and PI of a contract with Davalor Health S.L. I am currently Full Professor in the Dept. of Optics (Faculty of Physics) of the University of Valencia, where I have directed five doctoral theses, one of them awarded the extraordinary prize in Physics and Mathematics. My (scientific) interests include the statistical foundations of biological vision and its relationships to machine learning, information theory, and vision science experimentation.