Gonzalo Safont receives the IEEE SMCS award for Outstanding PhD Thesis on Cybernetics

Dr. Gonzalo Safont, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Signal Processing Group (GTS) of the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTeAM) has been awarded by the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) as part of their Outstanding Thesis Grant Initiative. This worldwide program aims to recognize the outstanding students and young professional members of SMCS who, early in their career, contributed to major advancements of theory or applications of systems science & engineering, human-machine systems, and cybernetics. Accomplishments include theoretical and technological advances, improvements in processes, or development of new products or procedures related to the fields of interest of the SMCS. The list of winners can be found at http://thesisgrantinitiative.ieeesmc.hu/winners/.

Dr. Safont’s thesis, “New Insights in Prediction and Dynamic Modeling from Non-Gaussian Mixture Processing Methods,” received the grant for Outstanding PhD Thesis Work on the field of Cybernetics. “This work is an essential contribution to develop integrated systems to process multimodal data in big data contexts,” declared Dr. Addisson Salazar, senior researcher at iTeAM.

Gonzalo expressed his gratitude for the support provided by Dr. Addisson Salazar and Prof. Luis Vergara, for “their support and guidance throughout the making of my thesis. Their expertise and research have been truly invaluable for this work and for my growth as a researcher. I have been able to work with many different types of signals and learn many different techniques and methods, an opportunity I would not have had without their faith in me.”

Gonzalo’s current work deals with the application of the methods proposed in his PhD thesis to the joint modeling of electroencephalographic data and functional magnetic resonance imaging. This is part of a joint work with Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe and the ERESA Medical Group with the objective of exploring and diagnosing epileptic patients.