Luis Costero Valero and Mercedes Eugenia Paoletti Ávila, two professors in the Department of Computer Architecture and Automation at the UCM School of Informatics, have been awarded the 2022 Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE) – BBVA Foundation Young Computer Researchers Research Award.
Luis Costero Valero, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Architecture and Automation, is from Complutense, where he did a double major in mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate, and later a master’s and doctorate in computer engineering. During the last years of his undergraduate career, he started working with the research group ArTeCS (Architecture and Technology of Computing Systems). During the dissertation, he spent six months at the EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland), and after writing the dissertation he also worked as a postdoc at the institution for one year. After that, The University gave him a chance to stay as a professor, and after passing the test he returned to Spain.
Costello explained that the award has 5,000 euros, but “the most important thing is the recognition from professionals, after five years of hard work, this award is not only a recognition of one person, but a recognition of all Acknowledgment of those who put in the effort of this research”, in which he would like to thank some for their support, such as the three dissertation directors (Francisco Daniel Igual Peña, Katzalin Olcoz Herrero and Francisco Tirado Fernández) and the EPFL researchers with whom he continues to collaborate.
The award’s jury considered Costero well-deserved for its “excellent research in the field of high-performance computing, exploring new ideas for combining the management of different resources in multiple application scenarios with reinforcement learning techniques.” The professor explained that his work focuses on a field called high performance computing, which refers to large servers, and within this scope, the general idea of his work is “energy efficiency, finding computers that consume less energy”.
In the category of young computer researchers under 30 working in Spain, Ms. Mercedes Eugenia Paoletti Ávila also won the award. She has been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Architecture and Automation for the last year, although she resigned for personal reasons. In his case, the award was “for his outstanding contributions in the field of accelerating hyperspectral image processing using high-performance architectures, and for the impact of his international projections”.
