Carme Torras#
Short laudatio by Grzegorz Rozenberg#
Prof. Carme Torras is a scientist with a remarkable scientific career. She graduated in Mathematics with honours from the University of Barcelona and, holding a Fulbright scholarship, she obtained a Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There she followed a very innovative academic program that linked Brain Theory and Neural Computation, under the guidance of Prof. M.A. Arbib, perhaps the best known scientist in Brain Theory, who was also her Master thesis advisor. This exposure to computational models of the brain strongly influenced her scientific trajectory. Back in Barcelona, she completed her PhD with a thesis about neural models of temporal learning that was published by Springer-Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Biomathematics.
At the time, most neural models dealt with sensory activity (vision pathways attracting most attention) and focused on the spatial distribution of signals (pattern processing in images). Thus, her thesis centred on motor activity and temporal signal processing was very innovative, really pioneering, and opened up exciting avenues of research, which have been widely pursued by the international scientific community since then. In particular, the thesis highlighted the important role of pacemaker neurons in triggering and sustaining oscillations both in living brains and in computational neural networks, which is the substrate on which the learning of temporal sequences often relies. A further research step was to extract the principles underlying the neural models of motor activity and adapt them to robotics, more specifically to kinematics, robot control and motion planning. This is a research line that Prof. Torras has been pursuing steadily since she joined the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), where she has formed a large robotics group with twelve seniors and an average of six postdocs at a time.
The pioneering role that Prof. Torras has played in linking brain modelling to robotics shows up (especially at the European level) in the number of top European projects that she has co-organised.
It is important to note that, aside from the theoretical work, some of these projects have led to technology transfer. For instance, within the CONNY project, the group at IRI developed two software packages, one for the visual positioning of robots for Thomson CSF, which was patented, and another for the automatic recalibration of a spatial robot, which was installed on a mock-up of the International Space Station at Daimler-Benz Aerospace in Bremen. Prof. Torras has lead further contracts with industry, such as those signed with the French robotics company Robosoft, for the development of vision modules for both articulated and mobile robots.
An important (in the context of this nomination) aspect of Prof. Torras career is that she continuously attracts to her group researchers with different backgrounds, most notably top-rank mathematicians, experts in artificial intelligence, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers and very competent software engineers, which has allowed the group to tackle very hard and broad-scope problems. This shows up in the great variety of top-ranked journals in which she has published. For example, the intense collaboration with algebraic geometers has led to a recent series of papers on parallel manipulators, published in both robotics and mathematical journals with high impact.
Also important in the context of this nomination is the enthusiastic dedication of Prof. Torras to the training of very promising students and young researchers - some of them have later become renowned researchers.
The scientific, didactic, and organizational merrits of her career have been well recognized. She has received various awards - we highlight here the Narcís Monturiol Medal in recognition of a significant scientific and technological career by the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the recognition as Fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).
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