Alfonso Martinez

Since November 2011 I have been with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. I was a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow until December 2016. Currently I am an Associate Professor (Professor Agregat Serra-Húnter).

My research interests lie in the fields of information theory and coding, including digital modulation and signal processing techniques. My work on BICM proposes a novel information-theoretic perspective on this technique based on mismatched decoding, a research area where I am currently actively involved. More generally, I am intrigued by the connections between information theory, optical communications, and physics, particularly on the links between classical and quantum information theory. In this field, I conduct research on the phenomenon of decoherence, its interaction with the classical and quantum worlds, and the limits it may pose on the reliable transmission of information over optical channels, as well on a generalization of Maxwell equations to multidimensional space-time by means of exterior algebra.

I obtained my M. Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1997 from the University of Zaragoza, in Spain. In the period from 1998 to 2003 I was with the research centre of the European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, working as a systems engineer. Our work on APSK modulation was instrumental in the definition of the physical layer of DVB-S2.

From 2003 to 2007 I was a Research and Teaching Assistant at the Signal Processing Systems group of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. My research focused on optical communications, and more specifically on the links between classical and quantum information theory. My Ph. D. thesis was entitled "Information-theoretic analysis of a family of additive energy channels". In the same period, I coauthored a monograph on "Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation", a widely used technique that matches the simplicity of binary coding with the efficiency of non-binary modulation. In the years 2008-2010 I was a post-doctoral fellow with the Information-theoretic Learning Group at CWI, in Amsterdam. In 2011 I was a Research Associate with the Signal Processing and Communications Lab at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.