Pompeu Fabra University has received three new industrial doctorate grants in the various partial decisions in the 2018 call, the sixth since the beginning of this programme managed by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia. The 2019 call is currently open, with an initial partial decision that is to be announced in mid-June.

The three projects, which have already started, were presented by the UPF Doctoral School and will last three years. Through a collaboration agreement between the University and the respective company, they will be carried out within the Communication, Information and Communication Technologies, and Law doctoral programmes respectively.

The projects are to be carried out in the doctoral programmes in Communication, Information and Communication Technologies, and Law.

First is “Accessibility and development of applied positive uses of virtual and augmented reality for people with reduced mobility”, a project by the PhD student Alicia Cañellas Mayor, which she is conducting in the company Estudio Bay (Visyon), within the PhD programme in Communication. Her thesis supervisor is Laura Aymerich-Franch, Ramón y Cajal researcher with the Department of Communication and a member of the Communication, Advertising & Society (CAS) Research Group.

Secondly, “Representation learning on graphs for web data”, by PhD student Francisco Nurundín Álvarez González, linked to the company NTENT, within the doctoral programme in Information and Communication Technologies. His thesis supervisor is Vicenç Gómez Cerdà, a professor with the DTIC and a member of the Research Group on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML).

These two projects, each endowed with 33,960 euros, are co-funded and include financial support for both the PhD student (mobility and registration) and the research group.

Finally, the project “Criminal charges and compliance in corporate groups” is being carried out by the PhD student León Manuel González Mercé at the law firm Cuatrecasas Gonçalves Pereira, under the PhD programme in Law. His thesis supervisors are Raquel Montaner Fernández, a professor of Criminal Law at UPF’s Department of Law and researcher with the Research Group on Economic and Business Criminal Law, together with Iñigo Ortiz de Urbina, currently linked to the Complutense University of Madrid. This project is endowed with 8,472 euros, within the specific aid category, which includes funding for student mobility and registration.

With these three new projects, the University will have received a total of thirty grants since 2013 when it launched the Industrial Doctorates Plan, which are spread among the UPF doctoral programme in Information and Communication Technologies (14), Biomedicine (7), Law (5), Communication (3), and Translation and Language Sciences (1).

Promoting the emerging technologies for people with reduced mobility

The project “Accessibility and development of applied positive uses of virtual and augmented reality for people with reduced mobility” is to be carried out by Alicia Cañellas Mayor at the company Estudio Bay, SL (Visyon), which specializes in emerging technologies. She will do so from the theoretical approach of positive technology (which aims to improve people’s quality of life and physical and psychological well-being), in order to promote applied positive uses of virtual, augmented and mixed reality in groups of people with reduced mobility.

The development of these applications will take place at two levels: on the one hand, improved accessibility regarding the use of these devices and access to their contents; and on the other, furthering specific uses that can contribute to increasing these people’s independence and quality of life.

Developing new computational methods for representing data in network form

“Representation learning on graphs for web data” is the project that Francisco Nurundín Álvarez González is to carry out at NTENT, a company specializing in conversational artificial intelligence and semantic searching. It will focus on the development and analysis of computational and  statistical methods to automatically learn efficient representations of data in network form. These models can be useful not only to codify massive networks in a compact manner, but also in tasks like prediction.

Particularly, the study will be based on the characterization of real problems in which there is a need to learn these representations; in the development and analysis of methods to improve current ones; and finally, in exploring new applications in such issues as influencing the natural formation of a network via the framework of learning reinforcement and optimal control.

Study of the criteria for the attribution of liability in corporate groups

The project “Criminal charges and compliance in corporate groups”, which León Manuel González Mercé is to carry out at the law firm Cuatrecasas, Gonçalves Pereira, S.L.P., is based on an existing legal issue. There is currently confusion regarding the implementation of legislative diversity in terms of the sanctioning procedures that affect corporate groups, which constitute a group of legal persons without its own legal personality. These corporate groups present totally different realities, with major differences between such diverse entities as joint ventures and corporate groups, which hinders the application of a single solution.

The Industrial Doctorate project will perform an in-depth study in the research into elements of specificity with regard to criteria of imputation of liability for corporate groups and for parent-subsidiary relations, whether to determine authorship in cases of decisions taken by the parent company, and regarding cases of breach of the duty to supervise, survey and control of the parent company over its subsidiary.