The UPF School and Department of Engineering are celebrating their 25th anniversaries this academic year. In commemoration, a season of DeepTech Talks is being held addressing some of the main current and future challenges in the field of engineering and technologies. All of the DeepTech Talks sessions will be held at UPF’s Poblenou campus auditorium.

The next DeepTech Talk, which will be held on Friday, 28 March, is entitled “Why do we need biomedical engineers in hospitals?”. The session will tackle the multiple applications of biomedical engineering in hospitals, for example to improve patient well-being, promote advanced medical technologies and contribute to improving the safety and precision of various interventions.

The keynote speaker of this DeepTech Talk will be Abdel H. Moustafa, a cardiologist and the director of the Dimension Lab at Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona. The event will also feature two round tables, the first made up of Biomedical Engineering students who are currently working at various hospitals, and the second for health professionals, who in many cases work on issues related to digitization and technological innovation in the medical field. The speakers of the two round tables are linked to institutions such as Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol, Hospital de Sant Joan de Déu, Hospital de la Vall d’Hebron, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Hospital del Mar and Parc Taulí University Hospital in Sabadell.

The DeepTech Talk will be introduced by Oscar Camara, director of the UPF School of Engineering; and Clara Prats, president of the Interdisciplinary Group of Health Professionals (GIPS).

How can AI be applied to the world of sport?

The previous DeepTech Talk, which took place on Friday, 31 January, was focused on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the world of sport. Titled, “AI (multimodal analysis) & Sports: challenges & opportunities”, it was intended to address the challenges and opportunities of AI in this field, for example when it comes to improving game tactics, optimizing physical performance through personalized coaching sessions or preventing injuries based on the analysis of individual physical factors. 

The keynote speaker was Aleix Martínez, director of Science (and senior scientist) at Amazon, who delivered the talk titled “What is Generative AI? And why it matters?”. Another featured presentation, entitled “What AI can do for Football, and What Football can do for AI”, was given by Adrià Recasens, a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

Coloma Ballester, a full professor at the UPF Department of Engineering, also moderated a panel discussion, in which experts in data analysis from companies in the technology and media sectors as well as clubs and sports organizations (Arsenal F.C., Amazon, Mediapro and Zelus Analytics) were  participating. One of these speakers was Adrià Arbués, Senior Data Scientist at Teamworks (Computer Vision for Sports Analysis), who was interviewed by the UPF Engineering Department.

Ballester coordinates the Intelligent Multimodal Vision Analysis (IMVA) research group, which develops models and algorithms for image processing and computer vision with applications in sport and other fields and spearheaded the organization of this third DeepTech Talk. This session was co-organized with the ELLIS Barcelona Unit, this European reference network‘s node in the Catalan capital, to promote excellent, interdisciplinary research with ethical criteria in the field of AI. It was also attended by the director of the ELLIS Barcelona Unit, Dimosthenis Karatzas.

How to regulate AI?

The second and previous DeepTech Talk, held on 22 November 2024, was dedicated to examining the European Union’s first regulation on Artificial Intelligence - the so-called AI Act. During the symposium, the potential of the regulations, which came into force on 1 August 2024 to ensure that AI technologies are developed and used safely and reliably, and respecting the rights of citizens and companies, was analysed.

Ignasi Belda, director of the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA), was the main speaker at this conference, organized by the UPF Department of Engineering in collaboration with ACCIÓ (Agency for Business Competitiveness) and the Digital Cluster of Catalonia.

Also participating were the vice-rector for Knowledge Transfer, Vanesa Daza, and the president of the Digital Cluster, Joana Barbany. It also involved a talk by the secretary for Digital Policies of the Government of Catalonia, Maria Galindo. The event (see summary) was rounded off with two round tables, one focusing on the analysis of the AI Act from the academic and public policy perspective, and the other on the applications and uses  of  artificial intelligence in industry.

How can the ethical development of the Blockchain be safeguarded?

The first of this season’s talks was held on Friday 18 October, and was titled “Ethical Guidelines for Blockchain Systems within the EU”. The ethical implications of the use of this technology (regarding transparency, privacy, sustainability and social inclusion), which have scarcely been analysed since the emergence of blockchain at the beginning of the 21st century were dealt with. To address this issue, there was a presentation “Putting Blockchain Ethics into Perspective” by the Keith Miller, a full professor of Lifelong Learning in Science at the Faculty of Education and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who also gave this interview for the UPF Engineering website.

During the session, a round table was also held on the first guidelines developed by the EU on how to develop blockchain technology to meet the ethical commitments and fundamental values of the Union (set forth in the document Ethical Guidelines for Blockchain Systems). Experts such as Roman Beck, a professor of economics and an expert on this technology at the IT University of Copenhagen and director of the European Blockchain Centre; and Signe Agerskov, also a researcher at the same centre and a co-author of the first EU recommendations guidebook on this topic, among others. The session was opened by Vanesa Daza, as director of the Artemisa International Chair in Cybersecurity and a researcher in Engineering at UPF, and Migle Laukyte, a member of the team of the Chair and a researcher into blockchain.

Other sessions scheduled for 2025

For 2025, the following DeepTech Talks sessions have been scheduled:

• 30 May: Artificial intelligence and music: challenges and opportunities
• 27 June: UPF spinoffs and startups  

Further information on the DeepTech Talks UPF Engineering website.