Gábor Lugosi, an ICREA research professor with the Department of Economics and Business at Pompeu Fabra University, also linked to the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE), has recently been appointed a new permanent member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (RAC) of Spain, where he will join the Artificial Intelligence Area.

The academicians David Ríos, Daniel Peña and Luis Vega submitted Lugosi’s candidature. He will occupy the 67th medal of the corporation. He will be sworn in during this year: the average time taken between appointment and the ceremony is six months.

Gábor Lugosi “I see it as recognition not only of my career, but also of UPF, which has provided me with the ideal environment to carry out my research work”

For Gábor Lugosi, “it is a great honour to have been elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. I see it as recognition not only of my career, but also of UPF, which has provided me with the ideal environment to carry out my research work”. And he adds: “I interpret this distinction as support for the mathematics of machine learning, an area I consider fundamental for the solid and responsible development of artificial intelligence”.

Lugosi is the second full academician of the RAC, after Núria López Bigas (linked to the UPF Department of Medicine and Life Sciences and the IRB), who joined in 2024. The UPF researchers Tomàs Marquès Bonet and Pura Muñoz Cànoves, from the same department, and also linked to IBE (CSIC-UPF) and Altos Labs, respectively are RAC corresponding academicians.

The Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences is a public institution that aims to foment the study, research into and social dissemination of mathematical, physical, chemical, geological and biological sciences and their applications, and promote support for these disciplines.

Expert in the mathematics of machine learning, probability and combinatorial statistics

Gábor Lugosi (Budapest, 1964) obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1991. In September 1996 he joined the UPF Department of Economics and Business and became an ICREA research professor ten years later (2006). He is also a research professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE), where he co-directs the Data Science Methodology Program.

Gábor Lugosi’s main research interests are the mathematics of machine learning, probability, combinatorial statistics, information theory and game theory. His research has been motivated by applications in telecommunications and computer science, and also by learning in game theory. More recently, he has worked on high-dimensional problems in statistics, random graphs and structures, online learning, and sequential optimization, as well as inequalities in probability theory. He is an associate editor of the journals Probability Theory and Related Fields and Annals of Applied Probability.