Back ERC Consolidator Grants awarded to Albert Guillén and Toni Ivorra

ERC Consolidator Grants awarded to Albert Guillén and Toni Ivorra

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Toni Ivorra and Albert Guillén with their prestigious Consolidator Grants, to support the projects "Electronic AXONs: wireless microstimulators based on electronic rectification of epidermically applied currents" and ”Information Theory with Uncertain Laws” during the next 5 years.

10.01.2017

 

On 13 December, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the awarding of its consolidation grants to 314 European researchers. The funding, reaching a total of 605 million euros, will enable their research to have an impact on the world of science and other fields. The grants come under the priority called “scientific excellence” of the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

2 faculty members of the Department have been awarded one of the grants: Toni Ivorra and Albert Guillén. With this 2 new grants, a total of 15 ERC grants have been awarded to DTIC staff since its creation, in all modalities (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Proof of Concept).

 

Electronic AXONs: wireless microstimulators based on electronic rectification of epidermically applied currents, Toni Ivorra

In the project “Electronic AXONs: wireless microstimulators based on electronic rectification of epidermically applied currents” (eAXON), Antoni Ivorra, researcher with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, aims to demonstrate injectable electronic implant technology capable of stimulating the muscles and recording their activity. Potentially, this technology will be used to recover motor function in patients who suffer from paralysis. The implants will look like a flexible thread of some three centimetres in length and less than a millimetre thick. These unprecedented features will be possible thanks to the fact that the electrical supply methods used so far in active implants (batteries and inductive coupling) will be avoided, given that they require bulky components. The strategy that will be used is the rectification of bursts of high frequency current flowing innocuously through the tissues and are applied externally through textile electrodes.

Antoni Ivorra is a Serra Hunter senior lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University’s DTIC. He has a PhD in Electronic Engineering by UPC (2005) and has been a researcher at the Bellaterra National Microelectronics Centre (1998-2005), the CNRS in Villejuif (France), and the University of California in Berkeley (USA, 2005-2008). His research mainly deals with the study of bioelectric phenomena and, in particular, the use that can be made of them to implement new methods and devices for medical practice.

Information Theory with Uncertain Laws, Albert Guillén i Fàbregas

Claude E. Shannon’s (1916-2001) Information Theory paved the way for the age of information, providing the mathematical fundamentals of digital information systems. One of the main assumptions of Shannon’s results is the knowledge of the probability distribution that governs the system. In real systems, this knowledge is often not possible. The project by Albert Guillen i Fàbregas, ”Information Theory with Uncertain Laws”, will develop theoretical studies of information processing that take into account uncertainty in the probability distribution that governs the system, as well as coding systems that reach the established limits of theoretical study.

Albert Guillen i Fàbregas is an ICREA research professor at UPF’s DTIC, as well as a researcher affiliated to the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). He graduated in Telecommunications Engineering and in Electronic Engineering by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the Politenico di Torino (Italy), respectively. He then earned a doctoral degree at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2004. He was one of the main members of the organizing committee of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory which was held at UPF in July 2016, and is a member of several editorial boards of international journals and publications.

 

Text taken from UPF news The European Research Council consolidates the scientific excellence of four researchers linked to UPF

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