Ricard Gavaldà
Professor, CS Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
I have been on academic leave from UPC since February 2020.
I will not be able to take any interns or PhD students in the foreseeable future.
Current projects and activities
- Co-founder of teler.ai. Teler.ai is a virtual data scientist that lets teams explore, model and understand their data using natural language.
It delivers reproducible, auditable analyses, helping domain experts get reliable answers without depending on overloaded data teams. - Co-organizer of the Workshop on Data Science for Social Good, held in conjunction with ECML PKDD. 11 editions so far (2016-2026).
Past projects and activities
- Here is a list of the industrial projects I worked on while at UPC, with topics including datacenter management, healthcare and life sciences, social network analysis, sports analytics and others.
- Co-chair of the Nectar Track of ECML PKDD 2025.
- Invited speaker at the Applied Data Science Track of KDD 2024. Title of my talk: "Machine Learning for Clinical Management: From the Lab to the Hospital." Title and slides in my Publications page.
- July 2020: Panelist in a session on Data for Good at ICML 2020. One live session, and a re-run.
- Co-founder of Amalfi Analytics (2017-2026), a spin-off of UPC
that applied our research in Machine Learning and Data Mining to the management of healthcare organizations.
Our typical customers were hospitals and healthcare planning agencies.
We helped them use their data to improve patient care processes
in cost-effective ways. Amalfi was acquired by
the Relyens group in December 2023 - though I remained as CEO until April 2026. - Related to healthcare analytics, I was PI for collaboration agreements with Hospital de Sant Pau (readmission predictions), Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) (temporal trajectories of oncology patients), Fundació Pere Virgili (evolution of frail patients), CatSalut (Health Service of Catalonia) (patient mobility and resource usage), Consorci Sanitari del Maresme (absenteeism and work injuries in the healthcare workforce), Consorci Sanitari de Terrassa (patient flows in the emergency department).
- PI of the AGAUR Llavor project
"A system for predicting and managing admission pressure at hospital emergency department".
This project is partially funded by the "Fons Europeus de Desenvolupament Regional" (FEDER)
of the EU within the "Programa operatiu FEDER de Catalunya 2014-2020".
- Machine learning advisor in a collaboration agreement UPC - Gas Natural-Fenosa on predicting fraud in utility consumption. PI: Josep Carmona, CS-UPC.
- Collaboration with Futbol Club Barcelona (Barça) for an industrial doctorate on sports analytics.
- Collaboration with Transport Simulation Systems for an industrial doctorate on traffic prediction and management using machine learning.
- The MACDA (Management of Complex Data) project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. 2018-2020. PIs: Josep Lluís Larriba-Pey and Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, UPC.
- The APCOM project (Aprendizaje y Comunicación = Learning and Communication) (2015-2017), of Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, led by Marta Arias and Glyn Morrill (UPC).
- Editor of Theoretical Computer Science, 2010-2016.
- Presenter at the ECML PKDD 2015 summer school on Data Sciences for Big Data - Resource Aware Data Mining.
- Co-chair of the Nectar Track of ECML PKDD 2015.
- The MICINN BASMATI project (Biological and Social Data Mining: Algorithms, Theory, and Implementations) (2012-2014), together with U. Zaragoza and U. Cantabria.
- Demo co-chair of ECML PKDD 2014.
- Co-editor of a special issue on Social Web mining of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST), 2013.
- Member of the Scientific Committee of Pautomac: The ICGI 2012 probabilistic automata learning competition. November 2011-September 2012.
- Co-chair of the IJCAI Intl. Workshop on Social Web Mining (Barcelona, july 2011).
- The EU PASCAL2 Network on Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling, and Computational Learning (2008-2013).
- The MICINN SESAAME project, together with U. Málaga and U. Zaragoza (2009-2011).
- Organization co-chair of ECML PKDD 2010 (Barcelona, September 2010).
- Program Committee member of MLHC 2018 (machine learning in healthcare), GRADES 2018 (graph and network management and analysis), ICGI 2018 (grammatical inference), IJCAI 2015, BigMine 2014, ACML 2013.