Alfonso Martinez

Alfonso Martinez was born in Zaragoza, Spain, in October 1973. He is currently a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. He obtained his Telecommunications Engineering degree from the University of Zaragoza in 1997. In 1998-2003 he was a Systems Engineer at the research centre of the European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. His work on APSK modulation was instrumental in the definition of the physical layer of DVB-S2. From 2003 to 2007 he was a Research and Teaching Assistant at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where he conducted research on digital signal processing for MIMO optical systems and on optical communication theory. Between 2008 and 2010 he was a post-doctoral fellow with the Information-theoretic Learning Group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2011 he was a Research Associate with the Signal Processing and Communications Lab at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. He has been chair of the Spanish Chapter of the IEEE Information Theory Society since 2013. He is a co-chair for the 2017 European School on Information Theory and he served as General Co-Chair of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, held in Barcelona.
His research interests lie in the fields of information theory and coding, with emphasis on digital modulation, finite-length estimates of the error probability, and the analysis of mismatched decoding; in this area he has coauthored a monograph on “Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation.” More generally, he is intrigued by the connections between information theory, optical communications, and physics, particularly by the links between classical and quantum information theory.