Forbes magazine has included Javier Viaña (Bilbao, 1995) in its latest list of the 30 people under 30 years of age who are generating the most impact in the world in the science category. Viaña, 28, is an industrial and aerospace engineer, but he has focused his efforts and research on artificial intelligence and, more specifically, on its “explainability”, on ensuring that the decisions adopted by algorithms are transparent and understandable to the public. human mind.
The list of pioneers who have not yet turned 30 include researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs who are inventing new solutions: from greener plastics to smart fabrics, constructions on Mars, safer artificial intelligence or cancer treatments, among others. .
In Viaña's case, his company, Rezon.ai, works to add “explainability” to existing AI systems - for example those used by his clients in the healthcare field - so that their results are better understood. , so that it is known how they arrived at the answer they give in each case.
“In a car manufacturing chain it is easy to supervise the process: you put someone in the middle and evaluate how the parts are assembled; But when we use an algorithm, if you cannot supervise the structure, you only see the information that comes in and the information that goes out, and it is often unknown how it works inside, what the process for that decision has been like,” Viaña justifies.
And he considers that his inclusion on the Forbes list “is good proof that in our land there is great talent leading in innovations in AI.”
Viaña decided to dedicate his doctorate in fuzzy artificial intelligence applied to aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati to simplify artificial intelligence, to develop algorithms with a different approach than neural networks or deep learning, which are the used in most current applications, such as mobile assistants.
In an interview published in La Vanguardia in 2021, Viaña explained that, since he was little, he has had this interest in doing things differently or trying things that were not being done. This trait made him, for example, invent a compass for ellipses in his first year (he studied industrial and aerospace engineering at the University of the Basque Country) when he saw that they had to be made freehand and they looked bad. And thirdly, he published a formula that the Spanish Society of Mechanical Engineering awarded as the best research article of 2016.
He has also participated in projects for NASA, for Boeing, for Genexia, for the Cincinatti airport... And, at 28 years old, he has also had time to publish several books and poems, and his hobbies include surfing and playing. Guitar.
