On December 2017, I finished my PhD in Computer Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). During my research I specialized in the fields of Software Accessibility, Machine Translation and Augmentative and Alternative Communication. The title of my thesis was “From Telegraphic to Natural Language: an Expansion System in a Pictogram-Based AAC Application” and its full text, as well as its technical specs, can be found at the Spanish Government’s Thesis Repository, TESEO.
In the final years of my PhD, I managed and supervised groups of scholar students (computer engineers, translators and designers) based in Barcelona and Madrid and we turned my research into a full-fledge application named Jocomunico. The application automatically expands telegraphic language resulting from pictograms, used by people with severe speech impairments, into natural language sentences in Catalan and Spanish.
During the development process, Jocomunico was tested by end-users with severe cerebral palsy and ranging degrees of intellectual disability. The results of the sessions are published in Assistive Technology, the official journal of the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA).
The application is currently being used by more than 2,000 people at their homes, in hospitals, special education schools and care centers for disabled people, among others. You can read more on Jocomunico on its own section or directly at www.jocomunico.com.
Before entering doctoral studies, I did an Erasmus Mundus International Masters, with an Erasmus Mundus scholarship from the European Union, in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, just after gradutating from a degree in Computer Software by the UPC (Universitat Poltècnica de Catalunya) with the highest average grade for the graduation class of 2010.
Aside from Jocomunico, since starting my studies in computer science, I have been involved in managing and developing other software projects, such as, online stores, websites for companies and artists or mobile applications.