Josep Vidal Manzano

Position: Professor
Office: D5-113
Email: josep.vidalupc.es
Telephone: + 34 93 401 64 57
Fax: + 34 93 401 64 47
Web site:
    

Advised Students:   Adrian Agustín, Maribel Madueño, René Játiva, Jose Manuel Huerta, Eduard Calvo, Sebastien Simoens, Sandra Lagén, Marc Torrellas

Current Students:  Ahmed Raafat

Biography

Josep Vidal received the Telecommunication Engineering and the Ph. D. degrees from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, in 1989 and 1993, respectively. In 1988 he joined Cognivision Research, a Spanish firm dedicated to the development of vision techniques and equipment for industrial control. From 1989 to 1990 he joined the LTS at the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne as research assistant, developing signal processing algorithms for biomedical applications. In 1991 he was recipient of a Ministry of Education grant to complete the Ph. D. thesis (awarded the UPC's Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado in 1996) and joined the Signal Theory and Communications Dept. at UPC, where he became Associate Professor in 1997 and Full Professor in 2010. He has been teaching undergraduate and master courses in Statistical Signal Processing, Machine Learning, Information Theory and Digital Signal Processors at the Telecommunication Engineering School of UPC. In these areas where he has published in international conferences and journals and book chapters (Google Citations profile). He has served as Associate Dean of International Relations at the Telecommunications Engineering School in UPC and in his position promoted and managed the cooperation with PUCP and UCAB for the deployment of the Telecommunication Engineering studies.

Since 2000, he has continuously led the participation of UPC in EC-funded collaborative projects: SATURN (5th FP, Jan 2001- Jun 2004), devoted to the study of smart antennas technologies in 3G (and beyond) wireless networks, as well as the enhancement of positioning techniques for UMTS; ROMANTIK (5th FP, Jan 2003 - Dec 2005 as project coordinator), devoted to the design of intelligent relaying strategies, radio resource management and innovative radio link techniques for "structured" and "ad-hoc" multi-hop wireless radio networks; FIREWORKS (6th FP, Jan 2006 – Jan 2008), whose goal was the the design novel communications concepts at the PHY layer when relay stations are included in a wireless cellular networks; ROCKET (6th FP, Jan 2008 - Jan 2009, as project coordinator), whose target was the design of multi-user MIMO cooperative transmissions schemes towards the improvement of the system spectral efficiency; FREEDOM (7th FP, Jan 2010 - Jan 2012, as project coordinator) aimed at the design of advanced interference-aware cooperative resource management techniques in deployments of large number of co-channel femtocells and macrocells; TROPIC (7th FP, Sep 2012 - Mar 2015, as project coordinator), aimed at designing coordinated algorithms for the joint allocation of radio and computational resources, with the possibility of offloading computation and storage tasks from the user equipment to network edge devices with enhanced capabilities; TUCAN3G (7th FP, Feb 2013 - Jun 2016, as project coordinator) whose goal was the design of sustainable and economically viable acces and transport networks capable of providing broadband access in remote rural areas; the MSC action ITN 5GWireless (H2020 programme, Jan 2015 – Dec 2018) and the MSC action ITN 5GSmartFact (H2020 programme, Mar 2021 – Feb 2024) targeting to train young researchers in key 5G technologies. He has participated in research projects with Université Mohammed V of Rabat since 1995, funded by the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional. As a result of all these cooperations, 3 international patents and 25 contributions to IEEE 802, 3GPP-LTE (RAN1-RAN2) and ETSI-BRAN were submitted.

In terms of projects funded by the Spanish National R&I system, he was IP of ECO “Transmisión cooperativa para sistemas de comunicación inalámbricos de banda ancha” from 2005 to 2007 and co-IP (together with Javier R. Fonollosa) if the Type C-Consolider project “Limites Fundamentales de la Teoría de la Información de Redes” in the period 2006-2011, all financed by CICYT. From Jan 2017 he will co-lead (together with Olga Muñoz) the project 5G&B-RUNNER “Radio techologies for ultra-dense networks in the 5G and beyond (5G&B) era”. He has also led or participated in 6 projects of technology transfer with national and international companies.

In June 1995, he was co-organizer of the IEEE Signal Processing / ATHOS Workshop on Higher-Order Statistics (Begur, Spain), the IST Mobile Communications Summit 2001, (Sitges, Spain) in September 2001 and the European Workshop on Broadband Femtocell Networks, 2011 (Warsaw, Poland). He has served as co-editor of special issues in Signal Processing (EURASIP). Dr Vidal has been visiting scholar at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (1992), Ecole Nationale Polytechnique de Toulouse (2006) and University of Hawaii (2007). He is also Honorary Professor at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas.

Josep Vidal served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing from 2010 to 2013, and is currently member of the IEEE ComSoc Signal Processing for Communications and Electronics Technical Committee (SPCE TC). Additionally, he has been associate editor of special issues in Signal Processing-EURASIP, AMADEIA and EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communication Networks.

He has served as reviewer or panelist of the following agencies: Hong-Kong Research Council, Agence Nationale de la Recherche Française (ANR), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Agencia Nacional de Evaluación y Prospectiva (ANEP), Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR), Plataforma tecnologica española eMOV, and Agencia Andaluza de Evaluación de la Calidad y Acreditación Universitaria.

The impact of his publications can be assessed through: Google Citations profile, Web of Science, Scopus and ORCID.

More information: http://futur.upc.edu/JoseVidalManzano