Oriol Vinyals, honorary doctoral degree holder by the UPC: “AI allows us to focus on asking the right questions to advance science”
On 26 November, the UPC conferred an honorary doctoral degree on researcher Oriol Vinyals, vice-president of Research at Google DeepMind. Professor Eduard Alarcón delivered the oration in praise of Vinyals’s achievements at an event held in the Auditorium of the Vèrtex building on the North Diagonal Campus.
Dec 01, 2025
“Receiving an honorary doctoral degree from the institution that shaped the trajectory of my life is the most profound and personal experience of my career.” With these words, Oriol Vinyals expressed his gratitude for the recognition that he received on 26 November from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) at the Vèrtex building on the North Diagonal Campus.
The vice-president of Research at Google DeepMind continued his speech by recalling his time at the Interdisciplinary Higher Education Centre (CFIS), the Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) and the School of Mathematics and Statistics (FME), where he completed a double degree in Telecommunications Engineering and Mathematics.
Watch the video of the ceremony
The scientist explained that during his student years he realised the role of an institution like the UPC in education: “It doesn’t just impart knowledge—it teaches you new ways of thinking. It gives you the scientific curiosity that will drive you for life. The intellectual spark that led to my work in neural networks, AI and Gemini was ignited right here,” he said.
Regarding his early days at Google DeepMind, Vinyals said he was fortunate to find a whole team asking the same questions: “How could we use AI to improve the scientific process? What parts could be automated or scaled?” He spoke of the need to accelerate the science of AI, “even though this leads to a profound and unsettling question”, which he calls the builder’s dilemma: “In the end, in our quest to create intelligence, are we ultimately designing our own obsolescence?”
Responding to this, he said: “I want to challenge that view and explore the transformative role this technology can have in the scientific process itself and in the lives of those who build AI,” because, as he pointed out, “this transformation is already breaking scientific bottlenecks that have held us back for decades”. He cited AlphaFold as an example, a system that has accelerated research in protein folding, as well as Deep Think, a version of Gemini with an enhanced reasoning mode that has won gold medals in international mathematics and programming contests.
According to Vinyals, this revolution is changing the way science is done: “Our work as scientists is changing: we’re shifting from conducting every experiment to focusing on asking the right questions to advance science and benefit humanity. Our contribution becomes even more pure and essential.” He concluded: “Through our collective human curiosity, our creative ideas and our big questions, we will chart the course of a new era of unprecedented discoveries”.
“Our work as scientists is changing: we’re shifting from conducting every experiment to focusing on asking the right questions to advance science and benefit humanity”
A visionary scientist
In his oration, professor Eduard Alarcón of the ETSETB and assistant director of the CFIS, who acted as sponsor of the ceremony, described Vinyals as “a multifaceted figure and a true humanistic scientist, with natural interdisciplinary boldness”.
Alarcón acknowledged Vinyals’s dedication “to research at the frontiers of knowledge, where disciplines converge, with the audacity to explore unknown territory in unmapped scientific and technological fields—an attitude that distinguishes the exceptional scientist.” He explained that this approach to research began with Vinyals’s dual training “in and between the disciplines of mathematics and telecommunications, one of the earliest examples of excellence in interdisciplinary education at the CFIS”.
The ETSETB professor also highlighted Vinyals’s pioneering role in AI, in which he “has made visionary and pioneering contributions” to the advancement of these technologies, and expressed confidence in harmonious coexistence between the human and the artificial: “We express our conviction that interdisciplinary scientific research into AI, counterbalanced by evidence-based studies of its social and human impact, such as those led globally by Oriol, is a key to humanity’s progress,” he said. Finally, Alarcón emphasised Vinyals’s exceptional talent and his humanistic values, which are also central values to the UPC.
An inspiring figure for the UPC
UPC rector Francesc Torres gave Vinyals the diploma, the mortarboard, the ring and the white gloves as symbols of the honorary doctoral degree. In his speech, the rector said that by conferring an honorary doctoral degree on Oriol Vinyals “we celebrate the talent, vision and ability to transform the future that is born in our classrooms”, and referred to the UPC’s responsibility “to train the next generation of leaders in artificial intelligence, capable not only of understanding and developing the digital world, but of designing it responsibly and sustainably”.
He also stated that with this award “we recognise courage, rigour, a commitment to serving society and an outstanding academic career that has made you one of the world leaders in the current development of artificial intelligence, both in theory and in its potential applications”.
Finally, the rector addressed Oriol Vinyals, saying that he is not only “a success story from our university; you are a clear and brilliant example for our entire community.” He concluded by affirming that Vinyals is “the best example for our students, proof that the rigour and passion demanded in our classrooms are passports to global leadership.”
The ceremony was also attended by the vice-rector for University Policy Santiago Silvestre and the general secretary Neus Cónsul. Musical performances were delivered by UPC graduate Oriol Baeza Guasch, and also the UPC Orchestra, the Architecture Choir, the FME’s Ol·lari Choir and the Gaudeamus EEBE Choir, who performed the academic anthem Gaudeamus igitur.
An outstanding figure in deep learning
During his second year of university, Oriol Vinyals (Sabadell, 1983) decided to dedicate himself to AI, inspired by the words of MIT professor Tomás Lozano-Pérez, who delivered the CFIS inaugural lecture that year.
In 2006, he moved to the United States to complete his final thesis at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, after which he pursued a master’s degree at the University of California San Diego and earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California Berkeley. During his PhD, he gained his first professional experience at Microsoft Research and Google, where he entered the field of artificial intelligence.
After completing his PhD in 2013, he joined the Google Brain team as a researcher, specialising in AI solutions, machine learning and deep learning techniques in text, speech and vision. Since 2016, he has been vice-president of Research and head of Deep Learning at Google DeepMind in London, where he was a technical co-lead in the development of Gemini, Google’s most advanced multimodal AI model.
Oriol Vinyals has played a decisive role in advancing deep learning with innovations such as the creation of the seq2seq model, new machine learning techniques such as knowledge distillation and the TensorFlow platform, all of which have transformed machine translation, speech recognition and computer vision. He contributed to the development of AlphaStar, an algorithm capable of competing with and defeating the world champion in the video game StarCraft II—a milestone in the field of AI that was featured on the cover of Nature.
He was also involved in the development of AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein structures from their amino acid sequences and that has represented a major breakthrough in solving the protein folding problem, one of the biggest challenges in biology. The AlphaFold programme was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024.
In 2016, MIT Technology Review named him one of the world’s top 35 innovators under 35, the only Spanish scientist included in the list. Considered one of the most influential figures in deep learning and artificial intelligence, Oriol Vinyals is ranked among the top ten most-cited AI researchers worldwide.
