The honorary doctoral degree conferred on researcher Oriol Vinyals by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) recognises the talent, continuous innovation and global impact of the work of one of the most renowned international experts in artificial intelligence.

The proposal was sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Higher Education Centre (CFIS), the Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) and the School of Mathematics and Statistics (FME), the schools where Vinyals completed the double degree in Telecommunications Engineering and Mathematics.

The event will take place in the Auditorium of the UPC’s Vèrtex building, on the North Diagonal Campus, on 26 November at 12.30 p.m. and will be streamed live via the UPC YouTube channel and Zonavídeo UPC. Professor Eduard Alarcón, a full professor at the ETSETB and associate director of the CFIS, will conduct the ceremony and deliver the oration in praise of Vinyals. Attendance is limited; prior registration through the provided online form is required. 

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.