Carlos Torres Vila emphasized the power of research, innovation and education to tackle the great challenges facing humanity, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental deterioration, during his speech at the 14th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ceremony.

The fourteenth BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences recognized the contributions of Charles Fefferman and Jean-François Le Gall to mathematical analysis and probability theory, two domains that have applications in multiple fields, from the behavior of fluids to quantum mechanics and the properties of graphene.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone in this fourteenth edition to Judea Pearl for “bringing a modern foundation to artificial intelligence”. The Professor of Computer Science at the University of California (UCLA), has made contributions that enable AI programs to use two of the key resources we humans use to interpret the world and arrive at decisions: probability and causality.

Gerald Holton, who was unable to attend the awards ceremony in person, received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences from the President of the BBVA Foundation, Carlos Torres Vila, at his home in Cambridge (Massachusetts). "This award recognizes Holton's great contribution to the understanding of the cultural dimension of science," said Torres Vila.

The ceremony of the 12th and 13th editions of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, which took place on September 21 at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao, highlighted the value of science and culture in tackling the great global challenges facing humanity beyond the pandemic, such as the environmental emergency, the profound technological transformation and the risk of new economic crises. The event recognized 35 world leaders in scientific research and artistic creation.

The BBVA Foundation has awarded the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies to John Hennessy and David Patterson, founders of the new scientific area known as computer architecture, that designs the “brains” of computer systems. The awardees were the first to devise a conceptual framework that provides the field with a grounded approach to measuring performance, energy efficiency and the complexity of a computer.

Yesil Science was created with the objective of developing innovative solutions to healthcare, combining medicine, art, and technology. In addition, it is a company that has participated in the Garanti BBVA Partners program.

Sponsored by Garanti BBVA, the Turkish technology company Kodluyoruz has developed Alchemist, a series of 15 podcasts on technology and artificial intelligence.

Through a proof of concept, BBVA and Spanish startup Multiverse have tried out and benchmarked different quantum technology platforms to solve a classic problem of finance: The optimization of investment portfolios with real market data. Thanks to this analysis, published in a scientific paper, the authors have elucidated new formulas that could help speed up this type of calculation, maximizing profitability and minimizing risk.

Francisco Herrera, Computer Science Professor at the University of Granada, is leading research that aims to diagnose COVID-19 in less than a second using chest x-rays. The project, which is in advanced stages, uses artificial intelligence as a tool to interpret biomedical images more effectively than the human brain. This technique would greatly help health clinics that do not have sophisticated diagnostic imaging systems.

In the era of forced social distancing as a result of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, this technology has become one of biggest allies in the fight against the coronavirus.

Transactionality in databases is fundamental for critical systems, but the historical asymmetry between reads (massive) and writes (specific, but can impact in the middle of a read operation) could be solved with a new approach. Last year Databricks released to the community a new data persistence format built on Write-Once Read-Many (HDFS, S3, Blob storage) and based on Apache Parquet.

Smart crops, bacteria-detecting knives, and waste-reducing supply chains: These are some of the futurist scenarios that could become a reality if IBM’s predictions prove to be correct. As part of the bank’s Ninja Project — a program to cultivate BBVA’s internal digital talent and culture — IBM was invited to share its predictions with the bank’s employees.

The BBVA Foundation has honored Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and Peter Shor with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for their respective roles in the development of quantum computing and cryptography.

The BBVA Foundation has awarded Isabelle Guyon, Bernhard Schölkopf and Vladimir Vapnik with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category, for helping advance the field of artificial intelligence with their seminal contributions to machine learning. Their work has been applied to fields as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer vision, natural language processing and the monitoring of climate change.

The BBVA Foundation has recognized three marine biologists — Carlos Duarte, Terence Hughes, and Daniel Pauly — with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Ecology and Conservation Biology. Their research has expanded our knowledge about the Earth’s oceans and has contributed to the protection and conservation of marine biodiversity and ocean ecosystem services.

The BBVA Foundation presented Michael Hall and David Sabatini the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Biology and Biomedicine category for discovering the main regulator of growth in animal cells. This mechanism, a molecular pathway called mTOR, opens the door to new treatment options for cancer, diabetes and aging.

The race to make good on quantum computing is well underway. Millions of dollars have been allocated to developing machines that could cause current computers to become obsolete. But, what is the difference between quantum and classical computing? This is a puzzle that is beginning to be unraveled.

The President of the BBVA Foundation, Carlos Torres Vila, presented the Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE) - BBVA Foundation Research Awards in recognition of creativity, originality and excellence in cutting-edge research in the computer science field.

Noam Chomsky received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences in a ceremony at his home in Tucson, Arizona. BBVA Foundation President Carlos Torres Vila made the special trip to present him the award, as the U.S. linguist was unable to attend the award ceremony in Bilbao last June. “This is a recognition to your unparalleled contributions to the understanding of human language, which have had a tremendous influence in so many fields," said Torres Vila.

Roger Launius, former chief historian at NASA was at BBVA headquarters to deliver one of the featured speeches for Values Day: “Getting to the Moon: the value of the most important idea in human history.”  Launius used the history of the Apollo program and man's landing on the Moon as examples of two of BBVA’s corporate values: ‘We are one team,’ and ‘We think big.’

For Professor Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics expert and Emeritus Professor at Coventry and Reading Universities, the future of humans is literally tied to artificial intelligence, with technologies that will allow us to link our brains to machines to augment our physical and mental abilities. He recently sat down for an interview with OpenMind, BBVA's knowledge community, to share some of his insights into this fascinating topic.

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" was Neil Armstrong's famous phrase when he first stepped on the surface of the Moon. The phrase served to crown one of the greatest feats carried out by the human species whose 50th anniversary is celebrated this year.

Sixty candidates worked non-stop to develop an analytical model and come up with a business solution based on datasets provided by BBVA. The competition, hosted last week at Ciudad BBVA, was the last phase of a selection process aimed at recruiting new members to enroll in the 'Young Data Professionals' program, a BBVA initiative aimed at developing young advanced analytics talent.

BBVA Executive Chairman Carlos Torres Vila today unveiled the book 'Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade’ in Madrid. The book is the eleventh in a collection sponsored by OpenMind, the non-profit knowledge community created by BBVA. More than 20 authors contributed to this year’s edition, which fosters a broad based discussion about the new philosophical and ethical foundations that need to be established in order to sustain an economy, a society, a culture – and the corresponding regulation – as they adapt to the new scientific and technological contexts.

The BBVA Foundation has recognized the U.S. linguist with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences Category, a new category included in this year’s edition for the first time ever. Chomsky’s research opened up new paths in multiple fields of humanities, especially in the study of the human mind and the cognitive systems that comprise it.

BBVA and Jordi Roca, pastry chef at El Celler de Can Roca, have together launched the project ‘El sentido del cacao’ (The Sense of Cocoa), an initiative that aims to raise awareness of the series of conditions affecting the sense of taste and which affect up to 17% of the world's population. This project comes in light of a pioneering investigation based on neuroscience and sensorial management supported by, among other institutions, the Hospital Clínico San Carlos in Madrid and IOB Institute of Oncology.

NASA's Space Apps Challenge, one of the world’s most popular hackathons, has, once again, awarded a group of Spaniards, in this case the time behind ‘Galaxy Quest.’ The project helps processing real data collected by the Hubble telescope through a 'gamification' process.  But not only that:  It is the first step in developing an artificial neural network using these data, and a new communications channel between NASA and users.  José Luis Martín-Oar, service designer at BBVA and one of the team’s members, tells us everything about the project.