BSC-CNS Newsletter September 2022

BSC has signed an agreement with CINECA, Italy's leading supercomputing center, the city councils of Barcelona and Bologna and the University of Bologna to develop digital urban twins that promote the implementation in both municipalities of a public policy model based on scientific evidence. The agreement implies the involvement of two of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe in an alliance to position Barcelona and Bologna as references in the field of urban digital governance.

The First Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, visited BSC on September 1 to follow up on some of the technological innovation projects that the BSC is developing jointly with the Spanish government. Some of the projects were the chip design, the MarIA project, the first massive artificial intelligence system and expert in understanding and writing in Spanish, and Quantum Spain project, that promotes the quantum computing ecosystem in Spain.

BSC hosted last week two activities that managed to bring together some of the most internationally recognized researchers in the field of computer architecture and artificial intelligence. It was Mateo 2022 Workshop, Multi-core architectures and their effective operation, held on the 70th anniversary of the director of the BSC, Mateo Valero, and the ACM Europe Summer School on HPC Computer Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications.

BSC has obtained  €5M this year from European funds in competition with other international institutions to finance five new research projects aimed at studying processes related to climate change and its effects on health, society and the environment. The projects will be managed by the BSC's Earth Sciences Department. Currently, the BSC is working on 56 projects related to climate change.

In this video, Francisco Doblas, BSC director of the Earth Sciences Department, talks about the heat waves we have experienced in recent weeks: “It is unequivocal that the changes we observe in the climate system are due to human action. There have always been heat waves. What is not associated with the natural variability of the climate system is its greater persistence, frequency and intensity”.

NASA’s new mineral dust detector was launched to the International Space Station on July 14. The instrument has been developed within the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. BSC, ICREA and AXA Professor Carlos Pérez García-Pando is part of the EMIT Science Team, composed of international leaders in the fields of Earth System Modelling, mineral dust aerosols, surface geology, and imaging spectroscopy.

The MarIA project, the language modeling system created at BSC and funded by the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, has been awarded the Innovation Prize at the first edition of the Archiletras de la Lengua awards.The Archiletras awards recognize merits in the promotion, support, research and development of the Spanish language or any of the other languages in contact with Spanish in any of its territorial spheres.

BSC is part of the KOIOS project selected by the European Commission to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for uses related to emergency situations such as earthquakes. The initiative, in which fourteen institutions and companies from different European countries participate, has been financed with 10 million euros by the European Defence Fund.

BSC has hosted nine students in the framework of the BSC International Summer Internship Programme, an international call in order to spend at BSC a maximum of 10 weeks within the summer period. The programme aims to encourage undergraduate students to start a research career in our multidisciplinary research centre. Since the programme was officially launched in 2019, 45 students have taken part. More than 260 students from countries all around the world have applied.