Mario Martínez-Zarzuela

Mario Martínez-Zarzuela received the M.S. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Valladolid (Spain) in 2004. He worked as QoS project manager in Vodafone Spain for some months before becoming a research member in the Group of Telematics Engineering at the University of Valladolid, and an Assistant Professor in the same university in September 2005. After some predoctoral research stays in SINTEF (the largest independent research organisation in Scandinavia) in Oslo, and the CAPO (High Performance Computing and Optimization) research group, from the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, he presented his PhD. about neural processing emulation on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) devised to color image recognition and computer vision application, in 2009. In 2010, he obtained a permanent position as an Associate Professor at the Higher School of Telecommunications Engineering, at the University of Valladolid, where he teaches subjects related to computer architecture, operating systems and programming. Mario Martínez-Zarzuela was among the first scientist that adopted the use of commodity graphics cards in order to speed-up the execution of heavy computational algorithms. Instead of programming the CPU (Central Processing Unit), algorithms that can be translated to a data parallel scheme, are afterwards programmed to be executed on a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), which is not just a multi-core, but a massively parallel processor. In his PhD. (2009), he presented an image processing architecture based on the human visual system that was able to process the images in 2 seconds, while the same version in the CPU needed about 20 minutes. Also, Mario Martínez-Zarzuela was the first scientist who achieved to speed-up dozens of times the execution of Fuzzy ART-based Neural networks on the GPU. He is author of a book and several research papers in this field and reviewer of JCR journals such as Neurocomputing, Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering or International Journal of Neural Systems. Today, Mario Martínez-Zarzuela is leading various research projects related to GPGPU (General Purpose Computing on the GPU), Augmented and Virtual Reality, and Computer Vision using new acquisition technologies such as Kinect in the Group of Industrial Telematics (GTI) at the Department of Department of Signal Theory, Communications and Telematics Engineering of the University of Valladolid.