Ángel López-Oriona

Welcome to my minimalist website!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Statistics Research Group at KAUST, in Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦. I am fortunate enough to have a job that really fulfills me, and to live on the beautiful KAUST campus in Thuwal, situated by the Red Sea. My research interests include computational statistics, fuzzy set theory, and time series data mining, among others. Outside of work, I am passionate about investing and travelling the world with my wife!

A bit on my background. I was born and grew up in Cedeira, a small and beautiful town located in northern Spain 🇪🇸, in a region called Galicia, which I encourage you to visit. I did my bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in Spain. During my period as a PhD Candidate, I did research stays in Australia 🇦🇺, Germany 🇩🇪, Italy 🇮🇹, and the United Kingdom 🇬🇧. After receiving my PhD at age 28, I decided it was time for new adventures and challenges, so I decided to leave Spain and relocate to the Middle East. Fortunately, moving to Saudi Arabia turned out to be one of the best decisions I have made in my life so far!

Experience

Education

Research and CV

To have a complete overview of my research projects, you can take a look at my CV, where you can check my whole academic output. In any case, a summary of my main research interests is given below:

• Artificial intelligence.
• Behavioural economics.
• Clustering and classification of time series.
• Computational statistics.
• Directional statistics.
• Functional time series analysis.
• Fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory.
• Machine learning.
• Spatio-temporal statistics.
• Time series forecasting.

If you would like to have an academic collaboration with me, just send me a message and we can start discussing our next research project!

Travelling

One of my favorite things in life is travelling. I love exploring new places and immersing myself in their history, culture, and people. I usually travel with just a small bag 🎒 and my mobile phone 📱, which are all I need to visit every corner of the world. When travelling, I strive to fully immerse myself in local life and avoid tourist areas unless absolutely necessary. As Rolf Potts says in his fantastic book, Vagabonding: Indeed, the most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there.

So far, I have visited 38 countries and hope to see that number grow in the coming years. However, it's not the number of countries you visit what matters most, but the experiences you have in each one. Many people hop from country to country, posting Instagram photos to show off without truly enjoying the experience. In my modest view, these people are not real travelers. Don't be one of them! Once you understand this, there's nothing wrong with counting the countries you've visited. In fact, I track mine in a funny way by coloring a world map whose updated version can be accessed here.

While it's impossible to pick just one country as my favorite, Japan 🇯🇵 stands out as the most surprising with its natural beauty, rich culture, and the incredible warmth of its people. Other places that left me in awe include the landscapes of Bali (Indonesia 🇮🇩), the beaches of New South Wales (Australia 🇦🇺), and the ancient streets of Cairo (Egypt 🇪🇬). However, I'm not a fan of top lists because every place in the world is unique and offers its own special experiences!

Investing

I have a keen interest in personal finance 💰 and investing 📈, which led me to discover the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community several years ago. The FIRE movement, popularized by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin in their book Your Money or Your Life, emphasizes extreme saving and investing with the goal of retiring significantly earlier than traditional methods typically allow. FIRE enthusiasts strive to attain financial freedom, enabling them to choose how they spend their time.

While I'm not a fan of the FIRE movement in its purest form (since I believe the ultimate goal should be finding a job you love rather than stopping work altogether, and I hope I never retire from academia!), I do think everyone can benefit from the core principles of saving and investing that FIRE promotes. In fact, I apply these principles myself to some extent.

Although there are many investing strategies available, my preferred one is called lazy investing 💤. This approach involves investing in a few low-cost index funds and holding them for the long term. Two of my favorite finance books, The Simple Path to Wealth, by J.L. Collins, and The Bogleheads' Guide to the Three-Fund Portfolio, by Taylor Larimore, explain this strategy in detail. One aspect of lazy investing that I particularly like is that it requires minimal effort while outperforming the majority of active investing strategies (there are tons of research studies supporting this claim; see, for instance, this article). My current lazy portfolio (managed by the great Spanish neobank MyInvestor) is based on a balanced strategy considering 50% stocks and 50% bonds (advocated by Benjamin Graham, Jack Bogle, and many others). In particular, my portfolio consists of the following index funds and their respective allocations:

• Fidelity S&P 500 Index Fund EUR P Acc (IE00BYX5MX67): 25%.
• Fidelity MSCI World Index Fund EUR P Acc (IE00BYX5NX33): 25%. This fund overlaps with the previous one, making my total allocation in the S&P 500 and non-US stocks around 40% and 10%, respectively.
• Vanguard Global Bond Index Fund EUR Hedged Acc (IE00B18GC888): 25%.
• Vanguard Global Corporate Bond Index Fund EUR Hedged Acc (IE00BDFB5N63): 25%.

Regardless of your financial preferences, I strongly encourage you to start investing today, since, it is crucial for your long-term financial well-being. It is alarming how many people do not understand the importance of investing (I was one of them some years ago 🤦🏻‍♂️), which is why I have included this section on my website. Getting started with investing is, in my humble opinion, the most important financial decision that you can make today, and I am not exaggerating!

Investing is not nearly as hard as financial advisors want you to believe, and I am here to help you (for free!), because I think everyone deserves to be aware of the optimal way to build their wealth without depending on others. Feel free to contact me for information about investing and the FIRE movement.

Awards

• Extraordinary Doctoral Award by the University of A Coruña (UDC) for the most outstanding PhD thesis defended during the academic year 2022-2023 in the category of Computer Science and Mathematics. My thesis, entitled New Methodological Contributions in Statistical Learning for Time Series, received the highest score among 19 candidate theses in this category. This thesis was supervised by Dr. José Antonio Vilar Fernández.
  2024

  
  

• Award by the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) for the best work presented by a PhD student at the 17th Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), held in Porto (Portugal).
  2022

  
  

• Young researcher grant awarded by the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT) for the best work presented by a PhD student at the 13th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications (WILF), held in Vietri sul Mare (Italy).
  2021

  
  

• Award by the company International Business Machines (IBM) for the development of the most accurate Deep Learning model in the 1st IBM Competition of Computer Vision held in the European University of Madrid.
  2020

  
  

• Award (shared with many colleagues) by the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences (RAGC) for the development of a project (called COVIDBENS) for analyzing and monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic in the area of A Coruña.
  2019

News and interviews

Contact

I would love to hear your requests, suggestions, proposals, and advice! Feel free to reach out via email at oriona38@hotmail.com or send a WhatsApp message to my personal number, +34 636564332. Please don't hesitate to get in touch!