Ángel López-Oriona

Welcome to my minimalist website!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Statistics Research Group led by Professor Ying Sun at KAUST, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦. I am fortunate enough to have a job that truly 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 forecasting, among others. Outside of work, I am passionate about traveling 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 earned my PhD in Statistics from the University of A Coruña, conducting my research at the exceptional Centre for Information and Communications Technology Research (CITIC), advised by Professor José Antonio Vilar Fernández. During my PhD, I completed research stays in Australia 🇦🇺, Germany 🇩🇪, Italy 🇮🇹, and the United Kingdom 🇬🇧. After receiving my PhD, I decided it was time for new adventures and challenges, so I left Spain and relocated 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.
• Fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory.
• Machine learning.
• Spatio-temporal statistics.
• Simulation-based inference
• Time series analysis
• 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 several countries and hope to continue doing so 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. 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 🇦🇺), the ancient streets of Cairo (Egypt 🇪🇬), and the old city walls of Xi'an (China 🇨🇳). However, I'm not a fan of top lists because every place in the world is unique and offers its own special experiences!

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!