Artificial Intelligence excites and scares in equal parts. Cinema is largely to blame for the latter, as it has convinced us that thinking machines will end up organizing themselves to erase us from the map. Back in the 80s, when Terminator taught us to look askance at Artificial Intelligence, Carlos Martínez, current global director of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Solutions and Services at Telefónica Tech, what interested him most was basketball. “A friend’s mother recorded the games on video and passed them to me. I watched them over and over again to get statistics on the plays. It was my first approach to applied mathematics,” recalls the protagonist of the new installment of the Meet a Genius series.
Carlos Martínez, current global director of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Solutions and Services at Telefónica Tech, stars in the new installment of ‘Meet a Genius’
Unprecedented advances in our lives
His passion for basketball and statistics was combined with devouring books and comics non-stop. Come on, they were throwing at him both her numbers and her letters. “When it came to choosing a career, she was not very clear about what to study. I liked mathematics and physics, but also history and literature. In the end I decided on telecommunications engineering. Satellite communications caught my attention, the Internet was just beginning, and also mobile telephony… I saw that it had a future with a lot of potential.”
In the field of hospital management, AI allows us to predict how many people are going to go to the emergency department with some advance notice and plan resources.”
Carlos Martínez, global director of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Solutions and Services at Telefónica Tech
He wasn’t wrong. Artificial Intelligence has led to unprecedented progress in fields as diverse as medicine and education. “Thanks to advanced analytics of genomic data we have precision medicine, that is, we can individualize the diagnosis and treatment for each patient by combining their genomic data, their clinical history and diagnostic tests. Or determine with great reliability the most probable moment of delivery. This not only gives peace of mind to the pregnant woman, but also helps reduce the number of induced births. In the field of hospital management, AI makes it possible to predict how many people are going to go to the emergency department with some advance notice and plan resources,” he points out.
Artificial Intelligence is driving fundamental advances in areas such as healthcare and education
Applied to education, AI models allow the training itinerary to be adapted to the learning pace of each student. “When I went to school there were 30 of us in class and the teacher gave the same lesson to everyone. Now each child can receive infinite recommendations to delve deeper into the content that interests them most. It is an affordable technology based on generative Artificial Intelligence. And it gives us an excellent opportunity to make education truly universal.”
From audiovisual communication students to lawyers, the profiles that lead advances in Artificial Intelligence
To make these developments possible, the team led by Martínez draws on multidisciplinary profiles. “We have engineers, but also people who come from audiovisual communication, law, marketing, finance…” he lists. This variety of professionals makes language with machines as broad-minded as possible, which is essential for creating personalized services and avoiding bias errors. “Artificial Intelligence models are fed by the data that we previously provide them. If the input data is biased, the algorithm’s response will also be biased,” explains Martínez.
One of his team’s priorities is to apply the principle of ‘ethics by design’, which is nothing more than trying to enter data clean of bias to prevent algorithms from reproducing prejudices or discrimination. “Let’s imagine that we apply Artificial Intelligence for personnel selection. If we base ourselves only on the profile of the people who have held a certain position in previous years, it is likely that we will find that the ideal candidate is a male, white and of a certain age. But that does not respond to the plural reality of today’s society,” he points out.
The team led by Carlos Martínez is nourished by multidisciplinary profiles, integrating both engineers and people who come from the field of literature.
Soul of a globetrotter
Martínez joined Telefónica R&D as an intern when all this Artificial Intelligence was nothing more than an academic field that the general public only knew from science fiction films. Since then he has gone through various technological departments, he has been project manager, responsible for strategy, marketing, business development, and visible head of the launch of new products… “For work I have traveled a lot, I have known other cultures and that makes me It has given the opportunity to have a 360 view of society and develop the relational part of the brain, not just the technological part,” he comments.
As a teenager I became very shy, I had a hard time speaking in public. Aware of the barrier that this represented, I forced myself to volunteer to go to events or trips that involved public speaking. Now I manage that stage fright much better”
Carlos Martínez, global director of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Solutions and Services at Telefónica Tech
From his entire career he remembers three moments with special affection. “With the first one he had only been in the company for three months. It was my turn to represent Telefónica at an International Technology Forum in Seoul. It was an incredible experience”. The other two are more recent. “I was the technology manager in the construction of Distrito Telefónica, the group’s main headquarters in Madrid, where more than 12,000 people work. Thanks to this project I met people from many companies in the Group, with very different profiles and responsibilities,” he says. In 2016 he founded the Artificial Intelligence unit, LUCA, the seed of what is today Telefónica Tech. “It was like creating a startup with your friends when you left university, but within a large company. “We were a small family, but very diverse, with people in many countries.”
One of the most important moments in Carlos’ career at Telefónica was the creation of the Artificial Intelligence unit, LUCA, the seed of what is now Telefónica Tech.
The shy teenager who now won’t stop giving lectures
A brief look at your LinkedIn profile is enough to draw an x-ray of the number of conferences, meetings and congresses that demand your presence. Something that the teenage Carlos Martínez could not have even imagined. “At that age I became very shy, I had a hard time speaking in public. Aware of the barrier that this represented, I decided to overcome my fears and forced myself to volunteer to go to events or trips that involved public speaking. Now I manage that stage fright much better,” he acknowledges.
One of Carlos’s passions is rock and, in addition, he is learning to play the guitar
If he went back to that age, he is convinced that he would be less closed to talking to strangers. “It took me until I reached my professional stage, when I realized the importance of enriching myself with the perspectives of other people beyond my circle.” And he, at the same time, confesses that he feels comfortable meeting up with old colleagues. “One of the things I like most about being on this campus is meeting people with whom I have worked on a project throughout my career,” he says.
The whirlwind of everyday life, seeing from Telefónica Tech how technology advances by leaps and bounds and with an agenda full of public events, he compensates with his first steps playing the guitar. “I have always liked rock, from the Beatles to the grunge of Nirvana or Pearl Jam. I never dared to play a musical instrument because I thought I didn’t have enough ear to do it, but now I’m doing it,” she points out. In a way, Artificial Intelligence is like rock: disruptive, revolutionary and capable of changing the world.
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2023-12-19 04:56:47
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