Team
The Open Innovation approach to this collaboration enabled individuals with different skills, backgrounds, and from diverse organizations to work together.
Current members
Pablo Rodriguez is the Director of Research and Innovation and Head of the Barcelona R&D lab at Telefonica Digital.
CTO at El Bulli and nowadays he is in charge of the technological office at ElBulliFoundation.
I work in Telefónica R&D, and I have Telecommunications Degree. I’ve always been very curious, and that led me to work in different areas of the company, or other countries such as Brazil.
As project manager for Innovation and Open Innovation at Telefónica R&D during 2015 I was responsible for the relationship with elBullifoundation. If you are passionate about innovation, and from Bilbao (which almost always means that the art of food), working with the team at elBulli is a unique opportunity.
Open innovation relationships are complex and require learning processes on both sides. During this last period we have started to see concrete results after a long collaboration with specific applications as Lexicapp and Taxomapp for Bullipedia.
We have also accelerated the development of tools that enable creativity, combining the knowledge in the world of gastronomy from elBulli and technology from Telefónica Big Data initiatives. I hope that soon you can use, and give start to a digital revolution in the world of gastronomy.
Pere currently works at Telefonica R&D, in Barcelona, Spain.
He is the Program Manager for Early and Open Innovation, and Manager of the Digital Food Lab.
I started my contacts with elBulli during the first 10Fridays call. I had the opportunity to meet Ferran and David during those weeks, and I get surprised because of the methods they were using, so close to scientific reporting.
Tiago Simas is a Research Associate at Telefonica I+D since November 2014.
His main research at Telefonica I+D has been applying the theory of complex networks towards a better understanding of computational gastronomy and Football.
He received his Ph.D in Cognitive Science (Major) and Computer Science (Minor) from Indiana University, USA in 2012 From Jan. 2012 to Aug. 2013 he was a postdoc in Brain Mapping Unit at University of Cambridge, UK.
From Nov. 2013- Oct. 2014 he was a postdoc at the Department of Fundamental Physics, University of Barcelona, Spain, in a joint collaboration between UB and Telefonica I+D.
He has published 21 research papers.
Luisa is part of Telefonica I+D team at elBulliLab. She works as a Visual and Interaction designer, creating the next web applications focused on the Gastronomy world.
With her creative online skills, she brings a different approach with her designs, giving “an extra twist” to the user’s experience.
Audiovisual Systems Engineering student. Currently working on her Final Degree Project, Adriana is part of Telefónica I+D team in elBulliLab since February of 2015.
She works in elBulliLab giving support to the development team of Telefónica I+D, providing solutions to the technological needs that rise up in elBulliLab.
Her labour lies in the research of new technologies to help the elBulliLab team digitally manage the generated information on the Bullipedia. Through this exploration, she builds prototypes for the different features that may appear in different applications within elBulliLab.
While performing her tasks, Adriana is acquiring knowledge about the different technologies used and how the creative process works in elBulliLab.
Alumni
Since the lab started activities, there are different people that contributed to the project.
Begin both a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Polythechnic University of Catalonia, and a research affiliate of the Center for Organizational Innovation of Columbia University in NYC put Ramon in a privileged spot with respect to the Digital Food Lab.
He collaborated with Pilar Opazo’s on her PhD work about the creativity and innovation patterns at elBulli and ElBulliFoundation and was a member of her PhD Committee.
Beyond overseeing the observational and analytical work of Pilar, and true to his dedication to active design research, he also devised, organized and facilitated the HackingBullipedia contest process. Through this, he scouted, connected and invited to participate the most advanced research groups in world-class universities that dealt with technologies directly or indirectly related to Bullipedia: machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet of things, contextual design, visualization, big data…. Later on he analyzed the different contributions to HackingBullipedia and spotted the most promising lines of research.
Ramon keeps collaborating in innovation and creativity projects at Telefónica I+D.
Guillem Abelló is a multimedia Engineer by Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is a food lover who really enjoyed his participation in this project. He was part, as a software developer, of Telefónica i+D team in elBulliLab from May 2014 to February 2015.
He worked on the foundations of Bullipedia software project: assisting in the architecture design of the data models, providing the bindings to automatically feed the database from different data sources, either internal or external; and creating several prototypes with the data collected in order to find which applications gave most value to the project.
He was especially involved with the creation of classification and taxonomy prototypes; combining the own classifications of elBullifoundation and others like LanguaL food thesaurus, and then searching for the best way to show engaging results.
Being part of elBulliLab team since the first steps of the Bullipedia platform on elBullifoundation office (Barcelona) and at elBulliLab Barcelona.
Collaborating as a designer for Telefonica R&D with Ferran Adria and his team. Being in charge to develop the visual direction of the print, web, & digital applications of elBulliLab platform. Researching about semiotics, visual patterns & creative behaviours on visual design.
Working specially in: Visual & Art Direction, Design Thinking for contents, Conceptualizing, Graphic Design, UX/UI, Infographics, Motion Infographics, Visual design, Web design and Design & Visual Research.
Marc Couto has a degree in Computer Science at University Pompeu Fabra (2015).
While he was finishing his degree he started to collaborate at the Digital Food Lab, developing and upgrading prototypes of web applications. He was in charge of the language analysis and tagging features, both in the backend and in the frontend.
Currently he is a web and mobile applications developer.
Oriol Ribera is Telecommunications Engineer by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and certified in Data Science by the Washington University. His passion in software development, technology, design, and contemporary cuisine have driven him across a rich global perspective on R&D: Hitachi Japan, Nokia’s Mobile Internet Applications, Telefonica Research, and Ferran Adria’s Digital Lab elBulliFoundation.
He contributed to the identification of digital opportunities in the field of digital food by coordinating by the end of 2013 the open innovation challenge Hacking Bullipedia to spot global disruptive technologies in knowledge, flavour, and taste sharing via Internet, leveraging on innovation departments of 25 tier one worldwide universities. Resulted in the identification of a internet flavour sharing device, reputation networks technology, and a big data driven creative design tool.
Remarkable media impact in feature stories by Wired and Eater magazines. Coordinator of the first worldwide conference in food and computer science congress Gastro Tech Days cited by Wired UK magazine in October 2012 and Business Insider in October 2011.
He is a promoter of the “Digital Food” category leveraging on ingredient networks, food related recommendation systems, food and nutrition open datasets, and related digital services.
I am Telecommunications and electronics Engineer. Always working in technological innovation, I joined Telefónica in 2006 to work in turning new opportunities into real by applying technology to disciplines where our capacities provide a real differential value. With digital food I had the chance of rolling it out to gastronomy discipline.
In 2013 I managed to shape, together with Ferran and his team, such a crazy and amazing idea as Bullipedia was. We developed a prototype that combined ElBulli creations with social relevance algorithms in order to generate a new structured information plot that would allow labs and gastronomy research centers to develop new techniques and flavours not experimented in the past. In addition, in 2013 we successfully launched first edition of Hacking Bullipedia, a global worlwide Challenge where we counted with the participation of well-known research and gastronomy communities in order let them be part and decide on what Bullipedia potentially be.
My work both in the Digital Food Lab and in Telefónica has consisted in landing ideas around data hype and through working prototypes that, thanks to the ordering, processing and representation, we have managed to turn into real opportunities in the digital sector. I have worked with this purpose in sectors like advertising, tourism, gastronomy and, currently, privacy and security.