IFISC doctoral thesis wins award at the III CSIC Relevant Doctoral Thesis Awards
Sept. 24, 2025
- Rodrigo Martínez Peña's doctoral thesis, defended at IFISC in 2023, has been recognized at the III CSIC Relevant Doctoral Thesis Awards.
- The award distinguishes twenty outstanding research projects at CSIC centers, highlighting the excellence of the work carried out at IFISC.
Rodrigo Martínez-Peña, former doctoral student at IFISC Institute (UIB-CSIC), has been awarded the CSIC Relevant Doctoral Thesis Award in the category of theses defended in 2023. These awards, organized for the third time by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), annually recognize doctoral theses of special relevance defended at CSIC centers, with the aim of recognizing the excellence of research carried out by young doctors.
Rodrigo Martínez-Peña's thesis, entitled Reservoir computing in quantum systems and supervised by Roberta Zambrini and Miguel C. Soriano, delves into an emerging area at the intersection of quantum physics and artificial intelligence.
The work explores the paradigm of reservoir computing, a machine learning technique that takes advantage of the dynamic properties of certain physical systems to perform prediction and temporal data processing tasks. Already applied in fields such as weather forecasting and financial analysis, this approach promises to be a faster and more energy-efficient alternative to conventional methods.
In his research, Martínez-Peña analyzed how complex quantum systems, particularly spin models, can act as “quantum reservoirs” capable of processing information. The study identified the dynamic conditions that optimize their performance, as well as the limitations derived from the presence of local motion integrals in localization phases. Among his main contributions are the first theoretical characterization of the information processing capacity of quantum reservoirs, as well as the proposal of experimental schemes based on weak measurements to improve their practical viability.
This edition recognized twenty theses defended between 2023 and 2024, in disciplines ranging from the experimental sciences to the humanities.
