Following the defense of his doctoral thesis, titled “New Methodological Contributions in Statistical Learning for Time Series”, CITIC researcher Ángel López Oriona has been hired to immediately join a research group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

Oriona’s research field is time series clustering, an area that combines Mathematics, Statistics, and Artificial Intelligence to identify common patterns within large volumes of data. His academic contributions to this field were recognized in 2022 at the 17th Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS 2022) for his work “Unsupervised classification of categorical time series through innovative distances”, developed in collaboration with CITIC researcher José Antonio Vilar and Pierpaolo D’Urso, professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

Recently, the project he developed for his thesis—supervised by José Antonio Vilar and defended on July 19—caught the attention of KAUST, a prestigious Saudi institution dedicated to scientific and technological research, which requested Oriona’s immediate incorporation into the Environmental Statistics research group. According to the Saudi university, Oriona’s background at a renowned center like CITIC, with such high-level researchers, was highly valued during the selection process. “This was undoubtedly a key factor in my hiring,” the researcher noted.

“Among the projects to be developed, we will address certain research challenges proposed by the Saudi government. For example, the statistical analysis of climate change effects on the country’s flora and fauna, or the development of algorithms aimed at improving energy efficiency in various Saudi cities,” Oriona explained.