About me..

CV and some details about me
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“ Postdoctoral research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ”

Researcher specialized in robotics. I have collaborated on international projects in Japan, Europe and the United States, with world-class academics such as Alex ('Sandy') Pentland and Hiroshi Ishiguro. Currently conducting research and participating in projects on robotics and blockchain technology.

I have written in various generalist publications such as El País, El Mundo as well as scientific publications such as Advanced Robotics or Swarm Intelligence. My projects have had repercussions in several media outlets, like BBC, Wired, The Guardian or MIT Technology Review. I've given masterclasses and lectures at international congresses such as ICRA, EMTECH or GREX.

My goal is to build new distributed robotic systems that can change the way humanity feeds, communicates, transports and lives. These new decentralized technologies will have a great weight to build more open, fair and transparent ecosystems for their future users.

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Name

Eduardo Castello Ferrer

Address

MIT Media Lab, 75 Amherst St, Cambridge, MA 02139

Languages

Fluent in English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Japanese.

Research Media Appearances

BBC, El País, El Mundo, ABC, The guardian, Wired, Time, The Economist, MIT Technology Review ...

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time (Thomas Alva Edison)”

Work

Postdoctoral research affiliate - 2019 - Present
MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Conduct research on how distributed robotics systems provide new ways to improve mobility, last-mile logistics, and health-related issues in urban areas. This research is conducted in the City Science group at the MIT Media Lab.

Postdoctoral Fellow - 2019 - 2020
IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

Implemented novel methods to encapsulate cooperative missions in real-robot systems by using blockchain-based data structures.

Postdoctoral Fellow - 2017 - 2019
MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Conducted research on the combination of swarm robotic systems and blockchain technology to implement new security, behavior and business models for distributed robotic systems. This research was conducted jointly by the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab and IRIDIA at ULB. This research was supported by the EU MSCA grant: BROS.

Postdoctoral Associate - 2016 - 2017
MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Conducted research on the synergy between robotics and controlled-environment devices to discover, analyze, and integrate new techniques for precision agriculture.

Columnist and media collaborator - 2013 - Present
El País and El Mundo (largest Spanish newspapers)

Columnist for the Science, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship sections and leading writer of Robotics Blog (Entre replicantes) of El País diary. More than 2 million of daily unique readers.

Intern - 2013
Bristol Robotics Lab (BRL), University of the West of England

Designed and conducted extensive real-hardware experiments involving swarms of robots. Experiments involved the use of several E-puck robots in order to develop and analyze adaptive foraging controllers. This internship culminated in the submission of a research paper to the Swarm Intelligence Journal.

Intern - 2011 - 2012
Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (LSR), Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM)

Designed, tested and implemented several communication modules for the EU FP7 BEAMING project. These modules were used in order to teleoperate robotic avatars with real-time capabilities. This internship led to a collaboration project between LSR and Osaka University.

Network Designer - 2003 - 2006
Isabelinas Estate Agent - Valencia (Spain)

Designed and built the corporate intranet which connected all the local company branches.

Experience

Multidisciplinary experience in several countries, such as Spain, Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom, Japan and United States.

Leading teams and managing international projects in different areas: distributed robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Education

Education and training

Technical skills and competences

Programming: C/C++, Python, R, Go, PHP, Lisp, UNIX shell scripting, Matlab, SQL, DVCS (Mercurial, GIT), VCS (RCS, CVS, SVN, SCCS), and others.

Robotics Software: ROS, Player/Stage/Gazebo, Webots, OpenRTM-aist, V-REP, ARGoS.

Robotics and Machine Learning Libraries: OpenCV, Torch, TensorFlow, Caffe, mlpack, OROCOS.

Leadership and working in multidisciplinary teams. Innovation, disruption and trendwatching.

PhD. Eng. Robotics - 2012 - 2016
Osaka University (Japan)

Thesis title: Adaptive Foraging for Swarm Robotic Systems: A bio-inspired approach.
Topics covered: Swarm Robotics Systems, Optimization, Stochastic Control, Distributed Systems.
1st - First Class Honours

M.Eng. Robotics- 2009 - 2011
Osaka University (Japan)

Thesis title: Dynamic Task Assignment for a Multi-Robot System based on the Attractor Selection Model.
Topics covered: Advanced Robotic Systems, Sensory Information Processing, Pattern Recognition, Imaging Systems.
1st - First Class Honours

Bsc.(Hons) Intelligent Systems- 2006 - 2007
University of Portsmouth (UK)

Thesis title: Phoenix Linux: A intelligent Linux Distribution for recovery purposes.
Topics covered: Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms, Data Mining, Fuzzy Logic, Scientific Computing, Intelligent Systems Programming
Upper Second Class Honours

HND. Software Engineering- 2003 - 2006
ESAT ( Escola Superior D’Art i Tecnologia ) (Spain)

Topics covered: Structured Programming, Systems Analysis, Software Engineering, Networking, Database Design.
Upper Second Class Honours

Talks and Presentations

Academic Conferences and Journal Publications


Jorge Peña Queralta, Qingqing Li, Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, Tomi Westerlund. “Secure Encoded Instruction Graphs for End-to-End Data Validation in Autonomous Robots”, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022.


Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, Ernesto Jiménez, Jose Luis Lopez-Presa, Javier Martín-Rueda. “Following Leaders in Byzantine Multi-Robot Systems by using Blockchain Technology”, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2021.

Eduardo Castello, Thomas Hardjono, Alex Pentland and Marco Dorigo. “Secure and secret cooperation in robot swarms”, Science Robotics, 2021.

Volker Strobel, Eduardo Castello and Marco Dorigo. “Blockchain Technology Secures Robot Swarms: A Comparison of Consensus Protocols and Their Resilience to Byzantine Robots”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2020.

A. L. Alfeo, Castello Ferrer, E., et al., "Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management", 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2019).

Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, Ognjen (Oggi) Rudovic, Thomas Hardjono and Alex ('Sandy') Pentland, "RoboChain: A Secure Data-Sharing Framework for Human-Robot Interaction", in the Tenth International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine (eTELEMED), 2018, (Best Paper Award).

Volker Strobel, Eduardo Castello and Marco Dorigo. Managing Byzantine Robots via Blockchain Technology in a Swarm Robotics Collective Decision Making Scenario, Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018).

Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, Jake Rye, Gordon Brander, Tim Savas, Douglas Chambers, Hildreth England and Caleb Harper, "Personal Food Computer: A new device for controlled-environment agriculture", ArXiv e-prints, 2017.

Eduardo Castello Ferrer, "The blockchain: A new framework for robotic swarm systems", ArXiv e-prints, 2016.

Eduardo Castello, Tomoyuki Yamamoto, Fabio Dalla Libera, Wenguo Liu, Alan F. T. Winfield, Yutaka Nakamura and Hiroshi Ishiguro, "Adaptive foraging for simulated and real robotic swarms : the dynamical response threshold approach", Swarm Intelligence, 2016.

Eduardo Castello and Y. Sinan Hanay, "Demo : A Low-cost, Highly Customizable Robotic Platform for Testing Mobile Sensor Networks", in ACM Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MOBIHOC 2015), Hangzhou, China. June 22 - June 25, 2015.

Eduardo Castello, Tomoyuki Yamamoto, Yutaka Nakamura and Hiroshi Ishiguro, "Foraging Optimization in Swarm Robotic Systems based on an Adaptive Response Threshold Model", RSJ International Journal of Advanced Robotics, 2014.

Eduardo Castello, Tomoyuki Yamamoto, Yutaka Nakamura and Hiroshi Ishiguro, "Foraging in Real and Simulated environments for a Robotic Swarm based on an Adaptive Response Threshold Model", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2014), Multi-Robot Systems Workshop. Hong Kong, China. May 31 - June 7, 2014.

Eduardo Castello, Tomoyuki Yamamoto, Yutaka Nakamura, Yoshio Matsumoto and Hiroshi Ishiguro, "Task Allocation for a Robotic Swarm Based on an Adaptive Response Threshold Model", in ICCAS, International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems, 2013. (Student Paper Award)

Eduardo Castello, Tomoyuki Yamamoto, Yutaka Nakamura, Yoshio Matsumoto and Hiroshi Ishiguro, "Dynamic Task Assignment for a Multi-Robot System Based on the Attractor Selection Model", in IPSJ. Conference on Social Intelligence, Kobe, 2009.

BLOG

my blog
Symposium on Blockchain for Robotic Systems

Symposium on Blockchain for Robotic Systems

Robotic systems are starting to revolutionize many applications, from transportation to health care assisted by technological advancements, such as cloud computing, novel hardware design, and novel manufacturing techniques. However, several of the characteristics that make robots ideal for certain future...

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Looking at new trends in Distributed Robotics Systems and Society

Looking at new trends in Distributed Robotics Systems and Society

It isn’t a secret that distributed robotic systems are starting to revolutionize many applications from targeted material delivery (e.g., Amazon Robotics) to precision farming. Assisted by technological advancements such as cloud computing, novel hardware design, and manufacturing techniques, nowadays distributed...

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A Spanish exoskeleton for Daniela

A Spanish exoskeleton for Daniela

Scientists are often asked what drives them to spend so much time, work and energy on their field of research. In most cases, many hours of social and family life are mortgaged for the sake of results that will hopefully...

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Innovation 25 : A retro-futuristic world?

Innovation 25 : A retro-futuristic world?

Several weeks ago, a Japanese government representative came to our lab in order to give us a lecture. With all the bowing, reverence and the extremely polite language that my superiors used in order to address her, I thought she...

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Telepresence : The fufure of communications?

Telepresence : The fufure of communications?

It is curious, how your opinion can change as time goes by. At some point in time, we all look back and realize, that the way we look at things has changed. For instance, things that used to be really...

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Geminoid F Gets Job as an Actress

Geminoid F Gets Job as an Actress

Geminoid F is working as an actress, taking the stage in a play that opened yesterday in a Tokyo theater. In the 20-minute play, titled “Sayonara” (“good bye” in Japanese), the android shares the stage with another actress (of the...

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