ABSTRACT:

Carlos Florensa returns to ICFO to share the arc of his career—from Summer Fellow in science communication and biomedical optics to multimodal AI research at OpenAI. In this talk, he will give a high-level, candid perspective on his path from ICFO to a PhD at UC Berkeley, his five years at the robotics startup Covariant (acquired by Amazon), and his current work on real-time video-speech-to-speech intelligence.

Carlos will also discuss broader trends in artificial intelligence—what's already possible, what's coming next, and how this rapid evolution could impact basic sciences, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

BIO:

Carlos Florensa started his academic journey at the UPC studying Industrial Engineering and Mathematics, and first joined ICFO in 2012 as a Summer Fellow in the KTT department, creating a science-based magic show to explain ICFO research —from CosmoCaixa to London. He returned in 2015 as a Severo Ochoa Fellow, working with Turgut Durduran on computer vision for non-contact pulse-oximetry.

He went on to pursue a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley, with internships at DeepMind and NVIDIA. He then joined the robotics startup Covariant, where he built AI systems until its acquisition by Amazon. Today, Carlos leads video speech-to-speech research at OpenAI, working on the frontier of fluid real-time intelligence.