Vicenç Torra

Timeline

1. 1991–1994

   A UPC doctorate in AI

   He earns a B.Sc. in computer science at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 1991, an M.Sc. in 1992, and a PhD in computer science within UPC's PhD program on AI in 1994. In 1994, he joins the Universitat Rovira i Virgili as a tenured assistant professor.

2. 1997–2008

   The Weighted OWA operator

   He publishes "The Weighted OWA Operator" in the International Journal of Intelligent Systems in 1997; the WOWA is one of the aggregation operators he works on. In 1999, he joins IIIA-CSIC at the Spanish National Research Council as a tenured scientist, and in 2008 he becomes a research scientist there.

3. 2004–2008

   A conference series and a journal

   He starts the annual conference series Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence (MDAI) in 2004. He writes the book Modeling Decisions: Information Fusion and Aggregation Operators, published by Springer in 2007. He founds Transactions on Data Privacy, a journal whose first volume appears in 2008.

4. 2010

   A EurAI Fellowship

   He becomes a EurAI Fellow in 2010. The EurAI Fellows Program honors a very small percentage of the total membership of the member societies of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence, up to a maximum of 3%.

5. 2014–2020

   Professor at Skövde and Maynooth

   In 2014, he becomes Professor in Informatics at the University of Skövde in Sweden. In 2018, he becomes a professor at the Hamilton Institute of Maynooth University in Ireland.

6. 2017–2022

   Two books on data privacy

   Springer publishes his Data Privacy: Foundations, New Developments and the Big Data Challenge in 2017. His Guide to Data Privacy, published by Springer in 2022, is an introductory text based on his lectures and research that covers privacy models such as differential privacy and k-anonymity.

7. 2020

   Wallenberg Chair at Umeå

   Umeå University announces him as a new professor in the Department of Computing Science in May 2020, and WASP recruits him as a Wallenberg Chair in AI. He starts the Privacy-aware transparency decisions research group, which develops machine learning algorithms that build data-driven models avoiding disclosure of private information.

8. As of October 2026

   NAUSICA group at Umeå

   He is a professor in the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University and an IEEE and EurAI Fellow, and he leads the NAUSICA group on privacy-aware transparent decisions. His research covers data privacy for machine and statistical learning, and approximate reasoning with fuzzy sets and non-additive measures. Swedish Research Council funding supports a 2024–2028 project on privacy-aware, secure, explainable data-driven models in federated learning.