Scientific Research

In addition to offering solutions to current problems, Telefónica I+D is also involved in long-term applied research with the intent of solving the technical challenges that Telefónica will face in the future.

As a result, Telefónica is investing in bringing together a diverse, multidisciplinary team of incredibly passionate and talented people to follow their dreams, explore new areas of research and, in the process, create new worlds and areas of opportunity for Telefónica’s customers. Research allows Telefónica to see into the future and give it that competitive edge, working on tomorrow’s problems and finding solutions that people can only dream about today.

As a result, the Internet and Multimedia research areas were created at the end of 2006 and 2007 respectively, while the Data Mining and User Modeling area was created in 2008.

Data Mining and User Modeling

Research in this area, which is led by Nuria Oliver, deals with the most important aspects required for user modeling and the study of how this can be directly applied.

Its activities are human-centred and are focused on the search for solutions that will benefit the people using the services and products of the Telefónica Group all over the world based on socio-cultural, psychological, ethnographic and cognitive factors:

• Social Network Analysis, contact networks, and data mining. New techniques in data mining and social network analysis to create strategic knowledge that contributes to user modeling ("Birds of a feather flock together").
• Modeling, user characterization and customization. New methods of acquiring, representing and rationalizing knowledge, customization and decision-making support.
• User centred business intelligence: process optimization, business prediction, intelligent agents and CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Visit the Research Group web page.

Internet

Pablo Rodríguez leads the Internet systems group, which spans a multidisciplinary set of activities including: systems, theory, networks and data measurement.

Current areas of research include:

• Future Internet Design
• Greening the Internet
• Cloud Computing
• P2P and Content Distribution
• Network Transparency
• Wireless Technologies
• Web science and Social Networks

Visit the Research Group web page.

Multimedia

Nuria Oliver leads the Multimedia research team. This scientific group has a multidisciplinary knowledge base that includes experts in statistical machine learning, human-computer interaction, multimodal data analysis, mobile computing, context awareness, recommendation systems and multimedia data analysis and search, etc.

The team is structured in three areas of research:

• Analysis, search, recommendation and recovery of multimedia data. These technologies will simplify user access to multimedia contents, which are increasing in number and complexity on a daily basis.
• Ubiquitous mobile computing and context-based computing. Projects in this area will enable the development of the next generation of mobile services adapted to each situation and user.
  
• Multimodal user interfaces. Perceptual systems that will enable more natural ways for human-computer interaction or computer mediated human-to-human interaction. We are also exploring multi-display interfaces and non-traditional interfaces, such as surface computing or physiological monitoring.

Visit the Research Group web page.

Job Opportunities

Our scientific groups are constantly on the lookout for new talent. If you are interested in working in one of the groups, please go to section career opportunities for researchers on our webpage.