Dr Albert Solernou

Profile

With a degree in Physics, Albert did a PhD at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. He developed methodology and software for protein-protein docking and coarse grained modelling for proteins. Afterwards, at the University of Oxford, he joined the European FP7 Scalalife project in the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) group, part of the Oxford e-Research Centre. There, his research was on High Performance Computing (HPC), and involved parallel programming (OpenMP and MPI) focusing on the energy consumption of applications and algorithms. Additionally, he had a role as software advisor in the Oxford HPC clusters, while progressively acquiring some system admin responsibilities. 

After a short period as Advanced Research Computing Officer at the University of Leeds, Albert was awarded with a EPSRC fellowship aiming to study the early stages of blood clot formation. During three years, he worked on developing general coarse-grain methodologies for protein modelling together with an efficient and maintainable implementation, to bring molecular simulation to a longer time and length scales. 

Since then, Albert has been enjoying his involvement in ITS where he developed further his skills and moved into new research areas. As a member of the HumanDrive project, he integrated a ROS autonomous driver for human-like driving in the Driving Simulator. Additionally, he contributed to the InterACT project programming Virtual Reality experiments to study the reaction of pedestrians to automated vehicles. Furthermore, as part of the VeriCAV project Albert worked with Theoretical Game approaches for traffic modelling and implemented SmartActors, a micro traffic simulation tool to replicate the real-world behaviour of actors such as vehicles or pedestrians. In his current role, Albert’s research focuses on improving the immersive experience in the Virtuocity facilities.

Responsibilities

• Day to day management of the ITS suite of car, truck and pedestrian simulators.
• Design and development of simulator software.

Research interests

• Realistic and interactive models for traffic and pedestrians.
• Autonomous vehicles.
• Simulation software design.

• Interoperable Simulator Phase 3
• VeriCAV

Research groups and institutes

• Human Factors and Safety