GeoDB Tech Team — October 2019

Hey folks!

GeoDB’s project is moving fast, but today we’re not here to talk about our latest developments, we’re here to bring you something a bit different, to present our current tech team.

A project such as GeoDB moves forward quickly so almost every month we have new guys coming aboard. For this reason, we think that this is a perfect moment to introduce our tech crew.

Before starting with this, we also wanted to let you know that we’re currently hiring, so please, check the open positions (here) just in case you’re interested in joining our team.

Without further ado, below we list a brief description of our technical team members, sorted by the date of incorporation (from the oldest to the newest).

Fco Javier Estrella. CTO

Estrella holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (University of Jaén, 2015) and he’s a true DLT enthusiast. He’s a full-stack engineer that has developed dozens of OSGi solutions, adapting and integrating hundreds of tools so they can be executed in OSGi environments, from embedded databases, communication protocol clients and brokers, office suites, libraries of all kinds, IoT devices firmware, cryptographic utilities, DLT nodes and many other fun things. During the last years he has been totally dedicated to the DLT scene, both from a theoretical and practical perspective, so he’s the best person to lead the development of what we want to build.

Rafael Rodríguez. Tech Lead

Rafael is the core designer of the blockchain components of our solution. Rafael has dedicated his career in the field of software development, starting with a background education in computer science, networking and telecommunication electronics and has been recently involved in the blockchain industry. A perfect mixup of acquired abilities and motivations: networking, protocol design, concurrent — autonomous systems, and a white canvas to change the world. Coming from the highly competitive railway industry as embedded software engineer, he will provide the vision and methods to ensure that GeoDB delivers solid, compliant code at the most delicate parts of our ecosystem.

Álvaro García. Data scientist

Álvaro García-Recuero holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science by Université de Rennes 1 (2017). His Ph.D. dissertation proposes a privacy-preserving design of a protocol for abuse detection over the Internet, while Data Minimisation is employed for achieving reduced protocol runtime in future decentralised deployments. He has also built and hacks on Trollslayer, a platform for crowdsourcing, characterisation and victim-centric abuse detection in Online Social Networks. He releases his research contributions as Free Open Software on his github, thus supporting free software and reproducible scientific research. He is always interested in bold, challenging ideas that push-forward Research & Innovation.

Jorge Castro. Software engineer

Jorge holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science by the University of Granada (2019) and he’s knowledgeable in algorithmic, big data and has recent interest in DLT. Until he finished his Ph.D., he was dedicated to research in the machine learning applied to personalised information filtering. He balanced well a successful academic background and having hands on experience in developing complex algorithms for traditional and distributed computation.

Javier Cabello. DLT Architect

Javier Cabello Laguna is fullstack & DLT engineer. He’s an Engineer specialized in Industrial Electronics and holds a Master’s degree in Big Data & Visual Analitics and a Master’s degree in Blockchain Technologies, Ethereum and Cryptoeconomy. His expertise has been focused to systems industrialization and maintenance of production systems in industrial environments and telcos. He’s fullstack in the broadest sense of the term, as he has worked on major projects of installation and commissioning of IoT systems and digitialization of industrial environments, as well as maintenance and management of one of the largest big data clusters in Spain. He began with DLTs two years ago when he developed his firsts smart contracts and designing his first Hyperledger infrastructure. Nowadays, his expertise is very helpful to make our infrastructure available and his experience in production environments and his design are being important in the advances at our DLT area.

Fco José Diego. Data scientist

Fran Diego is a data scientist and engineer specialized in predicting modeling and quantitative economics. He started studying economics in Seville and continued studying quantitative economics in Pittsburg, USA (Carnegie Mellon University) where he met the word of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Since then he has brought together data science and economics in his work of quantitative economist in BBVA and consultant data scientist in BCG.

He continued working on the creation of an artificial intelligence team in Nextail (startup that applies AI to fashion industry) and the development of a big data architecture in Bayshore Networks (startup of cybersecurity for IoT).

Now he is mixing his knowledge of big data science and economics to make something Big in the new crypto world with GeoDB.

Víctor Iglesias. iOS engineer

Victor Iglesias Alcón has a degree in Telecommunications Engineering by the University of Alcalá de Henares. His experience in the area of IT began on UI and UX design, while in his free time he developed shell script for Linux and programs in C/C++. His passion for operative systems drove him from the world of mobility to iOS development.

His professional experience in multiple projects, together with his knowledge about design and low level programming, give him the necessary skills for carrying out high quality development.

Luis Miguel Navarro. Android engineer

Luis Miguel Navarro has a Bachelor in Telecommunications by the Polytechnic University of Cartagena. His passion for mobility and open source development drove him to start developing mobile apps in J2ME, moving to Android O.S. since its first versions. He has participated in multiple national and international projects where he has gained a wide range of skills necessary to have a clear view of the needs and the optimal requirements of every project.

He follows the SOLID acronym, trying always to create, implement and develop a professional product, stable and efficient, based on the continuous learning and training about emerging technologies.

Esteban López. DLT Engineer

Esteban has a Bachelor on Computer Science by the University Complutense of Madrid, writing his Bachelor thesis about DLT. His passion for new technologies and trading with cryptocurrencies drove him to specialise in DLT. He has more than two years of experience in this field, highlighting his contribution to several DLT projects in which he gain hands-on experience in technologies such as Hyperledger, Fabric and Quorum.

Fco José Quesada. Software engineer

Fco José holds a PhD in ICT by the University of Jaén. Since 2010, he has been involved in several research projects at the University of Jaén and University of Edinburgh, highlighting his participation as Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in the European project “Evolution of Shared Semantics in Computational Environments” (ESSENCE). Currently, he is finishing his PhD in informatics about domain-aware ontology matching at the University of Edinburgh.

Apart from his research work, during last years he has been also delving into Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and its application to real-life scenarios. In 2018, he participated with other colleagues in the Eclipse Open IoT Challenge 4.0, been rewarded with the second prize.

That’s all.

As you can see, we have a mixture of profiles, which in our opinion, makes our interdisciplinary team a great team. We’re taking our project seriously and prove of this is that we have a high percentage of Ph.D. members, which we think that it’s necessary to find the right solutions. In addition, almost all of our members have at least one master’s degree and several years of experience, so they have the necessary experience to build whatever is needed.

Stay tuned!