His company, Rezon.ai, aims to add «explainability» to existing artificial intelligence systems.
Forbes magazine has included Javier Viaña (Bilbao, 1995) in its latest list of the 30 people under the age of 30 who are generating the most impact in the world in the science category. Viaña, 28, is an industrial and aerospace engineer, but he has focused his efforts and research on artificial intelligence and, more specifically, on its «explainability», on making the decisions taken by algorithms transparent and understandable to the human mind.
His company, Rezon.ai, is working to add «explainability» to existing AI systems – for example those used by his clients in healthcare – so that their results are better understood, so that it is clear how they arrived at the answer they give in each case. «In a car manufacturing line, it’s easy to monitor the process: you put someone in the middle and evaluate how the parts are assembled; but when we use an algorithm, if you can’t monitor the structure, you only see the information going in and the information coming out, and often you don’t know how it works on the inside, what the process was like for that decision,» justifies Viaña.
«My inclusion on the list is proof that there is great talent in our country leading innovation in AI». Javier Viaña Engineer and researcher
Viaña decided to dedicate his PhD in fuzzy artificial intelligence applied to aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati to simplifying artificial intelligence, to developing algorithms with a different approach to those of neural networks or deep learning, which are used in most current applications, such as mobile assistants.
In an interview published in La Vanguardia in 2021, Viaña explained that, since he was a child, he has had this interest in doing things differently. This trait led him, for example, to invent a compass for ellipses in his first year of his degree (he studied industrial and aerospace engineering at the University of the Basque Country) when he realised that they had to be made freehand and they looked bad. And in third year he published a formula that the Spanish Society of Mechanical Engineering awarded as the best research article of 2016.
He has also participated in projects for NASA, for Boeing, for Genexia, for the airport of Cincinatti… and, at 28, he has also had time to publish several books and poems, and his hobbies include surfing and playing the guitar.
