November 14 seminar: Manel Martínez-Ramón

November 14, 2025

Artificial Intelligence: A short introduction

Manel Martínez-Ramón, UNM

3:00 pm, UNM Centennial Engineering Center, Room 1026
Online Guests: Contact Prof. Santhanam <bsanthan@unm.edu> for a Zoom link

Abstract: Artificial intelligence is now pervasive in our daily lives, reshaping how we communicate, learn, and work.

Today’s AI advances are largely driven by deep learning, especially transformer architectures, the foundation of large language models. These, in turn, trace their origins to an early and rather simple abstraction of the biological neuron, the fundamental unit of the nervous system.

In this introductory talk, we will explore the evolution of artificial intelligence from its beginnings in the 1950s to the present. Along the way, we will see how AI has often been guided by the aspiration to emulate the human brain, an ambition that remains, for now, more of an inspiring vision than a reality.

Bio: Dr. Manel Martínez-Ramón (Ph.D. in Telecommunications Technologies from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, 1999) is a Professor in the ECE Department at UNM. He holds the King Felipe VI Endowed Chair, sponsored by the household of the King of Spain. He joined the UNM ECE Department in 2013 as a full professor. His research activities include applications of machine learning to smart antennas, smart grid, photovoltaics, particle accelerators, and others. He is a co-author of the books Digital Signal Processing with Kernels (IEEE Press/Wiley, 2018), Machine Learning Applications in Electromagnetics and Antenna Array Processing (Artech House, 2021) and Deep Learning, a Practical Introduction (Wiley, 2024).