Carlos Peña, winner of the ECMI 2020 student’s competition

• The committee of the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry has awarded the report for modelling and prediction of pollen concentration submitted by BCAM’s research technician

The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) launched a competition last march to challenge students to derive a prediction model for pollen concentration. Allergy to pollen is one of the most widespread diseases in today’s world and even with the benefits of modern medicine, allergies still cause serious health problems and avoidance is an important aspect of treatment. Thus, prediction of pollen concentration is a very important task.

Participants were given a data set was within the IPA Cross-Border Programme Croatia-Serbia consisting of over 11000 measurements taken at every 7.5 minutes. These measurements included the source strength (proximity to the source), time stamp, pollen concentration at 1.5m above ground, pollen concentration at 6m above ground, mean temperature, mean relative humidity, global solar radiation, sum of precipitation and turbulent kinetic energy.

One of the two reports awarded by the ECMI committee was submitted by Carlos Peña, who is currently working at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics – BCAM as a Research Technician. The jury valued the originality of approach, the implementation, the results and overall quality of the report he presented and granted Carlos a prize of 500 euros (the prize was equally splitted among the two winning reports). He feels very grateful for having won the competition: “I wanted to contribute to the best of my ability on a problem of this level, and it makes me proud to know that this contribution is useful to them”.

On behalf of the center we would like to congratulate Carlos on this achievement. 

About Carlos Peña

Carlos graduated in Biology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2017) and obtained a Master’s Degree in Biostatistics at Universitat de Valencia (2019). He joined the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics – BCAM as a Research Technician within the Applied Statistics group in 2019 and has worked in several projects related to times series analysis with Bayesian methods since. He was also part of the working group on COVID-19 set up by the center to model the dynamics of the pandemic in the Basque Country.