I am a Full Professor (Catedrático de Universidad) at the Grupo de Sistemas y
Comunicaciones (GSyC) at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC).
The URJC is a public university located in the
southern part of Madrid; in particular, the campus where my office is located is in Fuenlabrada - see contact
information.
I earned my PhD in 2006 on Empirical Software Engineering Research on Free/Open Source Software (with European mention after visiting for several months the Business Univ. of Vienna, Austria, and the Univ. of Maastricht, The Netherlands). As a post-doc, I visited the University of Lincoln (UK) in 2006 and 2007 for four months, and was a visiting scholar (with a DAAD scholarship) at the Univ. Trier (Germany) for three months in 2008. In 2018, I have been appointed as Visiting Research Professor at the University of Skövde (Sweden) for two years. I've also visited for a week Chalmers University (Sweden, 2 times) and University of Jyväskylä (Finland) with the Erasmus+ exchange programme.
In 2012, my research group founded a spin-off company, Bitergia, which does software analytics, and that allows me to have an overview of the software industry and its needs, especially in the Free Software/Open Source domain. Among Bitergia's customers we can find the Linux Foundation, the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, Paypal, Intel or Mozilla.
I mainly do research in following two fields:
- Software engineering: I am specialized in software analytics of Open Source Software systems. My primary focus is on mining software repositories, socio-technical issues such as community metrics, software evolution, and development effort estimation.
- Computational thinking (CT): I investigate the effect of using coding as a way to help students learn beyond coding. I also work on how the development of CT skills can be assessed.
As part of my research, I have developed and maintained several software tools, as CVSAnalY, a versioning system log analyzer, and Dr. Scratch, a web-based gamified computational thinking skills assessment tool. CVSAnalY has been used in more than 250 scientific publications from our and other research groups, while Dr. Scratch currently analyzes more than 5,000 Scratch projects from 3,000 distinct learners on a monthly basis.
My research has been awarded several times, including conference best paper awards (CHI 2020, SANER 2019, ESEM 2018, EDUCON 2016, OSS 2012, MSR 2006), a significant contribution award (MSR 2015 for our MSR 2005 paper), an MSR honorable mention as a Most Influential Paper from MSR 2010, and a Google RISE Award (2015) due to the development of the Dr. Scratch platform.
I have collaborated with research groups from Europe and from the rest of the world. I have participated in several, multi-million-euro European, national and regional funded research projects, among others, FLOSS (2000-2002), CALIBRE (2004-2006), co-ordinated by LERO - the Irish Software Research Centre, FLOSSMetrics (2007-2009), QualiPSO (2007-2010), or SENECA (2015-2018). In addition, besides the collaborations in my research stays, I have worked with international research groups, such as the Univ. Victoria (Canada), Chalmers and Gothemburg Univ. (Sweden), TU Eindhoven (The Netherlands), Brunel Univ. London (UK), Osaka Univ. (Japan), among others. Beyond the activity of Bitergia, I have collaborated with the software industry, e.g., Telefónica I+D, Google, or Samsung.
I will be general chair of MSR 2021 next year. I have been general chair of ICSME 2018 and of SATToSE 2107, programme co-chair of OSS 2016 and OSS 2017, of IWPSE 2013 and IWPSE 2015, of OpenSym 2018, and the Industry track co-chair of SANER 2017. I have been involved in many conference PCs in the last years (ESEC/FSE, ICSME, MSR, SANER, OSS, among others). I am in the steering committee of ICSME, MSR, OpenSym, OSS and SATToSE.
I have served as member of a PhD thesis evaluation committee in following countries: Spain (5 times at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and 3 times at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), France (Institut Mines Telecom, Telecom Ecole de Management, 2013), Finland (Tampere University of Technology, 2014), The Netherlands (University of Leiden, 2016, and TU Eindhoven, 2018), Belgium (University of Mons, 2016), UK (Brunel University, 2016) and Brasil (University of Sao Paulo, 2017). I have been appointed to be part of the evaluation committee of a master's thesis at Bringham Young University (USA) in 2017 and University of Sao Paulo (Brasil) in 2019.
I have given in the last 15 years over 2,500 hours of teaching on 16 different subjects, mostly in Telecommunication Engineering and Computer Science degrees (mainly subjects on multimedia networks, server-side web development and client-side web development), but also in a Journalism degree (Introduction to Computer Science, 330 hours), an on-line free-choice subject for all public universities in the Region of Madrid (Free Culture, 110 hours), and a subject taught in English (Introduction to Computer Networks, 30 hours).
My teaching quality has been recognized with three DOCENTIA -a Spanish evaluation programme that evaluates university lecturers every three years that was first implemented in 2009 in my university- positive evaluations (2006-2008 - Favorable, 2009-2011 - Excellent, 2012-2014 - Remarkable, 2015-2017 - Remarkable). Only less than 8% receive an excellent evaluation.
Spanish universities have also a procedure where students evaluate their lecturers, at the end of the term using a Likert scale from 1 to 5. I have been evaluated in a total of 64 assessment surveys by students. The average score obtained in them is 4.25 / 5. Of the 64 subjects evaluated:
- 63 times (99%) I obtained an assessment score above 3.5
- 59 times (92%) I obtained an assessment score above 4.0
Send me an e-mail to: grex (at) gsyc.urjc.es
Visit me at: Despacho 110 - Departamental III - Campus de Fuenlabrada
Last modified: 3.5.2021