Martí Rosas i Casals homepage
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Martí Rosas i Casals homepage
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Hello and welcome everybody!
Though one of my great desires was to be born as an Occitan lord during middle ages and to defend Catalan citadels from dragons, orcs or similar beasts, ten years ago and after some therapist sessions I finally accepted my time and (I hope so) my place in these crazy ages we are living. Then I changed my mind and I became an electro-mechanical engineer. Nowadays, I am a professor at the EUETIT engineering faculty (the best and most beautiful engineering faculty in the world!) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, located at the amazing town of Terrassa, some thirty km away from Barcelona. Here, I teach assignments related to thermodynamics, engineering of solar thermal processes and HVAC systems and applications, and I am also a member of the UNESCO Chair in Sustainability located at the same faculty.
In one of my relapses, I met Ricard Solé. He showed me a new citadel big enough to defend and he said it would occupy my interest for the next one hundred years. Its name was, and still is, Complex Systems Laboratory at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. After some meditation (a few seconds, in fact), I thought it would be a nice place to live, to die or even to develop some of my interest areas of research. One of them is that related to the evolution and relation between geography, topology and dynamics of technological infrastructures, in order to define a new energetic model, more sustainable, distributed and adaptive (ambitious enough?).
Please, feel free to roam at your ease. Right now there is not too much to see, but just wait for a while.....
Salut!
My teaching activities and related academic stuff can be found at the ATENEA academic site of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Feel free to roam around! ("Entra com a visitant" option).
And here there are some other academic programs where I collaborate.
Technical
infrastructures involve those human made systems able to
transport information, energy or matter. From a
broader historical perspective, reliable networks of energy, transportation and
communication constitute the very foundation of all prospering
societies. But on the other hand, they have an enormous power to shape those
societies at their will: they fraction and divide the land where they develop,
imposing new territorial organizations and structures. They
tend to separate societies into those "reached" by the network and those
"not reached", imposing a new social order that relies
on an externally imposed technological one.
The increasing size and
complexity of most of these infrastructures and the spreading thought that all
the "things" transported by these
networks must be considered solely as commercial goods (and
not as fundamental social needs,
like electricity or water), have increased, as well, the number and size of malfunctions
and unexpected emergent phenomena like cascading failures, traffic and Internet
jams, etc. The traditional design of technical networks have been mostly functional and economy-based,
but not organic as in should
be. An organic and not hierarchical view of a network must take into account, at
least, three main dimensions: structure, dynamics and evolution.
In order to try to develop this necessary comprehensive way of
tackling the "infrastructural problem" (and to begin with)
we try to investigate
the complex interactions between space, dynamics and evolution of the biggest technical infrastructure of the
world: the power grid. Here you can find some of our results.
For every accessible file, the following language abbreviations are used: CAT - catalan, CAST - castillian, ENG - english.
As the whole world becomes
connected and interwoven, scientific areas collide and intersect as well in the
most unexpected ways. In this amazing
voy
age
I have found other related interests well worth to investigate as well. These are the
following:
... and activities
Here you can find my articles published in Diari de Terrassa (my hometown local newspaper).
I would
really like to leave this world better than it was given to me. But one of the
consequences of this so called "globalization" is that some hazards seen as
risks some years ago, have turned today into immediate menaces. Though I believe
that our time is running out, I am not a friend of grave judgements nor harsh
sentences. I think it is sometimes better to turn them into messages filtered by
music, cinema, books or art in general. Words, most of the times,
are not enough. Here there is a selection that makes me aware of the things
around us, for good and for bad. 
And, in any case, at
rosas @ mmt . upc . edu
(spaces used to avoid spam)