Every member of our community has special skills that make him/her stand out from the rest. This week you have the opportunity to meet the multi-talented engineer Jesus Salido through this interview he answered for us after making it to the top 3 in one of our latest challenges.
Enjoy the interview!
Can you introduce yourself briefly? What is your more relevant working experience?
My name is Jesus Salido Tercero and I’m from Spain. I am currently living in Ciudad Real, where I work for the Castilla-La Mancha University (UCLM) as a professor in the Electrical, Electronics, Control, and Communication Engineering Department since 1999.
I am an Industrial Engineer and I graduated in 1989 from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I majored in Electrical Engineering and minored in Electronics and Control Engineering and Industrial IT. In 1995 I obtained my Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering in the program Robotics and Artificial Intelligence also from the UPM.
From the year 1989 to 1995 I was a technologist and researcher at the Institute of Industrial Automation of the Council of Scientific Research (IAI-CSIC), work that I combined with consulting work, developing engineering projects (mechanical and electrical installations and fire control and prevention, among others) for third parties like CEPSA.
From 1996 to 1998 I did a post-PhD stay at The Robotics Institute at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), working on a research project related to distributed mobile robotics. I am currently working at UCLM, teaching and doing research on the development of intelligent systems and artificial vision applications (Grupo VISILAB, http://visilab.etsii.uclm.es). At this group, we carry out research projects with public and private funding from Spain and the European Union.
What challenges have you participated in? How well did you do in them?
I participated in two challenges, I made it to the second round in both of them and ended up in the top three in the Time Optimization of Alignment Process challenge.
What kind of challenge do you like most? Why?
I am open to any engineering challenge but I feel more attracted to those related to new technologies and mechatronics.
What is your motivation for participating?
I enjoy challenges in general, and the reason why I’m an engineer is that I like solving problems by finding new solutions or improving the existing ones while adding value.
Did you have any experience in this kind of challenges? Have you solved a similar challenge in the past?
Actually, all my professional experience as an engineer, researcher, and a professor has been about solving challenges. What resembles the ennomotive challenges the most is maybe the presentation of proposals to obtain public funding and the completion of company projects.
How did you come up with this solution? What was your inspiration?
Inspiration can come any moment, especially after reading and doing research on the problem at hand to understand every aspect and become more familiar with it. I also look for similar contexts and the solutions applied in those instances. From there, I establish some requirements, think of several potential solutions that will go through an assessment process and then I pick the solution that will work better. This process does not end until the implementation of the solution.
The stories of our engineers are truly inspiring. Can you achieve something like they have? Can you solve our engineering challenges?
