He doctor in Physics and expert in “Big Data”the Madrid native Alberto Palomocloses his time in the Government of Spain after being appointed almost three years ago as the first Chief Data Officer (CDO) in Spain (within the then recently created Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence) and now becomes the Strategy Director of the Gaia-X European Association for Data & Cloud AISBL. Based in Brussels, it is the parent organization of the initiative that works to deploy a federated and cyber-secure “cloud data infrastructure” throughout the European Union (EU).
During his stage as CDO in our countryPigeon has createdboth in the administrative and operational part, the “Data Office” of the Spanish Governmentconsidered a key technical tool to face new digital timeswhich has in turn served as beacon for reindustrialization and the advancement of the national fabric. In this sense, the Office has played a decisive role, drawing connections between data exploitation and new digital technologies. Therefore, the revolution that Artificial Intelligence currently represents cannot be understood without access to data and high computing capacity.
Thus, in his new professional role, and being the first Spaniard to carry it out, Alberto Palomo becomes part of the executive team of one of the most relevant technological-political projects in the history of the EU. Endorsed by the governments of the two great European powers (in particular by the then German minister Peter Altmaier and the still French minister Bruno Le Maire) as well as by the European Commission itself, the innovative project has had a great reception among major European industrial “champions”, although it has also raised criticism for its slow pace of deployment. And this will precisely be one of the main tasks of this new role, reorienting a disruptive proposal that is capable of coherently combining technology, regulation and markets.
Palomo was signed three years ago by the then Minister of Economy, Nadia Calvinoand the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, when he played“Big Data Analytics” professional work for Avangrid, North American subsidiary of Iberdrola, in New Haven (USA). After graduating in Physics, he completed a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in the department of the prestigious British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, and then obtained a doctorate through the Higher Council for Scientific Research. Later, he worked as a researcher, including modeling artificial neural networks for the Chinese multinational “Huawei” in the city of Toronto (Canada).