Mexican doctor Hiram Eredín Ponce Espinosa (pictured) has received the Google Award for Research, which includes one year of funding for him to carry out his work.

His project, “Transfer of learning using artificial hydrocarbon networks: a case study in robotics”, seeks to make computers, robots, and any element with artificial intelligence capable of transferring knowledge to other similar machines.

In an interview with Conacyt, Ponce Espinosa, who works as a research professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Universidad Panamericana (UP), explained that the prize aims to support research proposals that point to the development of frontier technology in computing.

“For me, this recognition is very important,” he said. “I am very proud to obtain a prize where my project was selected from hundreds of proposals, and also means a lot of responsibility for the work to be done.”

The young candidate explained that the basis of his work is based on a premise called artificial hydrocarbon networks, that he himself proposed during his doctoral thesis.

“The method is inspired by the chemistry of organic compounds,” he said. “The intention is to simulate, in a simple way, how different elements are interlaced and generate chains of carbon. From the computational point of view, we made these observations and we determined that these carbon molecules can be used as packets of information.”

According to the young researcher, the intention is that the same method be used so that the robots are able to transmit knowledge between them. They will first learn, before becoming teachers who teach other machines what they learned.

For now, the goal of the project will be to generate learning transfer between two robots, focusing specifically on one teaching another to balance itself. Once the first robot learns the method, it will become a teacher of another that does not have the same characteristics, explained the investigator.