Alex Martinez
I’ve always believed that the key to being happy is doing everything with passion. I try to bring passion to all that I do, be it as a professor of Data and Business Analytics at IE University, a consultant, a Ph.D. candidate or as an individual. Outside of work, I love to play guitar, go skiing, snowboarding or surfing, and brew and drink craft beer. I’ve even created a brand with my friends called Cervezas Indomable!
"Personal happiness is based on putting passion into everything you do."
Improve people´s lives with professor Martinez
Alex is a born and raised Madrileño. He’s completed several levels of higher education, built multiple startups and has worked in the public, private and academic sectors, all in Madrid. After graduating from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) with a Bachelor in Psychology, he continued his education at UAM with a Master in Statistics. He later studied an MBA at Escuela de Organización Industrial.
Alex started working with the Spanish law enforcement while still completing his undergraduate degree. He helped create VERA, a psychological profiling system to identify unknown offenders, and SERD, a risk-assessment platform for missing persons. After completing his studies in psychology, he worked with the Institute for Forensic Sciences and Security, developing a police risk assessment of violence against women for the Ministry of the Interior.
These experiences led him to start his first Ph.D., researching open response assessment through natural language processing. Investors began to discover and show interest in his work, opening the door to entrepreneurship. He continued developing the project for two months before he decided to quit his Ph.D. and launch Wibber, a web app that used machine learning techniques to help small businesses and content creators generate and optimize campaigns on social media. After two years of development, one round of funding and assembling a team of six, Alex was unable to secure a second round of funding and had to make the hard decision to close the company.
His experience with Wibber prepared him for his next entrepreneurial venture. He started an artificial intelligence consultancy firm, Compai, with a colleague from Wibber. Over the past two years, Compai has worked with companies like Opinno and Endesa to aid the transformation of vital processes through employee training.
Alex joined IE University as a professor of the Bachelor in Data and Business Analytics almost two years ago. He has since taught “Simulation and Modeling to Understand Change” and “Algorithms and Data Structures” to four different degrees at IE University. The former course covers the fundamentals of statistics and probability, whereas the latter focuses on computing, data management and storage. In the first edition of the Algorithms and Data Structures course, his class developed an algorithm for IE University that allows its members to orient themselves in all its buildings (IE Maps).
Alex’s experience as a professor has reignited his passion for education and as a result, he has rejoined his Ph.D. He is currently studying quantum similarity models in a vector space modeling context at UAM.
When he’s not teaching, consulting or doing research, you’ll find Alex playing the guitar (he plays it every day), surfing, snowboarding, skiing, or, most likely, brewing craft beer. He loves to tinker with new recipes with his friends and family. His brand, Cervezas Indomable, is not too bad either.
