Aïda Valls Mateu

Dr. Aïda Valls Mateu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics at Rovira i Virgili University (Spain), serving as the ETSE school secretary. She leads the ITAKA research group (Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition), recognized as 'Consolidated' by the Catalan government since 2014. Her work focuses on decision support systems, fuzzy logic, machine learning applications in healthcare, and tourism analytics. She has developed clinical decision support systems like RETIPROGRAM for diabetic retinopathy screening, validated in large-scale studies. Her research also addresses environmental and tourism-related decision-making challenges through multi-criteria analysis and semantic technologies.

Dr. Valls holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (2002) and has been at URV since 1998. Her team’s work spans health informatics (e.g., AI-driven retinopathy detection), sustainable energy evaluation, and personalized tourism recommendations. Notable projects include AI algorithms for diabetic retinopathy grading, lipid metabolism studies in diabetic populations, and fair tourism recommendation systems.

Her publications emphasize interpretable machine learning models (e.g., fuzzy decision trees), medical imaging analysis (segmentation of retinal lesions), and hybrid models for ICU patient discharge prediction. She actively contributes to advancing explainable AI through methods like Fuzzy-LORE for counterfactual explanations.

Current focus areas include refining AI tools for diabetic retinopathy screening, integrating semantic criteria in decision support systems, and promoting gender equality in AI research through collaborative initiatives.