Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), affiliated with the Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB). He leads the Complexity & Quantitative Linguistics Lab and is part of the LQMC research group (Quantitative, Mathematical, and Computational Linguistics). His research focuses on quantitative linguistics, mathematical models of language structure, and computational methods to analyze linguistic universals like Zipf’s law and syntactic dependency distances.

• Education: PhD in Computer Science from UPC (2003), with a thesis on 'Language: universals, principles and origins.'
• Editorial Roles: Section editor of Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd edition), editorial board member of Glottometrics, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, and Lingua.

Research Interests: Quantitative analysis of syntactic structures, language evolution, cognitive constraints in grammar, and cross-species communication patterns (e.g., chimpanzees, dolphins). He applies principles from complexity science, information theory, and optimization to linguistic problems.

Notable Achievements: Recipient of the Joan Lluís Vives Prize (2003) for popular science communication, Barcelona City Research Prize (2003), and UPC’s Best PhD Thesis award (2003-2004). Authored influential papers on dependency distance minimization and Zipfian laws, with over 200 indexed publications.

Teaching & Mentorship: Advised Master’s theses on dolphin communication, syntactic dependency distances, and data mining applications. Active in the Master in Innovation and Research in Informatics (MIRI), clarifying academic requirements like SIRI seminar credits.

Outreach: Authored popular science books, including Lingüística quantitativa i lleis lingüístiques, and featured in media like National Geographic and Scientific American for bridging linguistics with biology and physics.