Francisco Roldan Sanchez is a Deep Learning engineer from Barcelona that studied telecommunications engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and specialized in Computer Vision at the Computer Vision Center from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Since 2020, he is pursuing a PhD at Dublin City University and his main research focus is reinforcement learning in the context of robotic manipulation.

What do you most enjoy about your research with Insight? 

Having the opportunity to collaborate with researchers from other universities from Ireland and other disciplines.  Thanks to this, my research can be more original and I can tackle problems that I would have not thought about.

What is the most challenging aspect of doing a PhD?

When you do a PhD, particularly in science/engineering, you will run plenty of experiments, and most of them will be failed experiments. Dealing with frustration during the PhD can sometimes be difficult, but usually you have other people surrounding you that can help you: supervisors, other lab colleagues that have more experience than you, etc. When the experiments are successful the feeling is great though, so that all the frustration you once had is counteracted.

When you’re not working on your PhD, what pastimes do you enjoy?

I love reading books, by getting immersed into a different world I manage to avoid thinking on the PhD all the time.