In times like these, when the political system shows worrying signs of potentially crumbling down, with polarisation at record highs, old and new corruption scandals making headlines, and once-promising, fresh political parties increasingly cornered into near-irrelevance, reading Civio’s 2022 report feels like a small, tranquil oasis. And it is not... Continue reading

Desde aquí quería darle las gracias a la periodista Sandra Penelas, del Faro de Vigo, por su cobertura en prensa de los progresos en Iris.ai. Sandra ha seguido nuestra historia desde 2015, y siempre ha mostrado un gran interés por todas las cuestiones interconectadas con nuestro proyecto, tanto las más... Continue reading

With the year drawing to an end, we were very proud and happy to announce that Iris.ai has been selected for the prestigious EIC –European Innovation Council– Accelerator, receiving both a large grant and an equity investment. The company was selected among 78 successful companies from over 1,000 qualified applicants.... Continue reading

I cannot recall who or what pointed me in the direction of Ivan Turgenev. If I did, I could only express my sincerest thank you in return. From time to time, discussing literature, a friend will tell me that older books do not work for them. That they struggle to... Continue reading

The lists of most reputed novels in world history almost invariably include Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, which took five years to write, has been lauded for its literary realism-based critique of naïve romanticism. Its publishing, in 1857, brought about a great scandal. The novel was banned on sexual grounds,... Continue reading

Domingo Villar was a Spanish writer who prematurely passed away in May this year, aged 51. He had specialized on noir fiction. And very successfully so. His Galician trilogy –Ojos de agua, La playa de los ahogados, El último barco– has received a lot of praise from literary critics and... Continue reading

I admire Carlos Alsina, undoubtedly one of Spain’s leading journalists. He conducts and produces the third most popular news radio show in the country, which also happens to be the one I have been following for years with quasi-religious zeal. I consider him a brilliant interviewer, and hardly ever miss... Continue reading

During its initial 10-year trajectory, the Civio Foundation has received a remarkable number of awards. Arguably few or none more prestigious than the Premio Rey de España awarded yearly to the best medium in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world across two continents. In 2022, our non-for-profit foundation’s work was... Continue reading

In his highly acclaimed 1491 book, American journalist specialized in scientific topics Charles Mann provided a poignant account of new revelations affecting pre-Columbine America. Mann echoed new research directions –divergent ones–, born at the confluence of fields like archeology and anthropology, to argue three things: (a) that the continent was... Continue reading

American novelist and short story writer John Cheever –a personal favourite since a friend introduced me to his writing back in 2006– once apparently said that wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two. I thought of this in the context of... Continue reading

Criticar la metodología tradicional de la educación en España resulta prácticamente un lugar común. ¿Quién no ha estado en conversaciones, con familiares, amigos, o padres de compañeros de colegio de sus hijos, y ha derivado sin remedio en una ristra de quejas sobre lo decepcionante que resulta el escasísimo grado... Continue reading

Civio is a singular, amazing project born just over ten years ago. Last month, coinciding with this special anniversary –and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine too–, the organisation received one of the biggest honours it could aspire to. Powered by a superb, small team of ten full time employees... Continue reading

Volodymyr –Vova– was our first employee at Iris.ai. A complete superstar. Like Iryna, who is nearing full term with her first pregnancy. Or Denis, who fathered a baby, his first born, only a few months ago. Yevhenii has just joined us, but I am sure that, with time, he will... Continue reading

Antonio Pau is Spain’s biggest expert in the figure of Hölderlin, the eighteenth-century German poet who reached lyrical greatness in a life full of duress. In a January 2022 conference, Pau quoted Rainer Maria Rilke –I think– as saying that no poetry can be properly translated, not even the bad... Continue reading

Pinchas Gutter is a Canada-based Holocaust survivor, educator, and frequent guest lecturer. His ordeal during World War Two is hard to put into words, but it included seeing his parents and sister being killed by the Nazis at an extermination camp. In recent years Gutter has received additional public attention... Continue reading

I stumbled upon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie via pure serendipity. The close proximity of her Americanah novel title to Bhu Srinivasan’s brilliant Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism did the trick. I was hunting for more essays on the last few centuries of socio-economic development and ended bitten by the... Continue reading

Iris.ai is deep into a crucial strategic transition. After years invested in developing our algorithmic core for the machine understanding of scientific text, we are now launching a unique, content-centric researcher workspace. With this AI-powered workspace, which incorporates frontier NLP technology, researchers of all affiliations –corporate, academic, independent– will be... Continue reading

Mastering the art of collaboration –and intellectual collaboration specifically– requires taking many lessons. One of those is on how to give comments and feedback to others. With a long trajectory throughout human history, joint work on a specific output –be it a paper, a sketch, a project plan, or a... Continue reading

Uncertainty makes predicting the future fundamentally difficult. Anyone with a true edge in anticipating what the future will hold would do well in starting a fund to profit from it. And yet, there is a growing army of professionals –often referring to themselves as futurists– trying to master the skill... Continue reading

Life often feels like being under siege, with simultaneous attacks from two flanks. On the East, ‘impostor syndrome’, which refers to an internal experience of believing that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. While this definition is usually narrowly applied to intelligence and achievement, it... Continue reading

In my social media bios, I have often described myself as a digital knowledge fanatic. With that I try to encapsulate my excitement about how digital technologies hold almost infinite potential of helping us better understand just about every aspect of the world. From the immediate availability of nearly everything,... Continue reading

The novel by Kirmen Uribe has left me with a feeling similar to that experienced when I read fellow Basque writer Galder Reguera’s “Libro de Familia” –Family Book–. The two novels revel in their treasured microcosms of remembrance and enquiry. And despite acknowledging some sparks in both author’s literary universes,... Continue reading

“Decálogo del buen ciudadano”, el último libro de Víctor Lapuente, tiene un arranque muy difícil de olvidar. Con independencia de ser alguien que conozco y a quien genuinamente aprecio, ese comienzo es sin duda uno de los motivos por los que Lapuente captó toda mi atención durante la lectura de... Continue reading

It is often said that we overestimate what can be done in a short amount of time, but equally underestimate what can be achieved with persistence over the longer run. Civio, the independent Spanish non-for-profit Civil Society Organization we co-founded in 2011 provides a beautiful example. In the last couple... Continue reading

Sometimes you need a trigger. You just don’t know what that trigger is. “I have no money, no resources, and no hope. I am the happiest man alive.” I came across the quote. It is probably the best-known one from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The provocative declaration, combined with... Continue reading