Oral-History:Gabriel Ferrate

About Gabriel Ferraté

Ferraté was born in Catalonia in 1932. He studied engineering in Barcelona, getting his degree in 1957. He began to develop electronic traffic control systems in the late 1950s, and his company sold them to the municipality of Barcelona and many other European and South American cities over the next two decades, before it went out of business in the late 1970s. He split his business work with teaching and researching in automatic control, eventually becoming in 1975 a full professor at Barcelona in the chair of Automatic Control. In 1979 he became director of the school of engineers; in 1982 he became the first director of the Polytechnic University, when the engineering school integrated into it. After a year working for the Spanish government as General Director of Universities and Research and General Director of Scientific Policy, he returned to Barcelona as a professor doing research in Cybernetics (automatic control, robotics, acitivisual vision, bioengineering), director of the Cybernetics Institute, and a second stint as director of the Polytechnic, where he remained till 1994.