hree researchers from the Advanced Center for Electrical and Electronic Engineering (AC3E) have been awarded grants from the 2025 Exploration Projects competition. This competition, sponsored by the National Research and Development Agency (ANID), funds disruptive, innovative scientific and technological initiatives with the potential for transformative impact.
The researchers, Dr. Christian Rojas, Dr. Jorge Marín, and Dr. Jocelyn Dunstan, had their projects recognized for their excellence and potential to contribute to the country’s development in their respective fields.
Dr. Jocelyn Dunstan secured funding for her project, “Building a Transdisciplinary Framework for the Analysis of Chilean Dictatorship Documents with New Technologies.” The project will use new technologies to analyze documents from the Chilean dictatorship—a period that ended 50 years ago—that have varying levels of digitalization quality.
“Using artificial intelligence tools, specifically natural language processing and knowledge graphs, we seek to extract patterns from the data by detecting key information and building knowledge graphs that link people, locations, and dates,” explained Dr. Dunstan, who is also an academic at the Department of Computer Science and the UC Institute of Computational Mathematics.
According to Dr. Dunstan, winning this grant is excellent news because it provides the necessary resources to study and analyze these historical files with AI from a transdisciplinary perspective.
“This is the largest project I’ve led so far (I previously had Fondecyt and Fondef projects), and it represents a huge endorsement not only for my career but also for the content and approach of this project. It was a challenge to write it with the entire team. I am incredibly grateful to Hugo Rojas, Domingo Mery, and Antonia Fonck for their full dedication to this application,” the scientist emphasized.
The project “Towards a Silicon-Proved Automation Framework of Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuit Designs for Next-Generation Power Integrated Circuit Applications,” by associate researchers Dr. Christian Rojas and Dr. Jorge Marín, was another winner in the competition. This initiative proposes a collaborative effort between two lines of research: microelectronics and power electronics, making it a disruptive project with high transformative potential.
“This project boosts microelectronics in Chile and allows us to advance in a highly specialized, international-level area of research. I am grateful for the AC3E’s three consecutive years of support with strategic funds to start this research line. I also want to thank my co-investigators, Dr. Miguel Figueroa (UdeC), Dr. Alejandro Weinstein (UTFSM), Dr. Jorge Gomez (UAndes), and Dr. Alan Wilson (UNAB), for believing in this initiative,” Dr. Rojas said.
For Dr. Jorge Marín, this award is excellent news because there is a significant shortage of human capital in the global semiconductor industry, despite the growing demand for high-complexity designs and energy-efficient solutions. “We hope that our automation framework for power integrated circuits will help mitigate some of the challenges in this global industry. The training of people and the development of theoretical and experimental knowledge funded by the project will be key to continuing our research,” he said.
In this way, AC3E not only reflects the excellence of its research but also the innovative factor of each of its initiatives, which seek to have an impact and contribute to the country’s society and productivity.
