Highly Cited Researcher in the years 2018, 2019, and 2020.
He was born in Rus (Jaén) in 1966. He has been a Full Professor of Intelligent Computing and Decision Making since 2012 and has taught at the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media at De Montfort University in Leicester, United Kingdom, since August 2003. Previously, he served as a tenured Mathematics teacher in Secondary Education for 13 years (September 1990–July 2003), and for a short period he was a temporary lecturer in the Department of Algebra at the University of Granada (January–March 1990).
In 1984, he began his studies in Mathematics at the University of Granada, where he earned his degree in 1989, the same year he obtained the Teaching Aptitude Certificate (CAP) from the same university. In September 2005, he obtained the corresponding Teaching Aptitude Certificate for new university lecturers at De Montfort University. During the 1989–1990 academic year, he was selected by the Regional Government of Andalusia for a Research Training Fellowship in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Granada. In July 1990, he passed the national civil service examinations for tenured high school Mathematics teachers. Later, in 1996, he enrolled in the doctoral program of the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, where he earned his PhD in Mathematics (Cum Laude) on March 24, 2000, with the dissertation “Integration of Preference Representation Models in Multi-Expert Decision Problems.” Subsequently, on November 27, 2002, the University of Granada awarded him the Extraordinary Doctoral Dissertation Prize in Mathematics for the 1999/2000 academic year.
His research focuses primarily on preference modeling and the development of intelligent computing models for decision making, although he has also worked on recommender systems, fuzzy logic, computing with words, social network data analysis, sentiment analysis, and marketing-related data analytics. As of December 2018, his scientific output includes 240 publications, of which 127 are journal articles. To date, he has supervised 11 doctoral dissertations. He has served as Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member for numerous ISI-indexed international journals, and since October 2018, together with Professor Dr. Enrique Herrera Viedma, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the “Fuzzy Systems” section of the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. In 2018, Clarivate Analytics identified him as a Highly Cited Researcher in Computer Science, making him one of the eight most influential researchers in this field in the United Kingdom.