Autonomous University of Barcelona

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Type Public University
Established June 6, 1968
Rector Margarita Arboix
Administrative staff
 3,660
Students 43,175
Address Campus UAB Bellaterra, 08193, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Catalonia, Spain
Campus urban
Affiliations Vives Network, European University Association (EUA), CRUE, Venice International University.
Website www.uab.cat
data from 2011
The UAB Columns, monument of the university

The Autonomous University of Barcelona also known as UAB (Catalan: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; IPA: [uniβərsiˈtat əwˈtɔnumə ðə βərsəˈɫonə], Spanish: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) is a public university mostly located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near the city of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.

As of 2012, it consists of 57 departments in the experimental, life, social and human sciences, spread among 13 faculties/schools. All these centers together award a total of 85 qualifications in the form of first degrees, diplomas, and engineering degrees. Moreover, almost 80 doctoral programs, and more than 80 other postgraduate programs are offered. UAB has more than 40,000 students and more than 3,600 academic and research staff. The UAB is a pioneering institution in terms of fostering research. There are many research institutes in the campus, as well as other research centers, technical support services and service-providing laboratories, and the ALBA (synchrotron) located in the Barcelona Synchrotron Park is very close to the UAB. The UAB is considered to be the best University in Spain by the 2012 QS World University Rankings,[1] which ranked the university 176th overall in the world. Its subject rankings were: 144th in Life Sciences & Biomedicine, 92nd in Arts & Humanities, 106th in Natural Sciences, 95th in Social Sciences and 203rd in Engineering & IT.

Location

Most UAB academic activity is done on the Cerdanyola campus. Several centres exist in Manresa, Sabadell, Terrassa, Sant Cugat del Vallès and Barcelona.

The UAB campus is about 20 km away from the centre of Barcelona. It is accessible by air (flights to Barcelona, Girona, or Reus), by train (Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat, Renfe), by coach (SARBUS), or by car (AP-7 and C-58 motorways).

History

The Autonomous University of Barcelona was officially created by legislative decree on June 6, 1968. Previously, during the Second Spanish Republic, there had been plans for constituting a second university in Barcelona, but the Civil War and the following years of poverty under the early dictatorship did not allow these plans to become a reality until that year.

On July 27, a disposition to the decree was added, starting the creation of the Faculty of Letters, the Faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Economical Sciences. Around ten weeks later, on October 6, the first course of the Faculty of Letters was inaugurated at Sant Cugat del Vallès Monastery. During the same month, the Faculty of Medicine was created at the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona.

In 1969, an agreement was signed for the acquisition of the land where the university campus is currently located. During that year, the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Economical Sciences started running. During the following three years, several faculties and professional schools were created, and the construction works on the campus land took place. At the end of this period, most existing Faculties and Schools are settled in the campus.

At the end of the dictatorship in 1976, the University introduced a plan to create a model of a democratic, independent university, described in a document known as Bellaterra Manifesto, which included a declaration of principles. Two years later, after the approval of the Catalan Statute, the University Council agreed to recourse to the Generalitat de Catalunya.

During the period between 1985 and 1992, the University underwent several faculty reforms and the creation of several new faculties. In 1993, the University Ville was inaugurated as a student residence integrated inside the Campus complex.

Residence

Vila Universitària is the residential complex of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, located on its campus, which has 812 apartments with a total accommodation capacity for 2193 persons. The apartments at Vila Universitària enjoy a very privileged setting: they are located between the campus and the forest and have beautiful views, good train and bus connections and are about 45 minutes from the centre of Barcelona which is Plaza Catalunya.[2]

Computer Vision Center

Computer Vision Center is a computer vision research center based at UAB.[3][4] It was established in 1994 by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the UAB. In 2002, the commenced publication of Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis. It participated in the Pascal Challenge in 2009.[5][6]

Port d'Informació Científica (PIC)

The Port d'Informació Científica (Catalan for Scientific Information Port) is a research center and institution at the campus of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). Founded in 2003, its activity has been closely related to the development and exploitation of computing resources for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). A collaboration of IFAE (High Energy Physics Institute of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medioambientales and Tecnológicas), it is supported by regional (Catalan) and national (Spanish) research governing authorities.

The main scientific project PIC is associated to, in terms of utilization of computing resources, is the deployment, operations and maintenance of the Spanish Tier 1 site for the WLCG, supporting the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments of the LHC at CERN. PIC researchers and computing experts hence contribute to the development of Grid Computing technologies, as required by the computing needs of these experiments. Other projects in which PIC researchers are involved include computing support for Astrophysics and Cosmology experiments (such as MAGIC, PAU and DES) and computing techniques for medical imaging.

Notable alumni

See also

References

  1. ↑ "QS World University Rankings". Topuniversities. Archived from the original on 2012-09-17. Retrieved 2012-09-16.
  2. ↑ Vila Universitària de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  3. ↑ Francisco Viñals Carrera, María Luz Puente Balsells (2003). Análisis de escritos y documentos en los servicios secretos. ISBN 84-254-2319-8.
  4. ↑ Generalitat de Catalunya, ed. (1999). Recerca a Catalunya: centres de recerca, grups de recerca, departaments universitaris, serveis cientificotècnics. University of Michigan.
  5. ↑ "Premien un lector d’imatges de la UAB" (PDF). ADN. 2009-11-24. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-10-03.
  6. ↑ "Eight gold medal from "The Pascal Challenge" for the Computer Vision Center of the UAB". Global Talent. 21 October 2009.

Coordinates: 41°30′01″N 2°06′28″E / 41.50028°N 2.10778°E / 41.50028; 2.10778

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