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Albert Rodriguez Balcells   Hi, welcome. Thanks for visiting my site. There is always a vanity thing about these personal sites that I rather dislike. It actually took me a while to get over the embarrassment of writing about myself, but I ultimately realized it's a good exercise.

I am originally from Barcelona, Spain, where I spent most of my life. My parents, Pedro and Roser, still live there. You can see them here. BTW, here is a cool picture of my dad when he was young. My brother Bernat, and his wife Alicia, also live in Barcelona. Here is a pic of me and my brother when we were kids, weren't we cute :). Here's another one as teenagers. After going through college I moved to the US to go through grad school, and ended up staying. After attending grad school, I accepted a job in Cincinnati, OH. It's a neat city, not too large, not too small. I bought a house near U.C. campus, surrounded by trees in a secluded street, and lived there for a total of about 5 years. Then I transferred to one of my company's subsidiaries in NYC, and I've lived in Manhattan since August 2004.

Let's see, what else...I am responsible for Software Engineering at Next Jump, Inc. Next Jump is a leading provider of rewards and loyalty programs to corporations, affinity groups and institutions. Feel free to visit NextJump's website to learn more about my company. You can also check out my professional profile on LinkedIn. The company is privately held and headquartered in New York, with offices in Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, and London. I work out of our Manhattan office in midtown, like 2 minutes from my apartment.

Education. I got a Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain, and also a Master's of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. To check out some of my graduate research activities using the Finite Differences Time Domain (FDTD) technique for Electromagnetics - and I know you are dying to :-) - click here.

For a while I was into research, and I was writing actively. You can check out a series of articles I published in the late 90's click here.

That's it for now.

Albert