Researcher(s)
Date of Talk
Bio
Dr. de la Torre is an Associate Professor at the Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED), where he has been teaching and researching for over one decade in the fields of control systems, information technologies, and educational engineering. He has led and contributed to multiple national and international research projects, with a strong focus on applying cutting-edge digital technologies to remote and online experimentation.
Currently, he leads DecentraLabs, a European–funded project that develops a decentralized infrastructure for the secure, verifiable, and remunerated sharing of online laboratories between educational and research institutions. His work bridges academia, technology, and innovation, with applications spanning robotics, industrial automation, physics, cybersecurity, and advanced IoT-enabled laboratories.
Dr. de la Torre has a strong track record of international collaboration, having engaged with universities, research centers, and industry partners across Europe and beyond. He has undertaken several research stays abroad, including periods at Stanford University (USA), the EPFL in Laussanne (Switzerland) or the University of Wuhan in China, fostering long-term collaborations and joint research outputs.
These collaborations have contributed to an extensive publication record, with over 35 peer-reviewed journal articles, many co-authored with international colleagues. A number of these works are the direct result of his research stays, combining expertise from different disciplines to address complex challenges in remote experimentation, control systems, and educational technology.
Beyond research, he has taught across undergraduate and postgraduate programs, supervising numerous student projects and theses. He is passionate about fostering open knowledge, replicable infrastructures, and scalable educational technologies.
Abstract
For over two decades, online laboratories (OLs) have offered the possibility of conducting remote experiments in fields such as engineering, physics, robotics, and cybersecurity. Yet in practice, most remain confined to their own institutions and, when shared externally, often vanish over time due to the lack of incentives and sustainable models. This is compounded by the absence of standards for interoperating between systems and coordinating access, payments, and identity management across organizations.
DecentraLabs addresses these problems by applying decentralized technologies to the global management of OLs. Our goal is to turn OLs into decentralized online laboratories (dOLs), offering verifiable access, incentives for maintenance, and an open ecosystem for collaboration.
At the core of the system lies an Ethereum-based smart contract suite:
- A modular proxy (ERC-2535) to allow upgrades without disrupting service.
- NFTs (ERC-721) to represent laboratories and time-slot reservations (ERC-809 extension).
- The fungible $LAB token (ERC-20) as a payment method and incentive mechanism.
Through a decentralized marketplace, students, educators, and researchers can discover, book, and access laboratories anywhere in the world, with usage terms and payments enforced automatically and transparently. An authentication and authorization service bridges the blockchain logic with access control platforms, enabling seamless integration of dOLs into existing infrastructure.
The economic model rewards providers: they earn $LAB tokens for each reservation, and a portion of transaction fees will be allocated to scholarships for under-resourced institutions. All code is open source, encouraging auditability, reuse, and the growth of a development community around the project.
DecentraLabs is currently in a technical validation phase (testnet) supported by the NGI Sargasso program and in collaboration with Blockchain@UBC, universities, and equipment manufacturers.
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