Who I Am, Where I Come From, and Where I Am Going

Notes toward a human approach to engineering, by Ernesto Urdaneta.

§ A necessary warning

There are questions engineering cannot answer with a calculation. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? These questions resist summary, because a human being is not a data point. A person is a complex dimension made of origin, of wounds, of learning, of faith, and of purpose. Complex thought teaches us that reducing a person to a job title or a line on a résumé means, in the end, that we have understood nothing at all.

And yet there is one honest way to approach it: look at what a man has done, and at what he intends to do. Facts, as the old materialist tradition insisted, weigh more than words. What follows is my attempt to answer those three questions without ornament, letting the facts lead.

§ Where I come from

I was born in Maracaibo, the most innovative city in Venezuela. They call it the Land of the Beloved Sun: a land of gaitas, of the Virgen Chinita, of a warmth that comes not only from the climate but from the people. I grew up surrounded by the human warmth of the maracuchos, and that explains a great deal of who I am. In Maracaibo you learn early that work is done as a team, that you lend your neighbor a hand, and that humor is a form of resistance.

From my home I bring what cannot be studied: honesty, commitment, responsibility. My parents planted principles in me that I have never negotiated away, and that I still review every day the way an engineer reviews the drawings before building. I believe in Almighty God. I believe in respect for people, in freedom, in justice, and in solidarity. And I believe, with a conviction that runs through my entire professional life, that every person deserves quality human attention, without discrimination of any kind.

I also come from a decision: the decision to keep training. In 1992 I graduated as a Higher Technician in Mechanics from the Antonio José de Sucre Polytechnic University Institute. In 1999 I graduated as an Industrial Engineer from the distinguished University of Zulia. Later I completed a postgraduate program in Local Management and Governance at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. I mention the dates not out of vanity but because they reveal a method: first the machine and the workshop, then the system and the process, and finally public and territorial management. That sequence is the backbone of how I think.

§ Who I am: facts before words

I have more than twenty-seven years of professional practice across companies in different industries, in Venezuela and in the United States, and in each of them I have tried to leave behind a concrete technical contribution. My specialty is project administration and management, with an emphasis on managing projects in the face of natural disasters.

I have been part of multidisciplinary teams devoted to designing preventive plans that address the effects of natural disasters on business continuity. These are plans that do not merely react: they anticipate, model scenarios, and protect assets and critical infrastructure. Working in that discipline changes how you see the world. You come to understand that behind every asset protected there are jobs that survive, families that do not lose their income, and communities that get back on their feet faster. Seen up close, operational continuity is a deeply human matter.

Today I lead two companies in the United States: Network Construction LLC and Vital Edge Disaster Management LLC, where I serve as CEO. I live in Texas.

If I had to choose two words to define myself, I would choose learning and innovation. Learning, because I consider myself a lifelong student; I have always wanted to stand at the leading edge of scientific and technological knowledge, and I am not embarrassed to start from zero when something appears that I have not yet mastered. Innovation, because I cannot conceive of a problem that does not allow for a better solution than the last one.

To this I add a conviction that some people find provocative: I am a faithful follower of the law of least effort. I am not talking about comfort. I am talking about efficiency: reaching the result with the least possible expenditure of effort. An industrial engineer who does not pursue that is betraying the craft.

I like solving hard problems. I like designing machines. I am passionate about computing, software, and applications. I enjoy working in teams and building them, perhaps more than anything else. I speak English at an intermediate level and I keep sharpening it. I follow trading with interest. I love playing football. And I love art in all its forms, because I suspect that beauty and engineering are solving the same problem in different ways: giving useful shape to chaos.

§ The dimension that holds up all the others

§ Where I am going

The question about the future is, for me, the most concrete of the three.

First, I am studying the application of Artificial Intelligence to Industrial Engineering in order to improve production processes. I believe the most important advance AI offers is the possibility of automating production processes transversally to make them more efficient: not automating an isolated task, but cutting across the entire value chain. From that study, God willing, concrete applications and software will emerge. I would rather announce the direction and let people judge me by the result.

Second, I am the founding coordinator of the Ibero-American Union of Technologists, a project with remarkable work ahead of it: to unite technologists across the United States, Latin America, and Spain in the development of multidisciplinary working teams.

I define a technologist as any person who is applying a technology of their own, or improving an existing technology, in order to solve a problem, whether inside a company, in a community, or in a city. The definition is deliberately broad, because the technological talent of our region is scattered, often invisible, and almost always without institutional backing.

The Union seeks to support those technologists through patent filings, to build strategic partnerships with companies, multinational bodies, and governments, and to take part in working groups at the local, regional, national, and multinational levels in order to build a genuine support system. We also need to adapt, improve, and make safer the technologies arriving from other countries, such as China. In our founding document we studied China's remarkable model of new technology development in depth, not in order to copy it, but to draw out its best lessons and translate them into the reality of the Americas and Spain.

§ Closing

If someone wants to know the full dimension of a man, they will have to look at where he comes from and where he is going. And if they want to know his professional dimension, they will have to look at what he has done and what he has set out to do. There is no shortcut. Words are worth something only when facts stand behind them.

I come from Maracaibo, from a home where principles were taught before formulas. I am an industrial engineer who has spent twenty-seven years protecting processes, assets, and people against the unforeseen. I am headed toward an engineering practice assisted by Artificial Intelligence, and toward an Ibero-American network of technologists capable of turning scattered talent into real development.

I place my experience and my knowledge at the service of companies and non-governmental organizations willing to contribute to the development of new businesses and new technologies in our region. I am entirely at your service.