TecNM Tijuana at an AI and quantum seminar: the academic pipeline sustaining the technology frontier

By Tecnológico Nacional de México – Tijuana · October 22, 2026.

On October 15, 2026, research professors from the Graduate Program in Computing and students from the Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana (TecNM) took part in the Seminar on Artificial Intelligence & Quantum Computing 2026. The event was organized by the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnología Digital (CITEDI) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN).

According to the institution itself, Patricia Melin and Oscar Castillo served as honorary members of the Technical Committee. Castillo also delivered the keynote lecture "Higher Type Fuzzy Systems for Robotics and Control," on higher-type fuzzy systems applied to robotics and control. Fuzzy systems are an approach to AI that handles uncertainty using degrees of truth rather than yes-or-no decisions. Several students presented papers on their work. The seminar was held both in person and online, although the source gives no attendance figures and does not detail the outcomes of the presentations.

This is an institutional press release and should be read as such: it announces no technical breakthrough and provides no measurable data, and we cannot assess the quality of what was presented. What can be verified is that there is an active AI research group and that its students have a forum in which to present their work.

Our take: AI does not advance only in the big labs of San Francisco or Beijing. It also advances thanks to a broad base of universities training people capable of using, adapting and governing it. That base matters especially in countries like Mexico, where the alternative to developing homegrown talent is total dependence on other people's models and decisions. This is where our thesis on democratization fits: if the open frontier rises quickly, the advantage will go to those with people prepared to make the most of it.

The short term will remain difficult for those entering the job market with routine profiles. That is why it matters that students engage with research and not just with using tools: value is shifting toward judgment and understanding of the systems. In the long run, quantum computing and AI are two of the levers that could most accelerate scientific discovery, with an eye to curing diseases and generating abundance. That is a long way from a university seminar, but it is built through gatherings like this one.