index.html

---
layout: home
author_profile: true
title: the hairy ball theorem
header:
  overlay_image: /assets/images/panoramas/yellowstone_4.jpg
  image_description: "Yellowstone National Park, USA"
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<p style="text-align: justify">
Welcome to my site! I am a computer scientist and student from the gorgeous and
oxygen-deprived city of <a href="https://youtu.be/_vz_vMacgHs">Quito, Ecuador</a>.
Currently, I am a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University
of Cambridge, where I have the extreme luck to be supervised by
<a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mj201/"> Mateja Jamnik </a> and to be
supported by a <a href="https://www.gatescambridge.org/">Gates Cambridge scholarship</a>.
As part of my research, I am interested in broadening the applications of
artificial intelligence in critical tasks where understanding how these models
make predictions, and not just what their predictions are, is crucial.
Specifically, I am interested in so-called <b>concept-based interpretability</b>
and its wider applications to human-in-the-loop systems.
If you would like to read more about this, please take a look at my
<a href="/research/">research page</a>.
Whenever I am not breaking things at my daily job and research, I enjoy
needlessly hoarding weird book editions, casually attempting to play pickup
football or squash, and opening way too many articles in my browser thinking
I'll be able to read them all.
</p>

<p style="text-align: justify">
In this site I'll be collecting my personal thoughts on what I am sure will be a
seemingly random selection of topics. If you want to know more about my
research or myself, feel free to shoot me an <a href="/contact/">email</a> with
any questions and/or good jokes you may have. In the meantime, I hope you find
some of the posts in this site both slightly entertaining and interesting for
you!
</p>


<h3 class="archive__subtitle">Recent News</h3>
<table class='recent-news'>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[Feburary 2025]</b></td>
    <td>I will be co-presenting a tutorial on <a href="https://conceptlearning.github.io/">Concept-based Interpretable Deep Learning</a> at <a href="https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/">AAAI 2025</a>. Come by if you are around!</td>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[January 2025]</b></td>
    <td>We started a new online <a href="https://pyc-team.github.io/pyc-book/intro.html">blog series</a> and library (<a href="https://github.com/pyc-team/pytorch_concepts">PyC</a>) on Concept Learning. Check it out <a href="https://pyc-team.github.io/pyc-book/intro.html">here</a>!</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[January 2025]</b></td>
    <td>Our <a href="https://openreview.net/pdf?id=lmKJ1b6PaL">work on Causal Concept Graph Models</a>, lead by my amazing collaborators Gabriele Dominici and Pietro Barbiero, was <b>accepted at <a href="https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2025">ICLR 2025</a></b>!</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[October 2024]</b></td>
    <td>Our work on <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17691">unsupervised bias mitigation</a> was accepted at <a href="https://eccv2024.ecva.net/Conferences/2024">ECCV 2024</a> as an <b>oral</b> and <b>nominated as Best Paper</b> (within the top 15 papers)!</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[August 2024]</b></td>
    <td>Our workshop on <a href="https://human-interpretable-ai.github.io/">Human-Interpretable AI</a> was accepted at <a href="https://kdd2024.kdd.org/">KDD 2024</a>.</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[July 2024]</b></td>
    <td><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18217">One paper accepted</a> at <a href="https://icml.cc/Conferences/2024">ICML 2024</a> where I will also be a co-organizer of the <a href="https://www.latinxinai.org/icml-2024">LatinX in AI (LXAI) Affinity Workshop</a>.</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[January 2024]</b></td>
    <td>Joined <a href="https://www.turing.ac.uk/">The Alan Turing Institute</a> as a <a href="https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/enrichment-students/mateo-espinosa-zarlenga">PhD enrichment student</a>.</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[October 2023]</b></td>
    <td>Joined <a href="https://ai.sony/">Sony AI</a>'s <a href="https://ai.sony/projects/ai-ethics/">AI Ethics</a> team as a research intern.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[September 2023]</b></td>
    <td>Our Intervention-aware Concept Embedding Model (IntCEM) <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16928">paper</a> was accepted at <a href="https://nips.cc/virtual/2023/index.html">NeurIPS 2023</a> as a <b>spotlight</b> (top ~3.06% of papers)!</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[July 2023]</b></td>
    <td>Our Tabular Concept Bottleneck Model (TabCBM) <a href="https://openreview.net/forum?id=TIsrnWpjQ0">paper</a> was accepted at <a href="https://jmlr.org/tmlr/">Transactions of Machine Learning Research (TMLR)</a> and at ICML's <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/imlh2023/home">3rd Workshop on Interpretable Machine Learning in Healthcare (IMLH)</a></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[April 2023]</b></td>
    <td>Our Deep Concept Reasoner (DCR) <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14068">paper</a> was accepted at <a href="https://icml.cc/Conferences/2023">ICML 2023</a> and at ICML's <a href="https://differentiable.xyz/">Differentiable Almost Everything Workshop</a>!</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[March 2023]</b></td>
    <td>Our <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12872">paper</a> on the effect of uncertainty for concept interventions was accepted at the <a href="https://icml.cc/Conferences/2023">AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES) 2023</a>!</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[November 2022]</b></td>
    <td>Our <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10367">paper</a> on metrics for measuring concept quality and leakage was accepted at <a href="https://aaai-23.aaai.org/">AAAI 2023</a> as a <b>spotlight presentation</b>!</td>
  </tr>
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    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[September 2022]</b></td>
    <td>Our Concept Embedding Model (CEM) <a href="https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/hash/867c06823281e506e8059f5c13a57f75-Abstract-Conference.html">paper</a> was accepted at <a href="https://nips.cc/virtual/2022/index.html">NeurIPS 2022</a>!</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" class="news-date"><b>[December 2021]</b></td>
    <td>My <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12628">MPhil thesis work</a> was accepted at NeurIPS's Workshop on <a href="https://xai4debugging.github.io/">eXplainable AI approaches for debugging and diagnosis (XAI4Debugging@NeurIPS)</a> as a <b>spotlight presentation</b>!</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[June 2021]</strong></td>
    <td>Awarded <a href="https://www.gatescambridge.org/">Gates Cambridge scholarship</a> to study for a Computer Science PhD under the supervision of Professor Mateja Jamnik.</td>
  </tr>
  <!-- <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[June 2021]</strong></td>
    <td>Graduated from my MPhil in Advanced Computer Science with <b>distinction</b>.</td>
  </tr> -->
  <!-- <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[October 2020]</strong></td>
    <td>Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I moved to Cambridge, UK for an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge's <a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/">Computer Laboratory</a>.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[July 2017]</strong></td>
    <td>Joined <a href="https://www.cerebras.net/">Cerebras Systems</a> as an early Machine Learning Engineer.</td>
  </tr> -->
  <!-- <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[June 2017]</strong></td>
    <td>Completed my MEng in Computer Science from <a href="https://www.cornell.edu/">Cornell University</a> graduating with the <b>highest GPA of the cohort</b>.</td>
  </tr> -->
  <!-- <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[January 2017]</strong></td>
    <td>Joined Kirstin Petersen's <a href="https://cei.ece.cornell.edu/members/kirstin-h-petersen/">Collective Embodied Intelligence Laboratory</a> at Cornell University for a semester-long research project.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[January 2017]</strong></td>
    <td>Joined Christina Delimitrou's <a href="https://www.csl.cornell.edu/~delimitrou/">Computer System Laboratory</a> at Cornell University for a semester-long research project.</td>
  </tr> -->
  <!-- <tr>
    <td valign="top"><strong>[December 2016]</strong></td>
    <td>Completed my BA in Computer Science from <a href="https://www.cornell.edu/">Cornell University</a>.</td>
  </tr> -->
</table>