Welcome

I was born in Riohacha, in the fantastic northern Caribbean Region of Colombia. I attended high school there, at the Divina Pastora (below the blue building in the top right of the following figure).

Image from Wikipedia.

Taking classes in Math, Philosophy, and Natural Sciences, while viewing that wonderful sea every day couldn’t lead me anywhere else than to the capital to study Physics.

I finished my Bachelor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá in 2008, and continued there with a Master in Science under the supervision of Jereson Silva Valencia, defending my thesis with a summa cum laude in the Summer of 2010, and continuing research until mid 2011.

In the Fall of 2011, I began my PhD in Physics as a Fulbright fellow at Columbia University in New York City, supervised by Andrew J. Millis. I defended my thesis in the Fall of 2018, after having worked for a couple of years as a teaching fellow at Columbia and adjunct professor at New Jersey City University, then at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and finally at Yeshiva University.

In the Spring of 2019, I started to work as a Research Scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), moving from Physics to Machine Learning Research.

My current interests are in generative models in computer vision, scene understanding (2D/3D), reinforcement learning, time series prediction, anomaly/novelty detection, multisensor fusion, uncertainty estimation, and explainable AI. I develop and adapt existing cutting-edge technologies to apply them for Maritime Situational Awareness.