I am a 4th year PhD student at the École Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and I am hosted at Idiap Research Institute since August 2008 under the supervision of Daniel Gatica-Perez, and with Jean-Marc Odobez as co-advisor.
I am Mexican, born in 1981 in the warm city of Cuernavaca (so-called eternal spring city). It's name is the Hispanic version of the Nahuatl (Aztec) word Cuauhnahuac which means "surrounded by or close to trees".
I obtained a MS in Computer Science from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey campus Cuernavaca (ITESM) in 2006. My thesis was on optimization techniques (namely Simulated Annealing) to predict the native configurations of small peptides. I also worked during two years as a consultant for HSBC-Mexico developing mathematical tools for CRM and logistics departments, and after that as a project manager for the National Bank of Mexico. I joined Idiap Research Institute in 2008 as a PhD student.
I am currently working in the project CODICES, whose target is to apply, adapt and develop computer vision techniques to contribute in several ways to the task of processing cultural and historical image collections, improving the job of archaeologists and other people who frequently manage these kind of image data bases. More precisely, I am working with inscriptions of the ancient Maya culture from Mesoamerica.
Topics that keep me curious are computer vision, information retrieval, cultural heritage, history, mythology and legends, photography and cinema, as well as programming and coffee.