Hi! My name is Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga and I, at least last time I checked, look approximately like the dude in the picture somewhere near this text. Currently, I am a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) in Computer Science at Trinity College, Oxford. I did my PhD on interpretable AI at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Mateja Jamnik. In my research, I am generally interested in the overlap of AI interpretability, human-AI interaction, and representation learning. In particular, I am interested in designing deep learning models that can ask and receive help from users in the form of “hints” specified using human-understandable concepts. If this sounds possibly interesting for you, please take a look at my research page for a somewhat updated compilation of the work I am doing these days.
Before crossing the pond for my MPhil and PhD, I worked for three years and a half at Cerebras Systems, a machine learning hardware accelerator startup in the Silicon Valley. During this time, I probably ate my life quota of sourdough while working on some exciting projects at the intersection of software and hardware for AI. Previous to that, I lived for four wonderful years in Ithaca, NY where I was a Masters of Engineering student (2016-2017) and an undergraduate student (2013-2016) at Cornell University. Keep in mind that Ithaca’s namesake completely ignores the weather from its Homeric counterpart. So most of that time was spent happily buried under snow. Previous to my student life, I was in the gorgeous and oxygen-deprived city of Quito, Ecuador, where I was born and raised.
In this site I will be posting random thoughts and projects I get to work on in my free time (or at least that’s the idea). In the meantime, if you want to contact me or share some ideas with me (I am always open to collaborations!), please do not hesitate in doing so.
A small disclaimer: unfortunately, given how things work today, there’s the need to say that everything in this site is highly subjective and one hundred percent my personal opinion, not that of my employers/supervisors or any institution affiliated with myself.