About me
As I mentioned in the home page, my name is Alejandro Catalina, raised and born in Madrid, Spain. I am currently a PhD student in bayesian statistics at Aalto University, working under the supervision of Aki Vehtari since March 2019.
I studied a Bachelors in Computer Science at Universidad Aut'onoma de Madrid. In my final year I joined the Machine Learning Group to work with Jos'e R. Dorronsoro Ibero for my bachelors thesis, titled Data Analytics on Renewable Energies: Organization and Analysis of Radiation Satellite Measures.
After graduation I joined the Masters programme in Machine Learning at Universidad Aut'onoma de Madrid, which I finished with the masters thesis Nesterov Acceleration Schemes for Group Lasso under Jos'e R. Dorronsoro as well, where I developed some theory in the field of Convex Optimization to accelerate convergence of FISTA, a popular proximal optimization algorithm that is suited to minimize convex functions with non differentiable components.
In October 2017 I joined the PhD program at Universidad Aut'onoma de Madrid in machine learning, working around proximal methods and convex optimization. After an interesting first year I joined the Machine Learning Group at Cambridge University as a visiting doctoral student, working under the supervision of Jos'e Miguel Hern'andez Lobato, where I became interested in Bayesian methods.
Upon my come back to Spain I started working on a side project with Daniel Hern'andez Lobato, who is a professor in the same department I was doing the PhD at.
A few months later and after I got news of some openings at the Probabilistic Machine Learning Group I got in touch with Aki, who accepted me to become his student, and here I am! I am currently pursuing my PhD working in several topics involving Bayesian methods, Bayesian variable and structure selection and robust Variational Inference.
Hobbies
I have a very broad variety of hobbies that I enjoy full of passion, these include but are not limited to (in any particular order):
- Real Madrid CF (football).
- Tennis (playing and watching).
- Reading, specially fantasy genre (lord of the rings, a song of ice and fire, malazan: the book of the fallen, etc).
- Watching sports in general.
- Chess.
- Food, I love food and everything surrounding it, from very fancy and classy to the good ol’ classics.
- Computer science and programming languages in general, I have a big love for functional programming languages (Lisp, Haskell, I haven’t had a close look at Ocaml yet but it’s on my list).
If you share any of these passions and are up for a discussion on any of these or other fun topics, reach out!