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 Autónoma de Madrid. In my final year I joined the Machine Learning Group to work with José R. Dorronsoro Ibero for my bachelors thesis, titled Data Analytics on Renewable Energies: Organization and Analysis of Radiation Satellite Measures.
After graduation I went on to study a Masters in Machine Learning at the same university and with the same supervisor, that ended with the masters thesis Nesterov Acceleration Schemes for Group Lasso, where I developed some theory in the field of Convex Optimization to accelerate the practical convergence of FISTA, a very well known algorithm in the field.
In October 2017 I joined the PhD program at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in machine learning. After an interesting first year I joined the Machine Learning Group at Cambridge University as a visiting doctoral student, working under the supervision of José Miguel Hernández Lobato, where I became interested in Bayesian methods.
Upon coming back to Spain I started working on a side project with José Miguel’s brother, Daniel Hernández Lobato, who is a professor in the same department I was doing the PhD at. This is a project on which I am still working, developing inference methods for spike and slab models under multiclass classification settings.
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!
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!