I come from that little country in the middle of the world, Ecuador. In October 2019, I joined the Internet Data Lab (IDLab) at the University of Antwerp (UAntwerp) as Assistant Professor (tenure track). I received my PhD at the Center for Processing Speech and Images (ESAT-PSI) of KU. Leuven under the advice of Prof. Tinne Tuytelaars and Prof. Luc de Raedt in April 2015. Earlier I received my engineering degree from Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral in Ecuador. During my Ph.D. I conducted research on understanding how groups of elements from the image (objects, object-parts, image regions, trajectories, etc.) interact and how the relationships between them can be exploited to improve artificial visual perception problems. This fueled my interest towards investigating exploratory/explanatory models that can identify informative intermediate representations and use them as means to justify the predictions that they make.

Research Interests

• Representation Learning
• Model Interpretability and Explainability
• Multiple Instance Learning and Collective Classification
• Computer Vision

News

2020-06 : I am co-organizing a workshop on Interpretable ML (AIMLAI@CIKM).
2020-05 : One paper accepted at ICIP 2020.
2019-12 : Our FWO project on the topic of Explainable AI got awarded.
2019-10 : I have joined the IDLab at UAntwerpen as Assistant Professor.
2019-06 : Honored to be an Outstanding Reviewer at CVPR 2019.

Students

I am fortunate to have collaborated with the following persons:

Doctoral Students

• Kaili Wang (co-supervised with Tinne Tuytelaars).
• Salma Haidar

Master Students

• Roger Granda
• Zehao Wang (co-supervised with Kaili Wang).
• Zhou Wang
• Lies Bollens
• Kevin Bardool
• Shitong Sun
• Jean-Baptiste Verroken
• Chirstiaan Vanbergen
• Kaili Wang (co-supervised with Yu-Hui Huang).
• Seppe Iven (co-supervised with Bert De Brabandere).
• Jonas Heylen (co-supervised with Bert De Brabandere).
• Pieter De Clerq
• Michiel Vanuytsel (co-supervised with Konstantinos Rematas).
• Marc Martínez-Camarena.

Bachelor Students

• Anneline Daggelinckx

Publications

You can find some of my publications in the following DBLP link
Please refer to my previous homepage for open-access versions of the publications

Projects

I have collaborated in the following projects:
- SPOTT (concluded)
- Lecture+ (concluded)
- ICO LoCoVision (concluded)
- IWT PARIS (concluded)
- ERC COGNIMUND (concluded)

Service

• Reviewer for several scientific venues including TMM, CVIU, TIP, JMLC, NIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, AAAI, etc.
• Co-organizer of the tutorial "Deep convolutional neural networks as a tool for vision science" at ECVP 2019
• Session Chair at ICIP 2015.
• Co-organizer of the Latin American Free Software Installation Festival (FLISOL) 2007-2009 at Guayaquil-Ecuador.
• Co-founder of ESPOL’s Free Software community (KOKOA-ESPOL).