I received my degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering of the National University of Colombia (Colombia) in 1998. I then worked as a lecturer for the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Section at the University of Nueva Granada (Colombia), from 1999 to 2004, a period during which I founded the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at this section and was involved in several industrial projects in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

After this period, I moved to Barcelona, Spain, to pursue PhD studies in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computing Languages and Systems of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, where I hold a research grant funded by the Soft Computing Research Group. My PhD thesis is oriented towards the research on Generative Topographic Models and their regularization through variational inference for the hierarchical analysis of multivariate time series. I expect to finish my thesis by summer of 2008.

Since 2005, I am actively collaborating with the “Grup d'Aplicacions Biomèdiques de la RMN (GABRMN)” at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (Spain) in the European projects eTumour and HealthAgents. The main goals of the eTumour project are the creation of the largest database of brain tumour-related Magnetic Resonance (MR) Spectroscopic information in Europe and the research and development of classifier models to automatically identify several brain tumour classes through machine learning methods. My work in eTumour focuses on the research of novel unsupervised methods for clustering and visualization of high dimensional data of MR spectra. Furthermore, I am collaborating in the development of the preprocessing modules for this kind of data.