Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Biomedical Informatics
School of Medicine
University of Pittsburgh

Contact Info:

Research

My current research is on machine learning for genome-wide association studies, where we aim to improve prediction and classification performance of patient outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease events and death.

Recently, I was part of the BimagicLab in the Center for Bioimage Informatics at Carnegie Mellon, where I worked in biomedical imaging applications, such as classifying images of the middle ear that will capture a possibly infected tympanic membrane into normal or abnormal, or different degrees of infection.

I also work in computer vision and pattern recognition applications in biometrics. During my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in Carnegie Mellon (2008) I spent most of my time in face recognition and super-resolution. My dissertation is titled "Simultaneous Superresolution and Recognition", a new framework for matching low-resolution probe images to high-resolution images from a gallery, without applying image enhancement. The proposed framework was developed and evaluated for the problem of face recognition. We showed that this approach outperforms the use of super-resolution before face matching, and that it recasts the paradigms of super-resolution design when the purpose is recognition. A summary of this work was recently featured in a MIT Technology Review article: A Face-Finding Search Engine.

Education

Ph.D. -- Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA, 2008.
M.S. -- Electrical Engineering, Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. Monterrey, México, 2002.
B.S. -- Electronics and Communications Engineering, Cum Laude. Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. Monterrey, México, 1998.

Honors and Scholarships

Monterrey Tech (ITESM) Scholarship, Monterrey Tech, México, 1994.
Monterrey Tech (ITESM) Electronics and Communications Engineering Major "Top of the Class" Awards. Four terms out of 9, 1994-1998.
General Electric Engineering Award, Monterrey Tech (ITESM), México, 1998.
Best Final Project Award of B.S. Degree, Monterrey Tech (ITESM), México, 1998.
Honorific Mention (cum laude) of B.S. Degree, Monterrey Tech (ITESM), México, 1998.
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Technologia (CONACYT) Scholarship, México, 2002.

Areas of work

Fields of research: biomedical informatics, pattern recognition, computer vision, machine learning, image and video processing.
Specific research areas: genome-wide association studies, image recognition, super-resolution, image enhancement, feature extraction, image segmentation, multiresolution analysis.
Application areas: prediction of patient outcomes from genome and clinical data, biometric recognition, such as face, palmprint, iris and fingerprint recognition, and biomedical pattern recognition, such as automated clinical diagnosis from biomedical imaging modalities, and proteomics.