About Me

I do research combining complementary Artificial Intelligence techniques (from Machine Learning to Knowledge Representation). My major area of interest is Natural Language Processing as a means for data ingestion to and enrichment of knowledge graphs.

Contact Details

Selene Báez Santamaría
Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab of Prof. Dr. Piek Vossen
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

s.baezsantamaria[at]vu.nl

Education

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

PhD candidate March 2020 - present

The Vossen-Spinoza-project Understanding Language By Machines has funded a follow-up project: “MAKE ROBOTS TALK AND THINK”. In this Ph.D., I study trust as a relationship between social agents in a multimodal world that involves multifaceted skills and complex contexts. This work aims to create and evaluate a computational model of trust, from a robot's perspective towards trusting humans in collaborative tasks. This project is part of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

M.Sc. Degree in Artificial Intelligence (Cum Laude) 2015 - 2017

Specialized on Intelligent Systems Design. Interested on Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Mining, Computer Vision, Multi-agent Systems, and NLP

Beijing University of Technology

Master thesis February 2017 - June 2017

My thesis consisted on mining data from smart card users of the public transportation system in Beijing. The project includes supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. On the one hand, a classifier is created to identify public transit commuters via ensemble models. On the second hand, a convolutional autoencoder is used to engineer features that represent the travellers behaviours. These features are further clustered to identify seven common travelling patterns.

The University of British Columbia

B.Sc. Degree in Cognitive Systems: Computational Intelligence & Design (Graduated with Distinction) 2011 - 2014

Cognitive Systems is a multi-disciplinary program involving Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology.

Work

myTomorrows

AI Researcher June 2019 - February 2020

Data Scientist October 2017 - June 2019

myTomorrows provides patients with unmet medical needs, and their physicians, information about treatment options worldwide and facilitate access to medicines in development. My role focused on processing medical unstructured language to generate structured data in the form of a semantic knowledge graph.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

University Research Fellow September 2017 - August 2019

Supervised by prof. dr. Piek Vossen, I worked on the Spinoza project Understanding Language By Machines. This project focuses on enabling a Pepper robot (Leolani) to learn from language and context. Using Speech/Object recognition, NLP and Knowledge Representation techniques, it tackles problems of artificial cognition such as provenance, theory of mind, relevance and permanence.

IBM, Center for Advanced Studies

Watson Demo Intern July 2016 - January 2017

Create simple but powerful cognitive applications using the Watson Developer Cloud for backend services and Nao robots as interface. Perform end-to-end application development combining cognitive tools related to natural language, vision and speech.

Skills

I am a determined and goal-oriented person with strong analytical and critical thinking. I favor collaborative workplaces that promote self-growth through challenging projects.

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Knowledge Representation
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Research
  • Python
  • Databases
  • Git

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