I am pursuing a Ph.D. degree at Mila and the Université de Montréal, supervised by Professor Simon Lacoste-Julien. I also worked for two years at Meta Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) in Montreal as a visiting researcher, supervised by Professor Pascal Vincent. I have been conducting research on causal representation learning, independent component analysis, and disentanglement. I’m also broadly interested in out-of-distribution generalization, robustness, safety, and interoperability.

I have a master’s degree in data science from the University of Helsinki, where I was supervised by Professor Aapo Hyvärinen and Dr. Antti Hyttinen, working on independent component analysis for binary data (thesis).

I grew up in Brazil and moved to Finland to do my bachelor’s in computer science at the University of Helsinki. During my bachelor’s degree, I worked mostly on machine learning for particle physics and spent a couple of summers at CERN in Professor Maria Spiropulu’s group and Dr. Maurizio Pierini’s group.

I practice yoga.

Contact

vitoria.barin-pacela at mila.quebec (she/elle/ela)

News

2025

May: I was a 2025 Upper Bound Talent Bursary recipient.
Winter: I am a TA for the Representation Learning course by Professor Aaron Courville.
Mar: Attending KHIPU in Santiago.
Feb: Attending the Bellairs Workshop on Causality in Barbados!

2024

Apr: Presenting a poster at CLeaR, LA, about our paper “On the Identifiability of Quantized Factors”!
Mar: I was awarded Mila’s EDI Excellence Scholarship.
Feb: Attended RIIAA in Quito.