PDF (June 2024)

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mila/Université de Montréal, 2021 - present
  • Supervisor: Professor Simon Lacoste-Julien
• M.S. in Data Science, University of Helsinki, 2021
  • Supervisors: Professor Aapo Hyvärinen and Dr. Antti Hyttinen
  • Thesis: Independent Component Analysis for Binary Data
• B.S. in Computer Science, University of Helsinki, 2019

Employment

Visiting Researcher at Meta Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), (Montreal, Canada), 2022 - present

Supervisor: Dr. Pascal Vincent

Collaborator: Dr. Kartik Ahuja

Working on disentangled representations and out-of-distribution generalization. Project on the identifiability of quantized factors published at CLeaR 2024.

Publications

Presentations

Selected Awards

• Mila EDI Scholarship, Excellence Scholarship – Women in AI, 2024
• Professor Cho Diversity Award – Mila, 2021
• Instituto TIM – Scholarship for medalists of the Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad of Public Schools (OBMEP) enrolled in STEM undergraduate degrees, 2015-2019

Selected Service

• Conference Reviewer
  • International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2023
• Meta Women in AI Steering Committee – Montreal Lead, 2023-2024
• Reviewer, Mila PhD/MSc applications, 2023
• Mental Health First Aider – Mila. Certified training by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2023.
• Mila Library – Created and managed a library of books at Mila, 2022-2023.
• Workshop reviewer
  • SCIS and SPIGM at ICML 2023, CRL at UAI 2022, WiML and LXAI at NeurIPS 2019.
• Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Breakout Session – Leveraging Large Scale Models for Identifying and Fixing Deep Neural Networks Biases. Co-organized with Polina Kirichenko, Reyhane Askari, Megan Richards, and Mohammad Pezeshki, 2023.
• Volunteer – WiML, LXAI Workshops at ICML, 2023.
• Teaching Skills Committee, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science – Student member, assessed teaching demonstrations and teaching merits of candidates to the positions of professor and docent. 2020.
• International Masterclasses – Invited panelist, Hands on Particle Physics at IFT & NCC – UNESP, São Paulo. Participated in round tables in the international day of women and girls in science, as well as in the general masterclasses. 2017-2024

Research internships

• Spring 2020 - Spring 2021: Research Assistant at University of Helsinki (Helsinki, Finland)
  • Department of Computer Science
  • Independent Component Analysis for binary data employing variational autoencoders. Published at UAI 2022.
  • Supervisors: Professor Aapo Hyvärinen, Dr. Antti Hyttinen
• Summer 2019: Research Intern at Mila – Université de Montreal (Montreal, Canada)
  • Visualizing the Impacts of Climate Change with machine learning
  • Supervisor: Professor Yoshua Bengio
• Summer 2018: Intern at CERN – Openlab (Geneva, Switzerland)
  • Fast calorimeter simulation using Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs) for the Highly Granular Calorimeter (HGCAL) of the CMS experiment
  • Supervisor: Dr. Maurizio Pierini
• Fall 2017 - Fall 2018: Research Assistant at University of Helsinki (Helsinki, Finland)
  • Department of Physics
  • Jet energy reconstruction and fast calorimeter simulation with deep learning
  • Supervisor: Professor Mikko Voutilainen
• Summer 2017: Undergraduate Research Fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (Geneva, Switzerland)
  • Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
  • Energy estimation with deep convolutional neural networks for the Linear Collider Detector calorimeter. Published at EPJ-C 2020.
  • Supervisors: Professor Maria Spiropulu, Dr. Jean-Roch Vlimant, Dr. Maurizio Pierini
• Summer 2016: Undergraduate Research Fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (Pasadena, CA, USA)
  • Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
  • Mid-infrared band structure characterization of double-gyroid photonic crystals
  • Supervisors: Professor Harry Atwater, Dr. Siying Peng
• Spring 2016 - Spring 2017: Research Assistant at University of Helsinki (Helsinki, Finland)
  • Department of Physics
  • Molecular dynamics simulations for studying the mechanical properties of nanowires
  • Supervisors: Professor Kai Nordlund, Dr. Antti Kuronen, Dr. Andrey Ilinov

Posters/Extended abstracts

• V. Barin Pacela, K. Ahuja, S. Lacoste-Julien, P. Vincent. On the Identifiability of Quantized Factors. RIIAA LATAM, Quito, Ecuador (2024).
• V. Barin Pacela, K. Ahuja, S. Lacoste-Julien, P. Vincent. Identifiability of Discretized Latent Coordinate Systems via Density Landmarks Detection. SCIS, SPIGM, and LXAI workshops at ICML, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (2023).
• V. Barin Pacela, A. Hyttinen, A. Hyvärinen. Independent Component Analysis for Binary Data with Variational Autoencoders. CIFAR Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) Summer School (2021).
• V. Barin Pacela, M. Pierini. Fast Calorimeter Simulation with Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks; Women in Machine Learning Workshop and LatinX in AI Workshop, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2019). [Code]
• B. Hooberman, M. Zhang, W. Wei, V. Barin Pacela, G. Khattak, S. Vallecorsa, A. Farbin, J-R. Vlimant, F. Carminati, M. Spiropulu, M. Pierini. Calorimetry with deep learning: particle classification, energy regression, and simulation for high-energy physics. Workshop on Deep Learning for Physical Sciences, NIPS (2017). [Paper]