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
Work experience
- Summer 2025: NeuroAI Intern at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA)
- Supervisor: Dr. David Klindt
- Mentored student from the Undergraduate Research Program.
- 2022-2024: Visiting Researcher at Meta Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), (Montreal, Canada)
- Supervisor: Dr. Pascal Vincent
- Collaborator: Dr. Kartik Ahuja
- Project on the identifiability of quantized factors published at CLeaR 2024 and another project under submission.
- 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
Publications
Invited talks
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
Teaching
- Teaching Assitant, Université de Montréal
- Representation Learning course by Professor Aaron Courville.
Selected Service
- Conference Reviewer
- AISTATS 2024 and 2025, CLeaR 2025, UAI 2025
- Meta Women in AI Steering Committee – Montreal Lead, 2023-2024
- Reviewer, Mila PhD/MSc applications, 2023-2024
- 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
- 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. 2017-2026
Posters/Extended abstracts
- V. Barin Pacela, K. Ahuja, S. Lacoste-Julien, P. Vincent. Quantized Disentanglement: A Practical Approach. SIM workshop at ICML (2025).
- 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]
Yoga
Hatha & Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training (380h), 2025-2026
- Yoga Sangha, Montreal. With Sylvie Tremblay.