Welcome!

I am Gustavo Aguilar, and I am currently working as an Applied Scientist in the Amazon Alexa AI team. I recently completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Houston (December 2020). My dissertation was on Neural Sequence Labeling on Social Media Text and I was advised by Dr. Thamar Solorio.

During my PhD, I had the chance to work on linguistic code-switching sequence labeling, multimodal and multi-view learning for emotion recognition (Alexa Speech), knowledge distillation (Alexa AI), and model robustness to social media noise (Salesforce Research).

My PhD was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF grant #1910192) and the 2019 Snap Research Fellowship.

Prior to entering the PhD program

Before starting my Ph.D., I worked at Beyond Games Inc. as a Game Developer for 2 years and 9 months. I contributed to an MMO mobile game for iOS in many technical aspects (Gameplay, game logic on the server side, UI, etc.). I also worked as a co-leader of the gameplay engineering team in my last year. Check out the game here!

Chess Life

I was a professional chess player for more than 10 years. I became the National Chess Champion of El Salvador in 2012. Now, I sporadically play chess at The Chess Refinery club in Houston. I also follow the news for the top players and you may see one or two posts on my blog about it :).