Jose Carranza-Rojas
Applied Scientist
About
I’m a computer engineer and scientist from the greenish Costa Rica. I’m interested in Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Understanding and Biodiversity Informatics.
During my studies I worked mainly on automatic plant identification using computer vision and deep learning techniques, together with researchers from CIRAD and INRIA. I also worked on development on hierarchical architectures/loss functions to deal with taxonomic hierarchies of classes in the plant domain. We also pioneered work with herbarium institutions images, which have opened a new research area towards domain adaptation and overall using a new media type for plant species automatic identification and conservation. Our research was highlighted in Nature (opens in new tab) among other places.
In the industry, besides working as a Software Engineer, I have worked in conversational AI creation using NLU models, mostly language models in English and Japanese, using open-source tools like RASA, Tensorflow/Pytorch, as well as text classifiers, sequence classification and named entity recognition models.
Additionally, I have done research on generative models (VAE / GANs) for multiple image enhancement, to produce e-Commerce related images, optimized for Click Though Ratio among other things.
Featured content
Taxonomy 2.0 Podcast
This episode we speak to Jose Carranza, a deep learning PhD researcher in Costa Rica who has taken his expertise to an unexpected field, that of the biological classification of plants.