Dr Daniel Chicharro Raventos

Overview

Daniel is a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at City and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (CitAI). Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School in the Neurobiology Lab of Dr. John Assad and a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, in the Neural Computation Lab of Dr. Stefano Panzeri. Daniel obtained a PhD in Information and Communication Technologies, with specialization on data analysis for neuroscience, at the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, under the supervision of Dr. Ralph G. Andrzejak.

The core of his research has been the development of machine learning and statistical methods to infer the representation of informative features in high-dimensional data, and the application of these methods to understand how the brain represents and processes sensory stimuli and behavioral decisions in the activity of populations of neurons.

More broadly, Daniel is mostly interested in understanding how the causal structure and generative mechanisms of complex systems can be learned from data and exploited to create useful representations of high-dimensional data that are more robust and generalizable across domains. Currently, he is studying how the structure of causal mechanisms is reflected in distinctive sets of independencies between different sources of variability in a system, as well as in its invariance properties. He then exploits these causal trademarks for statistical modeling and to infer the effect of external perturbations or modifications of those mechanisms. The objective of this research is to better characterize complex real-life systems (e.g. neuroscience, genomics) and to improve data representations with causal inference methods also for technological applications.

Languages

English (can read, write, speak, understand spoken)

2^ndsupervisor

• Giorgio Maria Cavallazzi, Research Student

Publications by category