Victor Arango-Quiroga

Personal Website :)

Thank you for visiting. My name is Victor and this is my personal website.

About me

Brief personal and academic story

I am originally from Cali, Colombia. In 2014, I moved to Boston, MA where I transferred my studies from Colombia to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During my undergraduate, I completed two research internships in the space of Computer Vision and Robotics. I graduated as a computer engineer in 2018 and started working at Ford Motor Company. I worked there for 4 years having different titles such as as a Software Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer and Tech Lead. Three years later and during the pandemic, I moved back to Boston. In 2022, I moved to San Diego, CA to pursue my Master of Science in Computer Science at the University of California San Diego. Now, I am Machine Learning Scientist at Expedia Group based out of Seattle, WA.

Interests:

My field of interest is artificial intelligence (AI), specially machine learning (ML). From my research experience, I am interested in robotics and how one could control robot’s
behavior as a response of its environment (e.g. through visual or sound information). From my online classes and professional career, I am very interested in ML and Natural Language Processing
(NLP) and how they can solve a diverse set of problems in real life.

During my research and professional experience, I have been exposed and worked on NLP, ML (deep learning/NN, CNN, RNN, LSTM, XGBoost, and others), and AI in general (search, path planning, markov decision problems).
I also have substantial experience productionalizing ML applications (MLops) and have delivered 20+ ML/NLP projects during my time at Ford Motor Company.

These experiences motivate me to continue exploring and deepen my knowledge in AI and how it integrates with real life.

Note: See my resume below for more info.

Education:

M.S. in Computer Science at the University of California San Diego – Dec 2023 (AI Specialization)

Micro MBA at Rady School of Management at UCSD

B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst – May 2018

Certifications:

Stanford Professional Certificate in Artificial Intelligence – June 2022

Relevant Classes:

UC San Diego

  • CSE 251A ML: Learning Algorithms -Dr.Jingbo Shang
  • CSE 256 Statistical NLP – Dr. Ndapa Nakashole
  • CSE 291: Unsupervised Learning – Dr. Sanjoy Dasgupta
  • CSE 234 Data Systems for Machine Learning – Prof. Arun Kumar
  • CSE 210 Principles of Software Engineering – Prof. Michael Coblenz
  • CSE 240A Principles in Computer Architecture – Prof. Pat Pannuto (Fall 2022)
  • CSE 250A Probabilistic Reason&Learning – Prof. Berg-Kirkpatrick
  • CSE 252A Computer Vision I – Prof. Benjamin Ochoa CSE 276A Introduction to Robotics – Prof. Henrik I Christensen

Stanford University:

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Duckietown Project – Autonomous Driving

Picture taken at Center for Automation Technologies and Systems (CATS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Professional Experience

Skills

  • Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning, Computer Vision, & Natural Language Processing.
  • End-to-end ML Engineering deployment (Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Google Cloud Platform)
  • Machine Learning Scientist experience developing NLP applications using pretrained BERT, T5, RoBERTA, and other models. Also working with Multimodal LLLMS such as mPLUG-owl, IDEFICS, and others.
  • Tech Lead experience leading a group of 20+ ML Engineers at Ford Motor Company.

Soft Skills

  • Problem Solving and Critical Thinking
  • Love to socialize and integrate with others
  • Like to be challenged
  • Amateur photographer (I took the pic to the left)

“One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn’t do.” Henry Ford

Experience

  • I am currently working at Expedia Group as a Machine Learning Scientist where I focus on projects in the field of Computer Vision and NLP. More precisely, I am working with the development and instruction tuning process of Multimodal Large Language Models that have the capacity to understand images and videos.

    I worked as a Graduate Advocate at PATHS program in UC San Diego where I assisted, led, guided, tutored, and engaged with PATHS
    scholars who are completing their bacherlors degree. All the scholars that I guide are in STEM, specifically in Computer Science, Data Analytics, and Engineering. My goal is to share my experience with them and help them succeed during their academic and professional career.

    Prior to starting my MS program, I joined Ford Motor Company in July 2018 through the Ford College Graduate program which consists of three rotations during a time of three years (in my case, 3 and a half years). I rolled off the program in 2021 and joined the MLOps team as Tech Lead. I was selected to be part of a program for Ford employees called High Tech High Demand (HTHD).

    At Ford, I experienced how machine learning (ML) is used in marketing to make product recommendations and send targeted communications to improve sales and customer experience. I also conducted research on Fintech, including ML, to democratize AI development in the company. As such, I explored AI-as-a-service technologies and created internal publications on how to integrate trained ML models to applications that satisfied company security protocols and that could be integrated to the company’s cloud platform. In 2021 and 2022, I worked in different use cases developing scalable AI-based solutions covering regression, classification, clustering, and natural language processing. Thus, I experienced how AI could adapt to different real-world problems. The demand for internal AI-consulting in the company has exponentially grown in the last few years. As such, I had the opportunity to be a Tech Lead for one of the new teams that the company is created to accelerate the production of AI-based solutions. In this position, I was responsible for the
    technical implementation of the AI-based solutions of my team as well as planning and managing resources to achieve company goals.

    I left Ford Motor Company at the end of August 2022 to start my M.S. in Computer Science program at UC San Diego as a full-time student.

    Note: See my resume below for more info.

    —

    by

    Victor Arango

RESUME / CV