Hi 👋
My name is Eliezer Silva, I am an ML/AI researcher. I work currently as a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Applied Mathematics, Getúlio Vargas Foundation (EMAp, FGV), working with Prof Diego Mesquita on topics related to deep generative models, probabilistic modeling, and causality.
I obtained a Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology with the thesis titled “Factorization models with relational and contextual information: Probabilistic factorization, point processes, and neural sequential models” (presentation, full-text), under the supervision of Prof. Helge Langseth and Prof. Heri Ramampiaro. I worked with Poisson-gamma (matrix/tensor) factorization models, Point process models (Hawkes models), and hybrids of neural networks and point process models for recommender systems, as well as prior specification of hierarchical models.
I have an M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (University of Campinas) under the supervision of Prof. Eduardo Valle, with a dissertation titled “Metric space indexing for nearest neighbour search in multimedia context” (slides, full-text). We developed data structures and algorithms for similarity search in general metric spaces using a proposed scheme for locality sensitive-hashing in generic metric spaces.
I have B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Federal University of Espirito Santo. My undergraduate dissertation was on content-based text retrieval using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Vector Space Models. During my bachelor’s degree, I’ve worked also with Classical Mechanics Simulation using Functional Programming Language (Scheme).
My general research interest is focused on designing efficient algorithmic methods for Machine Learning and Information Retrieval problems, including search, inference, and modeling, with a special interest in probabilistic data structures, probabilistic algorithms, and probabilistic models.
Feel free to browse through this website and contact me if you have an interest in anything I’ve been working on. I try (and mostly fail) to update my research blog, discussing new ideas, methods, and related things.
I have also tangent interdisciplinary interests in philosophy, neuroscience (with a growing intersection with my own academic research), meditation, music (self-taught some instruments and do some compositions now and then), economics, human migration, genetics, and the future of humanity (not only from a technical point of view but also political, demographical, cultural and societal). In the back of my mind is some hard question about the emergence of intelligent/conscious behavior, collective decision-making, agency, and complex systems dynamics that potentially can only be addressed through a multi-level analysis of related phenomena.
Eliezer Silva 