Dev Profile

I'm a Data Scientist and Software developer. My interests include Artificial Inteligence(AI) in general, with focus on Machine Learning, Unsupervised, Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning. My track record also includes implementations related to Finance and Investing. I have experience in major areas of Software Engineering, including documentation, testing, front and back-end development.

Academic Profile

I was previously a PhD Student at the University of Alberta, where I studied under, the equally brilliant, Joerg Sander and Eleni Stroulia. I have completed coursework but decided to not write a thesis. I've completed two master degrees, both in the field of Computer Science with focus on distinct areas of Artificial Intelligence. The first with focus on the development of game agents and the second on unsupervised learning and data mining. I've published papers, books and bookchapters, see my Google Scholar for detailed information.

I am broadly interested in Artificial Intelligence with focus on data driven approaches. My research covered the detection, representation and evaluation of "change" in data. That means that I am curious about:

  • Whether the characteristics of the data and/or its data points are different at different points in time; (Change, as the result)
  • The process that makes data characteristics be different at different time points (Change, as in, the process of change).

I am also curious about: Financial Machine Learning, Ethics, Democracy and Philosophy.

In the past I did research on game AI, including intelligent agents, dynamic difficulty adjustment, and human-computer interaction.

Highlights

  • I will speak the the UN Habitas meeting as part of a panel of experts in AI.
  • I was one of a few researchers that took part on the evaluation of DALL-E-2 with OpenAI
  • I contribute(d) and/or maintain(ed) open source, including scholarly, yfinance, Eiten, and Freqtrade
  • I've done (and sometimes still do) reverse engineering of APIs and closed source code
  • My favourite technologies/languages are Python and Javascript

A third person summary

Victor is a PhD student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Dr. Joerg Sander and Dr. Eleni Stroulia. His research lies broadly in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on detection of Change in Data Mining and Machine Learning. Victor is also interested in: Financial Machine Learning, Time-Series Analysis, Ethics, Fairness and Bias in Machine Learning.

He holds a M.Sc. in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, a M. Sc. in Computer Science from UFMG and a degree in Game Development from PUC Minas. At the University of Alberta, he was supervised by Dr. Joerg Sander, under whom he researched Unsupervised Learning and Cluster Evolution. At UFMG he was supervised by Dr. Luiz Chaimowicz, under whom he researched Intelligent Agents, with a special focus on Computer Games. He has published both journal and conference papers as well as a book and book chapters.

Social Networks

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vnasilva/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vnasilva

Personal Website (Quite Outdated): https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~vsilva/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?hl=en&user=7Jl3PIoAAAAJ