Ferran Espuna Bertomeu

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Biography

I was born and raised in Barcelona, where I still live. When I finished high school in 2017, I decided to pursue a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science at Universitat de Barcelona, which I finished in 2023.

During the spring of 2022 I did an internship at University of Barcelona, in collaboration with the ChipScope is an European research project with the aim of creating a high-resolution microscope the size of a computer chip. I Used computer vision techniques together with knowledge of the mechanism of the microscope in order to stitch images taken from different viewpoints together and merge their information. Then I implemented and used back-propagation algorithms to reconstruct the original sample from images that present interference artifacts (or were unintelligible) due to the small scale of the measurements.

I was awarded with the 2022 internship at CVC which consisted in doing a fully funded research project with the help of a tutor in this institution. My project (which was also final dissertation for both of my degrees) dealt with the application of topological methods to study the generalization capabilities of neural networks. My supervisors were Professor Sergio Escalera, a researcher at CVC; and Professor Carles Casacuberta and Rubén Ballester, who already have numerous publications on the matter.
 

Since I completed my undergraduate studies I started working as a Research Engineer for Language Technologies in this research center. My main work there so far has been the preparation of datasets for and training of large language models (both generative and predictive) using the Transformer architecture. As part of this project, I helped develop a data processing pipeline for the use case of mid-resourced languages (in our case, Catalan) in HPC environments. This culminated in the pubilication of "A CURATEd CATalog: Rethinking the Extraction of Pretraining Corpora for Mid-Resourced Languages" in LREC-Coling 2023.

I am currently enrolled at the Master in Advanced Mathematics and Mathematical Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

Education

  • I  pursued a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science at Universitat de Barcelona from 2017 to 2023.
  • I am currently enrolled at the Master in Advanced Mathematics and Mathematical Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.