Bio

I am Bernardo from Mexico city. My main goal these days is to use statistics and engineering to understand social phoenomena and be able to generate answers to some of the problems we face as a society. I became interested in this, when I had the opportunity to lead projects to understand the psychometric profile of school drop-outs with a large high-school system, and a university in Mexico. The goal was to understand why students abandoned school, and what the school can do to make everyone find a place in education. After that I have worked on projects related to education for many years, and now in my PhD I am also co-leading a project that connects university students with elementary school students to provide tutoring.



Before starting my PhD, I co-founded a start up in Mexico (later we expanded to Chile) that provided psychometric tests to schools for career counseling. We did more than 25k tests in the 5 years I was there, and I enjoyed finding projects to use the data to understand problems in Education, such as school abandonment. I also did my BA in Economics and was fortunate to be advised by Enrique Seira, with whom I worked on applied econometrics projects, including my thesis which tried to overcome selection bias to be able to compare public and private education in Mexico. After, I did my masters in Computer Science, and was fortunately advised by Alejandro Noriega and we worked on projects investigating algorithmic fairness and worked along the Colombian government on their system to target social programs (SISBEN IV)



Today, I am advised and mentored by Esteban Moro, Anette Hosoi, Munther Dahleh, Sandy Pentland, and Rich Fletcher. Being in an institute for my PhD (The IDSS of MIT) I am glad to have the advantage to work with a variety of researchers to tackle interdisciplinary problems from multiple perspectives. Mentored by Esteban Moro and Sandy Pentland, I am currently working on social data problems, notably a project understanding how food environments influence our decisions. Mentored by Anette Hosoi and Munther Dahleh I am working on inference projects, addressing finding causality in problems with incomplete labels. Mentored by professor Rich Fletcher I have worked on projects using mobile technologies for health. With this great combination, I hope to be able to do projects that address social questions and generate solutions using engineering and statistics.



In my free time I enjoy playing/learning the guitar, attending movie festivals and being with my friends. Reach out to talk about any of those, or the research projects! I think that teams and collaborations are essential to creating solutions to social phoenomena.



Projects

These are some of my projects. This section is still in progress.

Work with Salome Aguilar, Jimena Aguilar, Sebastian Guevara and Cimenna Chao. The program connects (online) kids with university students as tutors in groups of 5 kids with the goal of answering research questions as well as providing education in Mexico.
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We are interested in understanding how the optimal group composition is affected by the emotional abilities of kids and their capacity to cooperate.
While we have all done many diverse tasks, my main work has been thinking and creating an infrastructure to train tutors and communicate with all participants in the program. Check it out here (you can use 1234567899 to try it)
Work with Alejandro Noriega, Michiel Bakker and Sandy Pentland where we present a new algorithm that can be used to ensure making select fairness metrics hold when collecting information to make estimations. Download it here
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While I am not actively working on fairness currently, I'm happy talking about it if you want to discuss it!
In this work I am mentored by Esteban Moro, and it is joint work with Abigail Horn, Kayla de la Haye, Brooke Bell, Mohsen Bahrami, Burcin Bozkaya and Sandy Pentland.
Public work is pending, we will present a poster in this conference , and I'll update this website when it's possible. For now, what we are trying to do is use mobility data to find whether food environment affects our eating habit, and how.