About me

Hi! My name is Javier (pronounced like ha-bee-air). I am a fourth year PhD Candidate in the Signal and Image Processing & Machine Learning (SIPML) track of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at the University of Michigan. I am co-advised by Laura Balzano and Jeffrey Fessler. I collaborate with Scott Peltier from the Biomedical Engineering (BME) department. I am fortunate to be partially supported by the Rackham Merit Fellowship. My research interests are topics such as signal/image processing, machine learning, deep learning, medical imaging, optimization, and applied math.

My research so far focuses on the following:

  • Designing machine learning algorithms to better handle heteroscedastic (noisy) data distributions such as:
    • Subspace basis estimation of low-rank data with an improved PCA-like algorithm (ALPCAH)
    • Unsupervised learning of low-rank data clusters with an improved “K-means” style algorithm (ALPCAHUS)
  • Alzheimer’s disease in resting state / task-based functional MRI data with novel deep learning approaches such as:
    • Learning spatial-temporal 4D kernels to handle 4D spatial-temporal rs-fMRI data for disease diagnosis (4D CNN - ISMRM25)
    • Learning temporal dynamics of BOLD timeseries data for behavior score regression and outlier detection of non-healthy subgroups (ongoing)
  • Miscellaneous works:
    • Smooth optimization algorithms for global and locally low-rank regularizers (under review)
    • Deep unsupervised support vector machines (SVMs) for imbalanced data clusters (ongoing)

In the navigation bar above, I have various sections available ranging from:

  1. Publications = Publications and preprints
  2. Talks = Talks/Presentations over the years at various academic groups/conferences
  3. Teaching/Awards = Teaching experience and academic awards received over the years
  4. Industry = Industry experience and portfolio
  5. Grad Work = Graduate portfolio and projects
  6. Undergrad Work = Undergraduate portfolio and projects
  7. Certs = Certifications ranging from IT, 3D mechanical design, and more
  8. CV = A one page resume and university transcripts