About me

I’m a third year Computer Science Ph.D. student at MIT, advised by Martin Rinard.

Before coming here, I completed my M.S. in Computer Science at NYU, where I worked with Dennis Shasha on implementing AQuery, an optimizing compiler for order-related database queries. Before that, I worked for Morgan Stanley as part of the housing and mortgage research group. I graduated with a B.A. in Economics from University of Pennsylvania in 2011. I’m originally from San José, Costa Rica.

My main research interests center around programming languages, databases, and data science. I’m particularly interested in applying programming language techniques to improve the way we do work in the latter two areas.

These interests include directions such as:

• optimization: how can we optimize data analysis-related programming tasks and systems? I particularly like the idea of optimizations that stem from a key insight in the way we use and think about data, rather than necessarily focusing on optimization from a systems-perspective. Our recent work on working with missing data is one such example.
• user experience/accessibility: how can we make programming for data analysis easier and accessible to non-experts? An increasingly large portion of the data-science community have domain expertise in areas outside of computer science and programming. I believe we are responsible for producing and improving tools that allow them to be productive without getting mired in details they may not be interested in.
• automation: how can we learn useful patterns in programming for data analysis and automate them to produce more robust programs/applications? Many tasks related to data analysis are tedious, repetitive, and error-prone. We should look for opportunities to remove human interaction from these and allow experts to focus on the core of their problems.

I’ve also worked on an assortment of other projects, such as using iOS data to customize image compression for users with color vision deficiencies, and performing large-scale color vision analysis across different countries.