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About

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Bio #

I am Eliezer de Souza da Silva, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in Data Science, Machine Learning, Generative Models, and Causality. Currently, I am working at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), School of Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I have experience in software development and industrial projects as a software engineer, research scientist, and data scientist.

I hold a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from NTNU, Norway, where I completed my thesis titled “Factorization Models with Relational and Contextual Information.” I also earned an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UNICAMP, Brazil, with a dissertation on “Metric Space Indexing for Nearest Neighbor Search in Multimedia Context.” My academic journey began with a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from UFES, Brazil.

My research focuses on developing advanced probabilistic models to help us answer questions across various scientific domains. My expertise lies in using probabilistic reasoning to integrate uncertainty measures into machine learning models, seeking to increase the robustness and trustworthiness of AI systems. I have worked on probabilistic machine learning, Bayesian statistics, causal discovery, and deep learning, with applications in information retrieval, recommender systems, NLP, time series, physical simulations, and others.

Currently, I am studying and developing generative models for amortized inference, focusing on Generative Flow Networks. This work was produced with Prof. Diego Mesquita while being part of the Green AI Lab.

In addition to my research, I am passionate about education and mentoring. I have designed and delivered course materials, graded coursework and master theses, and mentored B.Sc. and M.Sc. students in ML/AI and applied mathematics. I have also been instrumental in organizing and leading educational initiatives such as the Nordic and Tropical Probabilistic AI School, which aims to bring advanced AI education to diverse audiences.

Outside academia, I enjoy playing music and composition, attending cultural events, traveling, running, playing basketball, practicing meditation, and exploring nature. I usually do those things with my son, friends, and sometimes strangers. I grew up in multiple countries and value cultural exchanges. I am fluent in Portuguese, English, and Cape Verdean Creole and have basic to intermediate knowledge of French and Spanish.

For a comprehensive overview of my professional journey, including my publications and detailed academic and industry experiences, please refer to my full CV here.

With Antonio Gois and Juan Ramirez at the Tropical Probabilistic AI School 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Contact #

Education #

Selected Works #

  • Analyzing GFlowNets: Stability, Expressiveness, and Assessment. In ICML 2024 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling (non-archival workshop), 2024. Tiago da Silva, Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Rodrigo Barreto Alves, Luiz Max Carvalho, Amauri H Souza, Samuel Kaski, Vikas Garg, and Diego Mesquita.

  • Prior Specification for Bayesian Matrix Factorization via Prior Predictive Matching. Journal of Machine Learning Research 24 (2023). Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Tomasz Kuśmierczyk, Marcelo Hartmann, and Arto Klami.

  • Time is of the Essence: A Joint Hierarchical RNN and Point Process Model for Time and Item Predictions. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2019. Bjørnar Vassøy, Massimiliano Ruocco, Eliezer de Souza da Silva, and Erlend Aune.

  • Content-Based Social Recommendation with Poisson Matrix Factorization. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD), 2017. Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Helge Langseth, and Heri Ramampiaro.

  • Large-Scale Distributed Locality-Sensitive Hashing for General Metric Data. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP), 2014. Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Thiago S.F.X. Teixeira, George Teodoro, and Eduardo Valle.

Hobbies #

  • 🎶 Music playing and composition
  • 🏃 Running
  • 🏀 Basketball
  • 🧘 Meditation
  • 🌳 Walks and exploring nature

For more details, download my full CV here.