Xavier F. C. Sánchez Díaz

PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Biography

PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. My research interests include analysis of evolutionary computation for multimodal optimisation, as well as fitness landscape analysis. I enjoy puzzles, maths, nature and music. Lately I have been working on a playground for evolutionary computation in Julia.

I was previously a research associate at the Research Group with Strategic Focus in Intelligent Systems of Tecnológico de Monterrey, studying evolutionary computation, hyper-heuristics and constraint satisfaction. I was also an associate lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, where I was teaching automata theory, discrete maths, and programming languages.

I spent some time as research assistant and lead developer at the Department of Mathematics at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where I implemented online evaluations for maths MOOCs Matemáticas y Movimiento and El Cálculo, among many other projects focusing on mathematics education.

Interests

Evolutionary Computation
Multimodal Optimisation
Landscape Analysis
Artificial Intelligence

Education

PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Current
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
MSc in Intelligent Systems, 2017
Tecnológico de Monterrey
BSc in Software Engineering, 2015
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León

Projects

EvoLP.jl

EvoLP is a playground for evolutionary computation in Julia. It provides a set of predefined building blocks that can be coupled together to quickly generate evolutionary computation solvers and compute statistics for a variety of optimisation tasks, including discrete, continuous and combinatorial optimisation.

Documenting Python code for your research

Trustworthy research is achieved through open, explainable and reproducible experiments. For this, testing and documentation are crucial. Learn about documenting your Python code.

Introduction to Hyper-heuristics

Hyper-heuristics Hyper-heuristics can be seen as “algorithms to select or generate new algorithms”. They can be used to find feasible or approximate solutions for NP-hard optimisation problems. Please feel free to look at the further reading section in the slides and hit me up if you have any questions.

Evolutionary Computation in Python

Please see the slides for a more detailed explanation. DEAP Short Tutorial DEAP (Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms for Python) is a Python module which provides you with tools to easily implement evolutionary computation algorithms.

Mathjax Viewer

A simple webpage to typeset equations in LaTeX using MathJax. Useful to practise and learn common LaTeX commands and symbols, as you can see both results and the commands side by side.

Very basics of Git

A very brief and visual introduction to the Git methodology, from a more academic point of view. Highly recommended to understand how Git works and how it could help in both your personal or collaborative projects.

Teaching

Autumn ‘24

Xavier F. C. Sánchez Díaz

Last updated on Jul 4, 2024 NTNU, Teaching

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Autumn 2024 Along with Pinar Özturk, I am co-lecturing TD4136 — Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. I am also the assignment coordinator. For more information, please check the corresponding course page.

Recent Blog Posts

Xavier F. C. Sánchez Díaz

Last updated on Jun 20, 2023 6 min read EvoLP.jl

Benchmarking solver implementations in EvoLP.jl v1.1

This notebook showcases how the solver implementations of EvoLP 1.1 and 1.0 compare in terms of runtime.

Xavier F. C. Sánchez Díaz

Last updated on Jun 27, 2022 0 min read

Basic Machine Learning in Julia with MLJ

A nice and descriptive tutorial on the basics of ML with Julia

Xavier F. C. Sánchez Díaz

Last updated on Nov 12, 2020 3 min read

On Smart Pointers and Memory Management

Yesterday, I came across a bug1 in one of the snippets we used for graphs in the Data Structures and Algorithms course. Under very specific conditions, the program crashed with a generic bad_alloc error while everything was logically sound.

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