Ferran Espuña: Deep Learning Research Engineer, Mathematician and Computer Scientist

About Me

I have a double degree in mathematics and computer science and am currently working in the field of artificial intelligence research. I thoroughly enjoy solving problems of any kind and am very curious, hard-working, and proactive given the right motivations. I work well both independently, as a leader, and as a part of a team.

Contact Info

• Email: ferranespuna@gmail.com
• Location: Barcelona, Spain
• Phone: +34 600 24 69 87

Professional Experience

Barcelona Supercomputing Center | Research Engineer

2023 - Present
As a Deep Learning Research Engineer for Language Technologies, my main work focuses on Large Language Models. So far, my work has involved:

• Building and automating CURATE, a text processing pipeline designed to work in High Performance Computing environments and used to create CATalog, the largest pretraining dataset in Catalan.
• Actively participating in design decisions and writing pretraining scripts for the Salamandra models, a collection of highly multilingual language models pretrained from scratch using the Marenostrum 5 cluster.
• Researching ways to better evaluate the performance of our language models in open generation settings (not multiple choice).
• Opening research lines such as those for alternatives to Transformers (SSMs in particular) and mechanistic interpretability techniques (in particular, Sparse Autoencoders).

Computer Vision Center | Research Intern

2022
Awarded a fully funded research internship at CVC, which also served as an opportunity to develop my Bachelor’s Thesis.

• Research Topic: Application of Topological Data Analysis methods to study the generalization capabilities of neural networks.
• Supervisors: Professor Sergio Escalera (CVC), Professor Carles Casacuberta, and Rubén Ballester.

ChipScope Research Group at UB | Image Processing

2022
Contributed to the European research project ChipScope aimed at creating a high-resolution microscope the size of a computer chip. My work involved:

• Controlling the illumination and camera of the microscope to take image samples from effectively different points of view.
• Aligning and blending the images through computer vision techniques to produce a global view of the samples.
• Implementing wave backpropagation algorithms to remove interference artifacts caused by the small scale of the setup.
• Designing a user interface to make the process user-friendly.

Education

Master’s degree in Advanced Mathematics and Mathematical Engineering | UPC

Expected Graduation: June 2025

• Courses so far: Commutative Algebra, Number Theory, Coding Theory, Cryptography, Combinatorics and Graph Theory.
• Currently working on my master’s thesis on Algorithmic Extremal Graph and Hypergraph Theory.

Double Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science | UB

February 2023

• GPA: 9.0/10
• Achieved honors in courses like Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Distributed Software, Databases, Advanced Algorithms, Numerical Methods, and Differential Equations, among many others.

Publications

A CURATEd CATalog: Rethinking the Extraction of Pretraining Corpora for Mid-Resourced Languages

Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, European Language Resource Association and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

Personal Projects

• Developed a neural network from scratch, enhancing understanding of calculus, linear algebra, and gradient descent.
• Created visualizations for various 2D fractals and physical simulations.
• Designed a framework for 3D visualization of polynomial zeros through raytracing, applying my knowledge of Computer Graphics and Differential Geometry.

Skills

• Programming Languages and Technologies:
  • Python (NumPy, Pandas, TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenCV)
  • NeMo Framework
  • Slurm
  • C/C++
  • Bash
  • Java
  • MySQL
• Languages:
  • Spanish (native)
  • Catalan (native)
  • English (C2 / Proficiency)

Certifications

• Stanford University: Machine Learning Specialization
• IELTS Academic: 8.5/9 overall band score
• Driver’s License: B permit in Spain