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I'm a Ph.D. in Robotics from the Chestek Lab at University of Michigan. During my Ph.D., I worked on brain-machine interfaces for finger movement decoding. I did my undergrad in Chile, majoring in robotics and computer science, and love working on projects that can improve people's lives through robotics. I'm currently doing a postdoc at the Chestek Lab, working on improving continuous decoding of EMG signals from upper and lower limb amputees for prosthetic control.
- Weakly supervised learning for continuous prosthetic control: I work with upper and lower limb amputees, trying to improve continuous decoding of finger and leg kinematics from implanted EMG signals. With these participants, we do not have access to the ground truth for training machine-learning models, so we must be creative in how we prompt the user and how we handle the collected data. Currently working on strategies that will help our models be invariant to bad continuous labels. The way we have approached this problem has been through testing strategies on our monkeys, messing up their (actual ground truth) data in specific ways, and figuring out what helps for the human participants.
- Exploring the trade-off between deep-learning and explainable models for brain-machine interfaces (NeurIPS 2024, first author, available here).
- Exploring Synergies in Brain-Machine Interfaces: Compression vs. Performance (bioRxiv 2024, first author, available here. Currently under review at the Journal of Neural Engineering.
- Reliability and Minimal Detectable Change of Stiffness and Other Mechanical Properties of the Ankle Joint in Standing and Walking (2023, Gait & Posture, first author, available here)
- Balancing Memorization and Generalization in RNNs for High Performance Brain-Machine Interfaces (2023, NeurIPS, third author, available here)
- Error detection and correction in intracortical brain–machine interfaces controlling two finger groups (2023, Journal of Neural Engineering, fifth author, available here)
- Breaking the barriers to designing online experiments: A novel open-source platform for supporting procedural skill learning experiments (2023, Computers in Biology and Medicine, first author, available here)
- High Five: we created an open-source myoelectric upper-limb prosthesis fully made in Chile. The CAD and PCB designs are available online, as is all the code necessary to replicate the project. Look here and here for some awards we received for this project.
- Workshop on neurotechnology at UCSD, 2023: developed workshop to teach neurotechnology tools, such as feature extraction from ephys recordings and decoding models. We developed multiple Jupyter notebooks to walk the students through the most important concepts.
- Languages: Python, C, C++, Matlab
- Tools: ROS, LCM, Git, Linux, real-time systems, Redis