Pedro Colón-Hernández
I am a final year Ph.D. student that works on making technology more understandable and usable for everyone through conversational agents. I have experience in hardware and software systems, but my current specialty is on conversational AI and NLP. In my free time I do landscape photography.
Experience
Graduate Research Assistant
Working on the development of intelligent assistants that can browse for information, compile it into a usable source, and make inferences from it. The assistant will be able to guide users along tasks, and handle any problems that they encounter along the way.
Graduate Prototyping Intern
Worked on prototyping of dictation experiences and Siri capabilities.
MIT Summer Research Program - Pod Leader
Supervised 10 undergraduate students for the summer, coordinated weekly activities with them, checked in on them regularly to see how their experience at the Institute had been, and helped review their written works (statements of objectives, posters, etc.)
Graduate Diversity Ambassador
Have participated and helped with diversity recruiting initiatives at the Institute. My page
Graduate Prototyping Intern
Design and development of conversational experiences for Siri.
Sagrado-MIT Neuroscience Pre-college Program
Helped review students applications to the program, and in October of 2020 mentored 1 student on his journey to college.
Graduate Prototyping Intern
Developed prototyping tools to facilitate conversational experience design.
- Web tool development
- Conversational design pattern development
AI Latin American SumMIT - Coordinator
Helped coordinate the first ever AI Latin American SumMIT at MIT to discuss AI, its potential effect in Latin America, and developments in the region related to AI. We no longer host the page, but UNESCO has an overview
Master's Thesis
Worked on developing an object detection wearable that uses a sensor fusion (Radar, spectrometers, broadband camera) to identify objects and relay, through conversations with an intelligent agent, relevant information.
Summer Graduate Research Intern
Worked on fuzzing commercial avionics through various means (grammar, mixing and matching, manually constructed input). Did some C++ and Python tool development, and made a system to automate the fuzzing of avionics.
Graduate Research Assistant
Worked on fuzzing commercial avionics through various means (grammar, mixing and matching, manually constructed input). Did some C++ and Python tool development, and made a system to automate the fuzzing of avionics.
MIT Media Lab SOS Program
Helped students review their application materials and offered feedback and places to improve in it.
Projects (Under Development)
Dynamic Assistants
Synonymy and Antonymy in Hinting
Empathic Similarity
Commonsense Dialogic Questions For a Triadic Dialogic Storytelling System
Hover
Where's Pedro?
Holobits
Data Manipulator
Xeon Phi Card Management Tools
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
GPA: 5.00/5.00
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
GPA: 5.00/5.00
University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
GPA: 3.90/4.00
Skills
Interests
Apart from being an engineer, I enjoy photography, long walks, and reading. In the winter, I am a polar bear. During the summer, I enjoy going to the beach.
When forced indoors, I follow a number of sci-fi and fantasy genre movies and television shows, I am an aspiring chef, and I spend a large amount of my free time exploring the latest technology advancements.
Awards & Certifications
- Graduate Education for Minorities (GEM) Fellowship Recipient - 2016
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Recipient - 2016
- Certified Computer Engineer in Training (EIT) in Puerto Rico - 2016
- Passed the Computer Engineering Professional Engineer exam in Puerto Rico - 2016
- Approved the Computer Engineer Professional Engineering (PE) Exam - 2016