5 Minutes with Prof. Pablo A. Estevez

IEEE CIS Student Activities Subcommittee invites you to get to know the pioneers and experts in the Computational Intelligence. This month "5 minutes with..." focuses on Past President of the IEEE CIS, Prof. Pablo A. Estevez. What is your title, full name, and place of work? Pablo A. Estevez, Professor (University of Chile) and Associate Researcher (Millennium Institute of Astrophysics), Chile What grade of member in CIS are you? Fellow member How long have you been a member of CIS? Since its inception One reason why you are a member of CIS It is such a fun, exciting research topics and wonderful people What was you service pathway in the Computational Intelligence Society? Chapter chair, DLP chair, ADCOM member at large, VP Members Activities, President Can you share with us one success story that will motivate young members and provide useful guidelines for their careers? It was not until 2009 that I had my first approach to astronomy and it was absolutely by chance. I went to a symposium in southern Chile, where Pavlos Protopapas, an astronomer from Harvard gave a talk on machine learning applications to astronomy. That was an Eureka moment for me, since I thought I could apply my research to this science. Shortly after, Pablo Huijse (a graduate student at that time) and Pablo Zegers (Universidad de Los Andes) joined our team. From that moment on we were known world-wide as “The Pablos”. Later a fifth collaborator, Prof. Jose Príncipe, University of Florida, made us reconsider our team name to P4J: “four Pablos and one Jose”. In fact, currently there is a software code called P4J, result of this productive collaboration and which contains the algorithms created by our team to detect periods is stellar time series https://github.com/phuijse/P4J.