Dr Leonel Aguilar is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in applied artificial intelligence at the Data Science, Data Systems, & Data Services laboratory (DS3) at ETH Zurich. Previously, he has held postdoctoral appointments at the Cognitive Science group (COG) and the Computational Social Science group (COSS) at ETH Zurich and the research centre for Large-​Scale Earthquake, Tsunami and Disaster (LsETD, now CESERI) at the Earthquake Research Institute of the University of Tokyo, Japan. Dr Aguilar obtained his PhD in the Computational Science and High-​Performance Computing Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Previously, he held a principal lecturer appointment at the Universidad del Valle, Guatemala, in both the mathematics and civil engineering departments.

Dr Aguilar’s research focuses on modelling, simulating and analysing social phenomena and the development and deployment of AI/ML-based systems to support this. He has built systems to analyse AI-driven software agents in artificial worlds in VR (virtual reality) experiments to quantify human behaviour. Dr Aguilar has contributed to systems that make ML (machine learning) more accessible for non-experts while ensuring best practices. In this context, he has contributed to Easeml/AutoML, an automatic ML system that he has helped to integrate into the Swiss Data Science Center’s Renku data science service. He has also contributed to Easeml/CI&CD, a system for continuously integrating and delivering ML models.