Thiago Vallin Spina
Senior Research Software Engineer
About
Thiago Vallin Spina is a Senior Research Software Engineer of the Catalyst Lab of Microsoft Research. He joined Microsoft in 2021 and has since worked on a variety of research projects:
- Real-time 3D Telecommunications devoted to Telemedicine. We facilitated specialized healthcare access in reconstructive plastic surgery to underserved communities in Ghana and Scotland.
- Paralinguistic analysis from audio and video to enrich human-LLM interactions (Project Rumi). Can LLMs interpret the user’s facial expressions and tone when chatting with them?
- Development of Small Foundation Models (SFMs) for non-typical data modalities, such SFMs for electric power grid topology estimation and power flow studies (Project GridFM). We aim to improve datacenter site selection and operational decision-making in electric networks.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Computing of the University of Campinas in Brazil (2015). His research focuses on Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence, with a special interest in the creation of fast algorithms using High-Performance Computing techniques, such as multi-node/multi-GPU programming, to tackle challenging research problems.