About Me

My journey started a long long time ago, I can still remember ♫♪♪... in a place called Morelia, which is located in the central part of Mexico, some hours away from Mexico City and Guadalajara. This gorgeous place is where I grew up.

After high school, I enrolled at the Instituto Tecnológico de Morelia to pursue a bachelors degree on Computer Engineering. I enjoyed very much computer science and engineering, and started to learn languages, kind of as a hobby, and I really liked it, so I learned English, French, German, and had a few lessons of Chinese, Latin, Portuguese, and eventually some other.

After obtaining my bachelors degree I started working super hard but at some point I ended up in Germany pursuing a masters degree on Computational Linguistics at the Saarland University, which pretty much changed my life.

I got a MSc. degree on Computational Linguistics and then (ok, perhaps a little earlier) I realized that I was also interested on the psychological part of linguistics, so I started a PhD on Computational Psycholinguistics. And then, after a very long time, I finished and got my degree (yay!).

After spending a couple of years in the USA as a postdoc at the Applied Cognitive Science Lab of the Penn State University, and a covid-stay in Mexico with my family, I returned to the German lands, where the winters are long and the summers very hot.

Currently, I am a postdoc at the Language and Information Institute of the Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, where I am building computational models of human sentence processing, using Recurrent Neural Networks, and focusing on temporal dependencies.

A more detailed list of my professional interests is: computer science, linguistics, psycholinguistics, machine learning, artificial neural networks, explainable AI, information theory, programming, syntax, semantics, language production/generation, language understanding, among possibly others but these are the most important.

Things that I do outside of work: I like swimming, a lot. I also like dancing. I like music of pretty much all kinds and enjoy movies tarantino-style. I like to cook, I love traveling and enjoy having a beer with good company.

Contact Details

Jesús Calvillo
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf
40225, Düsseldorf
Building 23.21
Germany

jescalvillot(at)gmail.com

Education

PhD. in Computational Psycholinguistics

Saarland University Germany 2014 - 2018

The topic of my dissertation was psycholinguistic computational modeling of sentence production, using recurrent neural networks, while trying to approach the Uniform Information Density Hypothesis, and using distributed semantic representations.

MSc. in Language Science and Technology

Saarland University Germany 2011 - 2013

I obtained a master degree on Computational Linguistics. The topic of my thesis was a statistical syntactic parser that included psycholinguistic measures for syntactic disambiguation. In particular, we introduced a heuristic based on syntactic entropy in order to rerank analyses. An important aspect for me was the combination of statistical with psycholinguistic notions of parsing.

BSc. in Computer Engineering

Technological Institute of Morelia Mexico 2004 - 2009

I obtained my bachelor degree in my home town Morelia. As the final project, I developed a system for the administration of databases that, among other features, permitted the automatic generation of reports using a graphic interface that guided the user through a SQL grammar. I finished this degree with a specialization on Software Engineering.

Work Experience

Language and Information Institute - Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

Postdoctoral Researcher Düsseldorf, Germany 2021 -

I'm currently working to extend the Distributional Formal Semantics framework in order to introduce temporal relations. With the resulting framework, we aim to develop psycholinguistically-plausible neural computational models of sentence processing that can account for temporal event knowledge and aspectual phenomena.

Applied Cognitive Science Lab - Pennsylvania State University

Postdoctoral Researcher State College, PA, USA 2018 - 2020

Development of psychologically plausible models of human language processing, as well as applications for automatic natural language processing. Projects were related to discourse analysis of classroom dialogue, explainable AI, and psycholinguistic analysis of Chinese-English code-switching.

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Research Assistant: Java Development for NLP Saarbrücken, Germany 2013 - 2015

Development of a Java application towards Argumentation Mining in the project ARGUMENTUM. The system was designed from scratch integrating several nlp systems; including pos-tagging, named entity recognition, lemmatization, among others. With these features, an information retrieval system was obtained that takes into account thematic and argumentative patterns during search.

Cluster of Excellence: Multimodal Computing and Interaction

Research Assistant: Python Development for Psycholinguistics Saarbrücken, Germany 2012

Developed a Python tool that interfaces with the Stanford Parser, generating the integration and storage cognitive costs related to each word of a sentence. The objective was to see if there is a correlation between these psycholinguistic measures and fixation times of eye-tracking experimental data.

IBM

Programmer and SysAdmin Guadalajara, Mexico 2011

Developed a Perl-JavaScript tool that generates performance web reports out of log files of storage servers. My area was dedicated to provide technical support service to massive storage servers sold by IBM. This was done performing forensic analysis on the log data sent by the customers as well as System Administration tasks. The created tool provides graphics and statistics that enable a fast performance analysis and problem resolution.

Domain Gurus

SysAdmin and Programmer Morelia, Mexico 2009-2011

Performed Technical Support for 3 datacenters located in San Diego, California. The support was done in situ or remotely, with training in San Diego every 2 or 3 months for 1 month each time. The main language was English given the international customers. The servers were mainly Linux and Windows, but FreeBSD and 3Tera Applogic were also handled. The main tasks were related to connectivity, databases, web programming, DNS, virtualization, web and mail servers, and Cloud Computing.

  • I embrace my desire to... feel the rhythm, to feel connected... enough to step aside and weep like a widow... to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral, to swing on the spiral, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.

    Lateralus, Tool
  • Soy una bala perdida... bala perdida... por la avenida. Me disparó la vida.

    Bala Perdida, Manu Chao
  • Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

    Vincent Van Gogh