Hi! I am Denis, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, in the School of Engineering at PUC Chile. I am principal researcher at the National Center of Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) as well as principal research at the Millenium Institute for Intelligent Healthcare Engineering (iHealth). I am also adjunct researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research on Fundamentals of Data. I hold a professional title of Civil Engineer in Informatics in 2004 from UACh, Valdivia, Chile; and a Ph.D. in Information Science from University of Pittsburgh, USA, advised by Professor Peter Brusilovsky. I earned a Fulbright scholarship to pursue my PhD studies between 2008-2013.

My research interests are Recommender Systems, Intelligent User Interfaces, Applications of Machine Learning (Healthcare, Creative AI) and Information Visualization and I am currently leading the Human-centered AI and Visualization (HAIVis) research group as well as co-leading the CreativAI Lab with professor Rodrigo Cádiz. I am also Faculty member of the PUC IA Lab.
If you are interested on these topics and want to work under my supervision as Master or PhD student, send me an e-mail to dparra[at]ing[dot]puc[dot]cl.

Selected Projects

Automatic Radiology Report Generation from Chest X-rays

Pino et al, MICCAI 2021, Clinically Correct Report Generation from Chest X-Rays Using Templates	Messina et al, MedNeurips 2022, Two-stage Conditional Chest X-ray Radiology Report Generation
CNN-TRG [conf]	CRG [conf]
A Survey on Deep Learning for Automatic Generation of Radiological Reports (*for a pre-print of this article, check this ArXiv link)
Slides: Evaluation of radiological report generation [pdf]	Slides: Visual, language and mutimodal models for radiological report generation [pdf]

Intelligent User Interfaces for Recommendation Systems


TalkExplorer [conf][journal][demo]	SetFusion [conf][journal][video] [slides]	Moodplay [conf] [video]
A Survey on Interactive Recommender Systems
*for pre-prints of these articles, check my publications page

News

April 2023-September 2023 On sabbatical leave, I'm spending these 6 months at KU Leuven in Belgium researching on XAI and text report generation from medical images.

November 2022 I am attending Neurips conference, where Pablo Messina, the PhD student I co-supervise at PUC Chile with my colleague Alvaro Soto, will present his article on conditional report generation from medical images at the MedNeurips Workshop.

September 2022 Invited talk as keynote speaker at IntRS workshop co-located at RecSys 2022.

March 2022 I am (virtually) attending the ACM IUI 2022 conference in Finland. We have a paper in collaboration with Brazilian researchers, Balby Marinho et al. "Similarity-Based Explanations meet Matrix Factorization via Structure-Preserving Embeddings". I will also give and invited talk at the workshop APEx-UI: Adaptive and Personalised Explainable User Interfaces, the title of my talk is "From Transparency and Users' Control in Recommender System Interfaces to Guidelines for Visual XAI".

April 2021 We have launching the website of our research group on Human-centered AI and Visualization (HAIVis) and we are teaching a Tutorial on Deep Learning Methods for Visual Recommender Systems at the ACM IUI conference 2021.

August 2019 I have been officially promoted to Associate Professor at PUC Chile!

March 2019 I am attending the 24th ACM IUI conference in Los Angeles, CA, USA. We are presenting the paper "The Effect of Explanations and Algorithmic Accuracy on Visual Recommender Systems of Artistic Images," where we conduct a user study in order to measure and synthesize the impact of several aspects (algorithm, type of explanation, user expertise) upon different dimensions of the UX with an art recommender systems (perception of relevance, trust, understandability, etc.) [paper]

January 2019 Three of my master students successfully defended their theses: Mar\'ia Fernanda Sep\'ulveda, Vicente Dominguez and Pablo Messina. Kudos for them! Another student, Jorge Schellman, is defending in 2 days, hopefully he does well too.

October 2018 I attended the ACM RecSys 2018 conference in Vancouver, Canada. We presented 2 papers in co-located workshops, one at RecSysKTL by del Río et al. "Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better … for Image Recommendation?"[paper][slides], and another one at the IntRS workshop by Dominguez et al. "Towards Explanations for Visual Recommender Systems of Artistic Images" [paper]

...older news

Latest Publications

An Interactive Relevance Feedback Interface for Evidence-Based Health Care. Donoso-Guzman, I.; and Parra, D. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Intelligent User interfaces, 2018. [paper pdf]

Learning to Leverage Microblog Information for QA Retrieval. Herrera, J.; Poblete, B.; and Parra, D. In Proceedings of the European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2018. [paper pdf]

CNVis: A Web-Based Visual Analytics Tool for Exploring Conference Navigator Data. Bailey, S. M.; Wei, J. A.; Wang, C.; Parra, D.; and Brusilovsky, P. In IS&T Electronic Imaging 2018 Symposium , 2018. [paper pdf]

Students

PhD

Manuela Garretón

Andrés Carvallo

MSc

Jorge Schellman

Pablo Messina

Vicente Domínguez

María Fernanda Sepúlveda

Lukas Svicarovic

Manuel Cartagena (co-advised with Prof. Hans Lobel)

Antonio Ossa (co-advised with Prof. Hans Lobel)

Alumni

Ivania Donoso, Eng. MSc (now at Conversica)

Maribel Alvarado, MPGI MSc (now at Bibliotecas UC)

Teaching

Graduate

Second Semester 2018: Recommender Systems
Second Semester 2017: Recommender Systems
Second Semester 2016: Recommender Systems
Second Semester 2015: Recommender Systems.
First Semester 2015: Data Mining (MPGI Master Program )
Second Semester 2014: Recommender Systems (CS Master Program). The page for this class is here
First Semester 2014: Data Mining (MPGI Master Program )

Undergraduate

Second Semester 2018: Information Visualization.
First Semester 2018: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
Second Semester 2017: Information Visualization.
First Semester 2017: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
First & Second Semester 2016: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
First & Second Semester 2015: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
First & Second Semester 2014: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.

Academic Service

Workshop Organization

Journal Reviews

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
ACM TiiS (distinguished reviewer)
Interacting with Computers, Oxford University Press
Computer Communications, Elsevier
Social Network Analysis and Mining, Springer
Knowledge-Based Systems, Elsevier

Conference Reviews

2018: WWW, RecSys, UMAP, IUI
2017: WWW, RecSys, IUI
WWW 2016 (Web Science Track)
ACM Conference in Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2016
ACM RecSys 2015 (Posters and Demos)
CIKM 2015
I-KNOW 2015
RDSM 2015 Workshop, collocated at WWW 2015
MSM 2015 Workshop, collocated at WWW 2015
VISLA 2015 Workshop, collocated at LAK 2015
Web Science Track at WWW 2015
ACM CHI 2015
I-KNOW 2014
Web Science Track at WWW 2014
SocialCom 2014
ACM Hypertext 2014
LiUD 2014 Workshop, collocated at UMAP 2014
MSM 2014 Workshop, collocated at WWW 2014
I-KNOW 2013
Springer Volume on RecSys for TEL, 2013
EDM 2012
CARS 2012 Workshop (co-located with Recsys 2012)
RecSys, 2010
Web Intelligence Conference, 2011
Web Intelligence Conference, 2009