About me

Juan Casanova

(This page was last updated on 01/07/2023)

Professional and academic life

I am an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. I have a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Though I would claim this is a shallow description of my person. Some important keywords that my life, personality and plans revolve around: Videogames, artificial intelligence, academy, mental health, maths, software development.

Between 2009 and 2015, I studied to obtain a double degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Meanwhile, and starting in late 2011, I entered the professional software development world, working for several companies where I have performed all kinds of software development and IT related tasks (programming, software analysis and design, system and database administration, research and development, new technology development, testing and optimization, methodology development, employee formation tasks...). At the same time, I initiated work on academic research with professors at university (precisely, theoretical mathematical work on computability theory). This resulted in some mathematical results which we tried to publish but unfortunately weren't able to due to, mostly, our limited background in related topics which made our work hard to connect to existing work.

In 2016 I moved to Edinburgh where I started a fully funded MSc + PhD programme at University of Edinburgh. I finished my MSc with distinction in 2017, and continued on to my PhD, which after some challenges, was completed in early 2023. The particular project of the PhD is called "Faulty Ontology Detection and Repair", under the supervision of Alan Bundy and Perdita Stevens, and relates to the development of theory and techniques for automatically detecting faults in ontologies (also sometimes referred to as knowledge graphs). You can read more details on this page. The PhD mainly consisted in the development of a conceptual framework for automated detection of semantic patterns in ontologies, that relies on theoretical developments in the form of an automated theorem proving algorithm (which we call Minimal Commitment Resolution for Existential Second-Order Query Logic), together with a set of formalized fault patterns inspired by a wide range of previously existing literature, used to produce an automated and generic way of detecting patterns within a logical knowledge base. Unfortunately, the implementation of this approach encountered major challenges, mainly in the shape of computational performance/feasibility issues. However, we consider understanding these challenges and developing the underlying theory major contributions of the thesis.

At the same time, and since September 2020, I have been working as an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, as part of the Graduate Apprenticeship in Data Science team. In this position, I have fully developed and taught courses from the ground up, including Databases, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction and Networking, among others. I have also acted as a close Personal Tutor for Graduate Apprentices, and participated in the shaping of the degree and other programmes and aspects of the academic landscape surrounding my work. I have always liked teaching but this experience has reinforced this feeling in me and I consider teaching a very adequate profession for myself.

Personality

I would describe myself as a very curious, analytic, extremely sincere and always active person. Intensity, in one of its many meanings, is definitely an adequate adjective for me. I love understanding things, solving complex problems and learning. I consider self-awareness very important and thus I pay much attention to my self-understanding.

As a consequence of my personality traits I also dedicate a relevant portion of my time and energy to try to understand the economical and sociological context in which we live and attempt to live a sustainable life in all its senses, while also giving importance to the task of keeping the discussion active and the information flow healthy in our society. While I am not directly engaged in politics or in group activism (for several reasons ranging from social awkwardness to principled disagreements with major groups and lack of time and energy), some easily noticeable aspects of my personality in this regard are my attempt to reduce meat consumption, my very detailed political views (e.g. huge advocate of socialistic measures, big critic of intellectual property, concerned about the long-standing taboos around sexuality, mild activism on awareness of unusual sleeping schedules and their relation to the flexibility of work and society) or my principled reluctance to work for large corporations.

My main objective is enjoying what I do, which I usually achieve by pursuing interesting, difficult and complex goals. I am always doing something which I find fun or interesting, but I prefer big projects over small toys, and as such I pay a great deal of attention to mid and long-term planning. However, I try to avoid stress and overloading myself whenever it is possible, as I feel it serves no purpose, and tends to produce kickback effects for me. I pay great respect to each person's time and energy limits, including my own. Overall, I tend to prioritize activities which I believe will broaden my knowledge and understanding of reality.

As for many (or most) people, my personality and life has undergone a gradual change from my late teenage and young adult years, and an expansion in some very important senses for me, which I have not mentioned yet, but which I feel deserve (at least) a paragraph. This comes mainly from understanding what made me feel bad about my life and where those feelings come from, and trying to put measures to learn to live around these issues better. A basic acknowledgement that I was a very anxious person led to considering possible personality disorders, challenging core beliefs that were holding me back and behaviours and attitudes that were hurting me. This has of course come with the help of people including (but definitely not limited to) therapists, partners and friends. An important part (for me) of this evolution has been the ability to fully explore my sexuality in ways that I always wanted to but wasn't able to. I am a very sexual, polyamorous person. I believe I am bisexual (as I've had satisfactory experiences with different genders), though I seem to have a primarily heterosexual inclination. Intense relationships are a fundamental part of my life, and I want them to continue being. I've had several very important partners in my life (in many cases in overlapping periods of time), and intensity here goes all the way and at the same time from sexual intensity to companionship and exploration of new aspects of life. I honestly believe my romantic and sexual life are the best living example of the transformation in my mental health and how that has affected my way of living life.

I have recently been in the process of getting a psychiatrist to evaluate potential personality traits, fundamental difficulties and/or personality disorders underlying my mental state. As such, I have been assessed to be mildly autistic and have mild and controlled but relevant traits of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. This relates mainly to my hyperanalytical personality, my social awkwardness, my difficulties with groups, some sensory variances, my difficulty working for long hours and my contrasting focus that ranges from serious procrastination to the ability to hyper focus on topics that interest me.

You can read more details about my personality, specially on how to deal with me, here.

You can contact me at my email address: juan.casanova.undeceiver@gmail.com