Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez
jdiazrod (at) yorku.ca
Ph.D., M. Sc., B.Eng.Assistant ProfessorYork UniversityToronto, Canada
I received my PhD in Mathematics, focusing on statistics, from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in 2018, supervised by Professor Sylvain Sardy. Following this, I served as an assistant professor at Universidad del Norte (Colombia) in 2019, and later joined York University in 2021 as a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. My research focuses on statistics and machine learning, emphasizing the development of theoretical frameworks with practical applications across various disciplines. Additionally, I am deeply committed to data science education and mentoring, having developed several courses and programs to advance learning in the field. Alongside my academic duties, I have a robust background as a data science consultant and machine learning engineer in diverse industries. My expertise covers the entire data science lifecycle, from data collection and preprocessing to exploration, visualization, model selection, and deploying fully operational production systems.
Students
Current PhD. Students
Amy Jia (since 2023) - Currently working on transformers and attention models.
Chenyi Yu (since 2023, co-supervised with Cindy Fu) - Currently working on online categorical changepoint detection.
Nicolas Ewen (since 2023, co-supervised with Kelly Ramsay) - Currently working on filter and channel regularization for convolutional neural networks.
Previous Master students
Zayeeda Shahreen Labiba - Currently a Statistical Analyst at the Population Health Research Institute (Canada).
Previous Undergraduate students
Steven Zheng - Currently master student at University of Toronto (Canada).
Nicolas Yaya (Universidad del Norte) - Currently Business Operation Specialist at Mincka Engineering (Australia).
Education, research and affiliations
Education
Ph.D. in Mathematics, Université de Genève. Geneva, Switzerland. 2018 (link)
M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science, Université de Genève. Geneva, Switzerland. 2014 (link)
B.Eng. in Electronics, Universidad Industrial de Santander. Bucaramaga, Colombia. 2010
Research Interests
Data Science
Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence
High dimensional statistics
Inverse problems
Optimization
Activities
Publications
Peer-reviewed
S. Sardy, C. Giacobino, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Thresholding tests based on affine LASSO to achieve non-asymptotic nominal level and high power under sparse and dense alternatives in high dimension". Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. 2022 (link)
J. Diaz-Rodriguez, S. Sardy, D. Eckert. "Nonparametric estimation of galaxy cluster's emissivity and point source detection in astrophysics with two lasso penalties". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 2020 (link)
D. Hug-Peter, S. Sardy, J Diaz-Rodriguez, E. Castella, V. Slaveykova. "Modeling whole body trace metal concentrations in aquatic invertebrate communities: A trait-based approach". Environmental Pollution. 2018 (link)
C. Giacobino, S. Sardy, J. Diaz-Rodriguez, N. Hengartner. "Quantile Universal Threshold". Electronic Journal of Statistics. 2017 (link)
Preprints
K. Ramsay, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Differentially Private Boxplots". 2024 (link)
J. Diaz-Rodriguez, J. P. Gomez, J. P. Orange, N. D. Burkett-Cadena, S. M. Wisely, J. K. Blackburn and S. Sardy. "Tomographic reconstruction of a disease transmission landscape via GPS recorded random paths". 2024 (link)
E. Nino-Ruiz, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Adjoint-Free 4D-Var Methods For Non-Linear Data Assimilation Via Line Search Optimization". 2023 (link)
Conference papers
J. Diaz-Rodriguez, S. Sardy. "A composite lasso penalty with an application in Cosmology". IEEE Intl Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). 2016 (link)
Projects and software
Data Science projects and apps
COVID-19 projects (video - in Spanish)
covidBAQ: Covid19 tracking and prediction in the city of Barranquilla
RtColombia: Real time calculation of the reproducible number of COVID-19 pandemic in every town of Colombia
Coronability: Calculation of coronavirus probabilities for sensibilization purposes
Real time modeling of accident probabilities according to traffic light locations (video - in Spanish)
Software and libraries
DPBoxplot: Differentially private boxplots. 2024. Python (link)
TVqut: Tomographic reconstruction of a disease transmission landscape via GPS recorded random paths. 2024. MATLAB (link)
ALIAS: Astrophysics Lasso Inverse Abel Solver. 2020. MATLAB (link) & C++ (link)
qut: Quantile Universal Threshold. R package. 2017 (link)
Awards and grants
Awards and grants
2024 - New investigators best presentation award. Winner. Statistical Society of Canada.
2023 - New investigators best presentation award. Runner up. Statistical Society of Canada.
2021 - NSERC: Discovery Grant.
2019 - Latin American Swiss Center (CLS-HSG): Swiss Latin American seed grant.
2019 - Colombian Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications: Top 10 Data Science project in Colombia.
2016 - Best conference paper. International Conference on Information Complexity and Statistical Modeling in High Dimensions with Applications.
2012 - Fellow. COLFUTURO: Foundation for the future of Colombia.
2009 - Bronce Medal. Iberoamerican Math Competition for University Students.
2004 - Gold Medal. Colombian National Math Olympiad.
Teaching
Current courses (2023-2024)
MATH 1130: Introduction to Data Science (undergraduate)
MATH 2130: Principles and Techniques of Data Science (undergraduate)
MATH 6650: Introduction to statistical data science (graduate)
Old courses
MATH 4939: Statistical data analysis in SAS and R (undergraduate)
NATS 1130: Statistical reasoning (undergraduate)
Old courses (at Universidad del Norte)
Statistics I, Statistics II (undergraduate)
Calculus I (undergraduate)
Mathematical Statistics (undergraduate)
Mathematical Statistics (graduate)
Computational Statistics (graduate)
Machine Learning (graduate)
Advanced topics in Statistics (graduate)
Some pictures...
Current Phd. students (2024)
With my PhD. advisor (Sylvain Sardy) in 2015 (Top of Sandia Mountain in New Mexico (US)
My family...