Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez

Current PhD. Students

• Yilin Chen (starting September 2025, co-supervised with Divya Sharma)

• Amy Jia (since 2023) - Currently working on self-attention models.

• Nicolas Ewen (since 2023, co-supervised with Kelly Ramsay) - Currently working on filter and channel regularization for convolutional neural networks.

Current Master students

• Blanca Fernandez Mendez

• Ting-Jie Liao

• Elina Lisenko

Current Undergraduate students

• Johnathan Channer

Previous Master students

• Zayeeda Shahreen Labiba - Currently a Statistical Analyst at the Population Health Research Institute (Canada).

• Chenyi Yu

Previous Undergraduate students

• Steven Zheng (USRA) - Currently master student at University of Toronto (Canada).

• Nicolas Yaya (Universidad del Norte) - Currently Business Operation Specialist at Mincka Engineering (Australia).

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

• Treasurer of SORA: Southern Ontario Regional Association of the Statistical Society of Canada (2024 - 2027)

• Reviewer of CSDA: Computational Statistics & Data Analysis (2020 - 2023)

Peer-reviewed

• M. Jia*, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Dynamics of Spontaneous Topic Changes in Next Token Prediction with Self-Attention". Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS (To appear). 2025 (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". The Annals of Applied Statistics (To appear). 2025 (link)

• K. Ramsay, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Differentially Private Boxplots". International Conference of Machine Learning ICML. 2025 (link)

• E. Nino-Ruiz, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Adjoint-Free 4D-Var Methods For Non-Linear Data Assimilation Via Line Search Optimization". Atmosphere. 2024 (link)

• 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)

• 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)

Manuscripts

• J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "k-LLMmeans: Summaries as Centroids for Interpretable and Scalable LLM-Based Text Clustering". (link)

In preparation

• N. Ewen*, K. Ramsay, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Structured Output Regularization".

• M. Jia*, J. Diaz-Rodriguez. "Detecting Topic Shifts by Exploiting LLMs’ Struggle to Transition"

*supervised student

Software and libraries

• k-LLMmeans: LLM-based centroids for text clustering. 2025. Python (link)

• DPBoxplot: Differentially private boxplots. 2024. Python (link)

• TVqut: Total variation with the Quantile Universal Threshold. 2024. MATLAB (link)

• ALIAS: Astrophysics Lasso Inverse Abel Solver. 2020. MATLAB (link) & C++ (link)

• qut: Quantile Universal Threshold. R package. 2017 (link)

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)

Awards and grants

• 2024 - New investigators best presentation award. Winner. Statistical Society of Canada. (link)

• 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 projects 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.

Current courses (2023- )

• 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)