Portrait of Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Core Academic Member
Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal
Research Topics
Active Learning
AI and Sustainability
AI for Science
Blackbox Optimization
Climate
Climate Variable Downscaling
Computational Biology
Deep Learning
Drug Discovery
Generative Models
GFlowNets
Molecular Modeling
Probabilistic Models
Representation Learning

Biography

Alex Hernandez-Garcia is an assistant professor at the Université de Montréal, a core academic member at Mila, IVADO professor and member of the Institut Courtois. His machine learning research is motivated by scientific applications to tackle the climate crisis and other societal challenges. In particular, a current focus of his work is active and generative machine learning to facilitate scientific discoveries, such as new materials and antibiotics. He also advocates for a critical examination of the impacts of artificial intelligence, is a strong proponent of open science and is active in initiatives about making science more inclusive, equitable, open, reproducible, transparent and environmentally conscious.

Current Students

Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Collaborating researcher - Polytechnique Montréal Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Postdoctorate
Principal supervisor :

Publications

Biological Sequence Design with GFlowNets
Moksh J. Jain
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Chanakya Ajit Ekbote
Jie Fu
Micheal Kilgour
Lena Simine
Payel Das
ClimateGAN: Raising Climate Change Awareness by Generating Images of Floods
Victor Schmidt
Alexandra Luccioni
Mélisande Teng
Alexia Reynaud
Sunand Raghupathi
Gautier Cosne
Adrien Juraver
Vahe Vardanyan
Climate change is a major threat to humanity, and the actions required to prevent its catastrophic consequences include changes in both poli… (see more)cy-making and individual behaviour. However, taking action requires understanding the effects of climate change, even though they may seem abstract and distant. Projecting the potential consequences of extreme climate events such as flooding in familiar places can help make the abstract impacts of climate change more concrete and encourage action. As part of a larger initiative to build a website that projects extreme climate events onto user-chosen photos, we present our solution to simulate photo-realistic floods on authentic images. To address this complex task in the absence of suitable training data, we propose ClimateGAN, a model that leverages both simulated and real data for unsupervised domain adaptation and conditional image generation. In this paper, we describe the details of our framework, thoroughly evaluate components of our architecture and demonstrate that our model is capable of robustly generating photo-realistic flooding.