Álvaro
Schwiedop Souto

AI researcher & engineer

I study how models see, learn and reason. Then I build systems that put that research to work.

Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Research

Causal Workspace JEPA

Mechanistic interpretability

Understanding what changes inside a language model when its answer changes. Controlled interventions and differential analysis of Qwen3-0.6B.

Methods & results

Built a 612-patch dataset with entity-disjoint splits. Activation patches transferred the donor capital answer in 50% of held-out test pairs. Averaging Jacobians across 24 training contexts reduced finite-logit-effect prediction NMSE from 0.737 to 0.354 on unseen validation entities.

Code & research

FlowTwin

Physics-informed world models

Predicting where a vessel will go next. A physics-conditioned JEPA and gradient-boosted trees, trained on public NOAA AIS trajectories.

FlowTwin model comparison on held-out vessel trips
57 future held-out trips. Mean absolute error in kilometres; lower is better.
Methods & results

A three-model ensemble reduced trajectory MAE by 11.72%, from 2.635 to 2.326 km, across 57 future held-out trips. Trip-bootstrap 95% confidence interval for improvement: 5.90–17.13%. A research evaluation on public data.

Code & results

Sonar perception

Self-supervised perception

Adapting foundation models to a different kind of vision. Small-object sonar detection with DINOv2, a learned feature pyramid and Faster R-CNN.

Sonar detection evaluation comparing frozen and fine-tuned representations in Kenai and Channel
Detection evaluation across Kenai and Channel. Individual model checkpoints.
Inspect validation examples
Annotated sonar objects missed by both compared detectors
Kenai validation: annotated objects missed by the compared detectors.
Methods & results

Controlled experiments on sparse supervision and cross-location transfer, plus a fine-detail image branch to preserve localization cues beyond the backbone patch grid.

Code & experiments

Work

From understanding the problem to delivering the system.

Trace-it

Document AI · Team project

From business policy to auditable decisions. A team-built platform that turns policies into tested Python rules, with document evidence and human escalation.

Methods & results

I owned document AI, ERP integration and deployment. The delivered evaluation reproduced 471/471 reference decisions. In a cold-cache VPS benchmark of 540 synthetic invoice PDFs, ingestion time fell 51%, from 182.1 to 89.0 seconds.

Team repository

J&A Automation

Client delivery · In production

Connecting the work on site with the numbers behind it. A multilingual platform for technician assignments, approved time and expenses, project profitability and billing.

Methods & results

Built workflows from client and project setup through approvals, immutable issued invoices, partial payments and accounting exports. Role-based financial access keeps internal economics out of customer reports. Delivered English, Spanish and Portuguese reporting, PDF/XLSX exports and production deployment.

Project repository

About

I’m an AI researcher and engineer based in Santiago de Compostela. My work connects multimodal perception, self-supervised world models and mechanistic interpretability with the practical demands of building useful software.

I work across the whole process: developing a hypothesis, designing experiments, negotiating requirements and delivering a working system. I care about both the technical details and the people who will use the result.

Full curriculum vitae

Education

Computer Engineering
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

2024–present · Third year, 2026/27

Languages

Spanish & Galician — native
Portuguese — bilingual
English — C1, Cambridge
German — C1, TestDaF

Research

PyTorch · JEPA · Transformers · DINO
Multimodal fusion · Causal interventions
Geometric learning · Statistical evaluation

Engineering

Python · SQL · FastAPI · PostgreSQL
TypeScript · React · SvelteKit · OCR
Linux · Docker · CUDA Graphs · ONNX

Working with people

Client discovery · Requirements negotiation
Solution presentation · Technical leadership
Commercial negotiation · Deal closing

Contact

For research collaborations, engineering projects or a conversation about your next idea.

alvaro@schwiedop.com