Sergio José Rodríguez Méndez

Research Fellow

Picture of Sergio José Rodríguez Méndez

Location
CSIT N322

Email
Sergio.RodriguezMendez@anu.edu.au

Phone
+61 2 6125 1766

Clusters
Data Science
Software Innovation Institute

Website
https://w3id.org/people/sergio

Interests

Sergio’s interests spectrum is wide… 8-)

  • Knowledge Graphs.
  • Ontology Engineering.
  • Link Data & Semantic Web.
  • Data Science.
  • Information Retrieval.
  • Machine Learning.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) / Understanding (NLU).
  • Brain-Computer Interface (Brain-Machine Interface).
  • Internet of Things: sensors and actuators.
  • Cloud/Fog/Edge Computing.
  • Software Engineering and Architecture.

Research

As a professional Software Engineer (SE) and Software Architect (SA), Sergio’s main role in his research activities have been of the principal architect, technical lead, and senior developer. His recent research projects and outputs are:

  1. Contextual Metadata-based Knowledge Graph (KG) and KG Construction Pipeline (under the AGRIF Project ─ The Australian Government Records Interoperability Framework):
    a. MEL: Metadata extraction and pre-processing pipeline component.
    b. g0-Builder + J2RM: Initial graph (g0) creation component with a JSON-2-RDF mappings annotations tool for domain-ontologies.
    c. Schímatos: a Web-Form SHACL-based generator.
    d. TNNT: The NLP/NER (Named Entity Recognition) Toolkit : supports 9 tools and 21 models.
    e. KG-I: KG Integration package.
    f. KG-ER: KG Entity Reconciliation package.
    This suite of software artifacts is being evolved into a KG Construction Pipeline to automate the creation of KGs from heterogeneous data sources.

  2. Federated Linked Big Data semantic layer for a pervasive Augmented-BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) system (Ph.D. main research work):
    a. The Brain Computing Interface Ontology (BCI-O): an ontology for multi-modal BCI data capture activities, presented at the ISWC 2018 and IoT 2018 conferences. The BCI-O spec was built following a detailed Ontology Engineering process with extensive BCI data modeling and analysis using the Web Ontology Language.
    b. A Linked Data Engine (LDE): as an access point to retrieve semantically annotated BCI metadata with content-negotiation stored in an OpenLink Virtuoso Universal Server triple store. The LDE implementation was inspired by the Linked Data Platform Protocol for a JSON-to-SPARQL translator RESTful API as a semantic query formulation mechanism. It also gave machine and human access to the BCI-O spec, using sophisticated XSL2 templates (XSLT with XPath) to render the various spec versions.

  3. Collaborative Filtering based Social Recommender System (CF-SR): a 6-month project to build a complete CF-SR. Main activities:

    • Analysis: popular theories of SR algorithms and survey of tools.
    • Design: architectural layout of system components and data flow pipeline.
    • Development: Java 8, Maven v3.3.9, Apache Hadoop v2.8.2, Apache Spark v2.2.0 Machine Learning Library (MLlib) — RDD-based CF ALS algorithm (Alternating Least Squares), and SpringBoot + Swagger frameworks.
    • Infrastructure settings and deployment: GCP (Google Cloud Platform) Ubuntu environment.
    • Novel outputs: the system design includes a multi-model engine for user-from-to-product CF recommendations.

Biography

Dr. Sergio José Rodríguez Méndez (羅士豪) is an interdisciplinary scholar and professional SE+SA, with 24+ years of working experience (13+ in industry and 10+ in academia). He’s an expert with vast experience as a Full-Stack System Developer, Data Specialist, Project Manager, and I.T. Consultant using various platforms and tools.

Sergio obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science International Graduate Program (EECS IGP) of National Chiao Tung University (NCTU, now NYCU), Taiwan. Prior to his Ph.D., Sergio obtained a Masters in Information and Communication Technologies (Magna Cum Laude) from USAC, and a Magister in Finance (graduated with honors) from URL. He earned his bachelor’s in Computer and Systems Engineer (Magna Cum Laude) from URL.

In Taiwan, he worked in diverse projects and academic positions as Senior Researcher, Research Assistant, Lecturer, and Teaching Assistant. In Guatemala and Central America, he worked on multiple technology integration projects for corporate electronic banking systems over the Internet (2001-2006), and as a Senior Consultant of governmental financial Business Intelligence platforms (2006-2010).

Currently, he is working as a Research Fellow in Knowledge Graph Engineering at the ANU School of Computing.

For more information, see Sergio’s Web resources.

Activities & Awards

Industry

Sergio has strong SE/SA skills and comprehensive knowledge of Software Development Life Cycles for various types of information systems. He has deep knowledge of the Web technology stack with mature expertise in a variety of programming and scripting languages, including Python, Java (J2EE platforms), C/C++, JavaScript, C# (.NET Framework), SPARQL, and SQL.

During his Project Management positions in the industry, he worked on competitive business proposals with high-effective strategic plans, organised I.T./human resources, executed tasks under constrained schedules, and diligently controlled (Quality Assurance) the expected deliverables and results that added value to the defined scopes, with a strong commitment to customer satisfaction maintaining a fluent relationship among all the various participants, especially stakeholders and end-users.

He co-founded a Guatemalan software development company, where he led the early efforts to build e-banking and middleware corporate systems.

Since 2001, he has been a guest speaker to various industry and academic venues (seminars, workshops, and conferences) regarding Semantic Web, Web technologies, and Software Engineering.

Academia

Sergio has lectured core Computer Science undergraduate courses, and specialised courses in graduate school (2003-2011) in two different Guatemalan universities (URL and USAC). In Taiwan, at the Computer Science Department of NCTU (now NYCU), he served numerous times (2013-2018) as a lecturer and teaching assistant of the course Pervasive Computing. Also, he was a Research Assistant at the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica in two distinct projects (2013-2014, 2016-2017).

Over the years, his involvement in industry/academic projects, helped him to mature strong communication and interaction skills with different university staff and students in cross-disciplinary environments.

At ANU, Sergio’s academic activities include being a course convener/lecturer and supervising/reviewing student projects and PhD students.

Sergio has a strong commitment to contribute with generic, useful, novel, and high-quality software artifacts to the open-source community, in order to advance state-of-the-art frameworks. Currently, his main focus is to automate the creation of KGs from heterogeneous data sources, through a KG Construction Pipeline (KGCP).

He is an active participant in the W3C KG Construction Community Group.

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