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Profile photo of Igor L.R. Azevedo
Igor L.R. Azevedo

Electrical Engineer

Master of Research (MRes) in Artificial Intelligence @ Imperial College London 🇬🇧
Former Research Scholar @ The University of Tokyo 🇯🇵
BSc in Electrical Engineering @ University of Brasília 🇧🇷

Contact & Links

A Bit About Me

My research journey spans three continents: I began in Brazil, earning a first-class Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Brasilia and winning the Brazilian Government Scientific Initiation Scholarship Award for FPGA research with Professor Alexandre Nery. After that I worked in partnership with Cellcrypt supervised by Professor Edson Mintsu Hung researching machine learning pipelines to improve call quality by optimizing PJSIP codec parameters.

My next step was in Japan, where I received the prestigious Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship to work at The University of Tokyo under Prof. Toyotaro Suzumura, former MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Research principal scientist. There, I collaborated with Nikkei Inc. (Japan's second-largest media company) under supervision of Dr. Yuichiro Yasui, researching news recommender systems and foundational LLMs. This resulted in a SIAM SDM'25 paper publication work on news recommenders achieving superior multilingual performance and earning the SIAM Travel Award, which recognizes promising early-career researchers in data mining.

Now at United Kingdom studying at Imperial College London, I'm pursuing an MRes in AI/ML, supervised by Prof. Pedro Mediano on generative and contrastive deep learning for predicting rare events in large-scale clinical data in partnership with the NHS.

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Profile photo of Igor L.R. Azevedo
Igor L.R. Azevedo Electrical Engineer
Master Research AI @ Imperial
Ex-Research Scholar @ UTokyo
EE @ UnB (Univ. of Brasília)

EDUCATION


Imperial College London London, UK | Sep 2025 - Sep 2026

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Master of Research (MRes)

Currently being supervised by Professor Pedro Mediano on generative and contrastive deep learning for predicting rare events in large-scale clinical data in partnership with the NHS.

University of Brasília (UnB) Brasília, Brazil | Aug 2016 - May 2022

Bachelor of Electrical Engineering

Focused on embedded systems, publishing a paper on FPGAs, and later transitioned to Machine Learning for codec optimization and financial markets. Final thesis supervised by Professor Edson Mitsu Hung.

University Center of Brasília (CEUB) Brasília, Brazil | Jan 2017 - Dec 2018

System Analysis and Development Associate Degree of Applied Science

Concentrated on Java development, particularly in real-time tracking systems, with a final thesis on a pharmacy delivery application, under the guidance of Professor Auto Tavares.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCES


  1. Research Scholar at The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan | Apr 2023 – Apr 2025
    • Served as a Research Scholar (a role similar to a Research Assistant) for two years in Prof. Toyotaro Suzumura's lab, contributing to machine learning research on recommender systems, foundational LLMs, and financial forecasting.
    • Led a research partnership with Nikkei Inc., Japan's largest financial media company (A Financial Times Group Company), analyzing their data to design and propose novel recommender system models for user behavior (under Dr. Yuichiro Yasui).
    • Contributed to foundational LLM research, actively analyzing and debating state-of-the-art papers on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and long-context handling in weekly lab sessions.
    • Engineered deep learning models for high-frequency stock price forecasting, with a focus on predicting market behavior during election periods.
    • Developed POI (Point of Interest) recommender system models during an industry partnership with Toyota.
  2. Developer & Development Team Lead at VOGA Brasília, Brazil | Jul 2021 – Apr 2023
    • Started as a Developer, later promoted to Development Team Lead.
    • Led system integration for VOGA post-acquisition by BTG Pactual, South America's largest investment bank.
    • Architected and developed a centralized platform to monitor and track over USD 300 million in managed assets.
    • Transitioned from full-stack development (Flask/NextJS) to a DevOps role, managing AWS infrastructure (EC2, VPC, RDS, ELB) with Terraform, automating CI/CD with Jenkins, and securing the application with Cloudflare.
  3. Research Intern at Cellcrypt: Quantum-Safe Encrypted Calls London, UK (Remote) | Sep 2020 – Jun 2021
    • Optimized machine learning models to improve VoIP performance by enhancing call quality and reducing latency.
    • Built an ML pipeline for automated PJSIP (multimedia communication library written in C with high level API in C++) parameter tuning, which boosted call quality metrics by 7%.

RESEARCH PAPERS


  1. A Look Into News Avoidance Through AWRS: An Avoidance-Aware Recommender System
    January - July 2024 | SDM'25 Proceedings | ArXiv
    • Collaboration: Toyotaro Suzumura (The University of Tokyo) and Yuichiro Yasui (Nikkei Inc.)
    • Highlights: Developed AWRS, an Avoidance-Aware Recommender System for news that incorporates article avoidance as a key factor to improve recommendations. Evaluated on datasets in English, Norwegian, and Japanese, AWRS outperformed existing methods by leveraging avoidance as an indicator of user preferences.
  2. NewsReX: A More Efficient Approach to News Recommendation with Keras 3 and JAX
    January - August 2025 | ArXiv
    • Collaboration: Toyotaro Suzumura (The University of Tokyo) and Yuichiro Yasui (Nikkei Inc.)
    • Highlights: A modular and extensible framework for news recommendation systems research, implementing state-of-the-art models with a focus on reproducibility and ease of use. The framework has been optimized with Keras 3 + JAX backend for enhanced performance through JIT compilation and XLA acceleration.
  3. POPK: Mitigating Popularity Bias via a Temporal-Counterfactual
    April - July 2024 | ArXiv
    • Collaboration: Toyotaro Suzumura (The University of Tokyo) and Yuichiro Yasui (Nikkei Inc.)
    • Highlights: Developed POPK, a model which uses temporal-counterfactual analysis to reduce popularity bias in news recommendations. POPK improves accuracy and diversity by systematically removing the influence of popular articles.
  4. From Votes to Volatility Predicting the Stock Market on Election Day
    August - December 2024 | ArXiv
    • Collaboration: Toyotaro Suzumura (The University of Tokyo)
    • Highlights: Developed POPK, a model which uses temporal-counterfactual analysis to reduce popularity bias in news recommendations. POPK improves accuracy and diversity by systematically removing the influence of popular articles.
  5. A SHA-3 Co-Processor for IoT Applications
    January - November 2020 | Paper (IEEE - WCNSPS'20)
    • Collaboration: Alexandre S. Nery (University of Brasília) and Alexandre da C. Sena (Rio de Janeiro State University)
    • Highlights: Designed and implemented a SHA-3 hardware co-processor on FPGA for IoT applications, achieving 65% faster performance than ARM Cortex-A9 with improved energy efficiency and reduced circuit area.

AWARDS


  1. SIAM Travel Award – SDM25 May 2025 | About
    About: Granted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), this award supported travel to the 2025 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM25) held in Alexandria, VA. It recognized promising early-career researchers contributing to the field.
  2. Japanese Government (MEXT) Research Scholarship April 2023 - April 2025 | About
    About: The Japanese Government (MEXT) Research Scholarship supports international students conducting research at Japanese higher education institutions.
  3. Brazilian Government (CNPq) Institutional Scientific Initiation Scholarship (PIBIC) August 2019 - July 2020 | About

    About: The PIBIC program, funded by the Federal Government of Brazil, aims to support undergraduate students in engaging with research, technological development, and innovation.

CERTIFICATIONS


PROJECTS


  1. VISUADL - Bringing Deep Learning Concepts to Life
    Platform dedicated to making deep learning concepts easier to understand through visual animations and simpler explanations. Website
  2. N2S - Knowledge Made Accessible
    Open-source platform focused on knowledge dissemination, simplifying deep learning, algorithms, and information theory with clear, visual explanations. Website
  3. Life Before The End
    An open-source platform designed to promote Indigenous awareness and scientific work to support Indigenous communities. Website

OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTIONS


  1. NewsReX - Code
    A modular and extensible framework for news recommendation systems research, implementing state-of-the-art models with a focus on reproducibility and ease of use. The framework has been optimized with Keras 3 + JAX backend for enhanced performance through JIT compilation and XLA acceleration.
  2. AlphaDL - Code
    Lightning AI Project for Cutting-Edge Deep Learning Models in Stock Markets.
  3. NewsrecLib - Code
    Implemented the PP-REC SOTA model into the news recommendation framework.
  4. Qlib - Code
    Added support for the Brazilian stock market, enabling local investors and researchers to use Qlib's machine learning models and data processing pipelines on Brazilian stock data.

ESSENTIALS


COURSES


LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCES


LANGUAGES


Portuguese Native
English Near-native
Spanish Limited
Japanese Basic

TECH STACK


Programming Languages

Python JavaScript SQL C Java

Frameworks & Libraries

PyTorch Lightning AI JAX TensorFlow Keras Plotly CrewAI Flask FastAPI

Infrastructure

AWS Cloudflare Docker Nginx

Databases

PostgreSQL