About me

My name is Marcelo de Oliveira Rosa Prates, I’m a 31yo software developer and artist based in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Education: I hold a PhD in Computer Science with Major in Machine Learning from UFRGS. The main lines of research I pursued during my doctorate (Aug 2015 - Aug 2019) were Geometric Deep Learning / Graph Neural Networks and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, particularly Machine Bias. My Erdős number is 3, through Moshe Vardi.

Career: I currently work as a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer at Dataside, with previous experience as an AI researcher at Samsung R&D Institute Brazil, where I led an innovative project for VO2Max estimation on wearable devices now shipped worldwide with the Samsung Galaxy Watch line. I also provide consultancy for companies interested on building solutions based on Machine Learning, Computer Vision or Large Language Models.

Art & Creative Coding: I have also been playing arond with Generative art / Creative coding for some time now. You can see some of my sketches in the Generative Art tab.

I have also been experimenting with generative art (art created through programming) as a hobby since 2015. My main artistic interests include the intersection of art and exact sciences, the nature of the artistic process in the context of generative art and the relationship of generative art with different types of media (2D printing, 3D printing and pen plotting; projections, interactive “sketches”). Other topics of interest are: physical and biological simulations, mathematical art, complex systems, signed distance functions, cartography, pen-plotters, fractals and abstract procedural art.

I’m the creator of the open-source Python package “prettymaps” (now boasting more than 10k stars on GitHub!) which allows anyone to create highly stylized maps from public OpenStreetMap data for free.