Here's some of what I do on my spare time (apart from hunting sunsets, of course!)

Projects

PictoMaker 2

A lightweight API to translate sentences into pictograms

PictoMaker Lite is a lightweight API that enables you to translate any sentence into a sequence of pictograms. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to syntactically analyze the sentence and lemmatize its components, whether it is in Spanish, English or Polish (more languages soon!). Then, it uses this information to generate an array of possible pictograms, that you can use later.

This API extensively uses ARASAAC, an open-source Spanish project that compiles incredible sequences of pictograms.

As a pilot, PictoMaker Lite can be used in Cisco Webex (more information here). You can try it out by adding pictomaker@webex.bot to your Webex account. This bot adds functionality like color tagging, choosing whether images should be colored or not upon generation, and skin tone options.

A few years ago, and motivated by my mother, who is a teacher of students with special needs, I decided to start the project PictoMaker. PictoMaker is basically a program that translates sentences to colorful pictograms, and that helped my mother in teaching people with autism and Down syndrome. The first version of PictoMaker I developed, only in Spanish, was the first webapp I ever developed, and received a warm reception from the educational community. I was really proud of it, and have always wanted to make improvements to it.

As part of the Cisco Incubator Program 9.0, I was approached with the task to create a bot for Cisco Webex, and I thought it was an amazing opportunity to go back to PictoMaker and try and improve it, by separating the original webapp into an API and a separate interface that could take advantage of it (in this case, a Webex bot).

Learning through pictograms is an essential tool for children with special educational needs, as well as crutial for elder people with Alzheimer's disease and dementia. I developed PictoMaker to make it easy for people to communicate using the power of images.

PictoMaker leverages the power of AI to lemmatize the different words you input (getting the basic form of the word) to search for the images, as well as it uses it to construct a syntactical analysis tree and allow people (and especially children) to better distinguish between words.

PictoMaker Lite

Joining students from different areas of expertise

Proyecto Bridge is a project created as the collective dissertation thesis of Escuela de Liderazgo Universitario (Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid). Its main goal is to expand the knowledge borders of university students by organizing events between university students of different areas of knowledge.

This project attends the necessity to to complement current university education through a space that favors interdisciplinary cooperation and the integral formation of university students with a critical spirit, prepared to provide collaborative solutions to the challenges of today's society. It is based in four main principles:

Integral formation of the university student.

Fostering dialogue and active participation.

Methodologies that foster creativity and critical thinking.

This is done via bridges, meetings between university students from different degrees in which topics of common interest are dealt with from a transdisciplinary perspective, and through methodologies that favor reasoning and argumentation.

As part of the project, we had to make a pilot bridge to test if our solution was appropriate. The encounter talked about liberating patents for COVID-19 vaccines, and was destined to university student from both health sciences and right and economy.

The encounter took place in Universidad Miguel de Hernández, in Alicante, Spain, and it received a warm acclaim both from the students and lecturers. We look forward to organizing these encounters in the future.

Proyecto Bridge

Fit your photos into canvases for printing

PhotoFitter

A project to help Spanish students with their university entrance exams during the pandemic

@yoteayudoconlasele originated as a network of thousands of university students all accross Spain, wanting to help pupils from the 2nd course of Bachillerato ace their college entrance exams. This network was present all across the country, in each and every autonomous community.

It consisted on three fundamental pillars:

The website, that I developed myself, was the "center of operations", and in where students could ask questions, find and share notes, and access online classes and many other resources.

The social media accounts, that served to both spread the word and coach the students, with a huge variety of contents, like study tips, career orientation and much more. Our Instagram account achieved more than 20k followers in just 48 hours.

The team of volunteers and organizers that was able to make the project work in record time.

This project received national media acclaim, and made a huge impact in the future of thousand of students.

You can know more about the project in the "about us" (archived), the FAQs (archived) and the "how to contribute" (archived) sections (all in Spanish).

As part of this project, I had to develop various utilites and features. Some of them were:

Calculadora Sele. A simple web utility that helped student calculate their scores in the University entrance exams ("selectividad").

YAS Gradu. Using Python and Pillow, I was able to generate the biggest class photo in Spain ever made.

YAS (short for @yoteayudoconlasele) was featured in several Spanish media outlets. Here are some of my favorite articles:

"'Yo te ayudo con la sele': una iniciativa entre estudiantes para preparar la EBAU", EducaWeb

"Cómo lanzar un proyecto en cuarentena", Start UC3M

"Héroes de la cuarentena del coronavirus: Yo te ayudo con la selectividad", La Razón

"Educación en cuarentena: los grupos de WhatsApp de padres echan chispas", Telva

This project is one of the most successfull and fulfilling projects I have ever worked on, and I think it has been the one where, at the time, I grew the most as a computer scientist. In YAS was where I put my time and soul during the lockdown —besides University, of course,— and the response was overwhelming. It was truly a gift to be part of this.

As always, I like to take a moment and reflect upon what happened. Here's some of the things I learned from @yoteayudoconlasele:

Have a great team. In projects like this, it is essential to have a great team — you cannot do all the work! Surround yourself with wonderful communicators, planners, doers and thinkers. If they share your passion for the project, then everything will be okay.

Be brave. We had to create a functional product in no time, due to the urgency of the situation. This meant little space for mistakes. However, not only the right answer has to be provided — it has to be provided at the right time. Don't be scared to deploy, hotfix and redeploy whenever it is necessary. Don't be scared to contact everyone to make something new in no time.

Be true to yourself. In big projects, you'll come up with imitators, and people wanting to take advantage of you —most of the time, to make money.— With every decision you make, remind yourself of your goal and your passion for the project. If it doesn't seem right, then it probably isn't.

@yoteayudoconlasele

PrioSort

Telematic accompaniment in hospitals and nursing homes

Hospitalit-e

Conferences on technology and its influence on human beings

Voces Universitarias II: Tecnología y Humanismo

Resources I made as part of my university studies

DGIIM

PictoMaker

md2tex

A generator for your own Cards Against Humanity

CAH Generator

Bloomgogo War Bot

Conferences on the relatoinship between University and politics

Voces Universitarias I: Universidad y Poder Político

An integral solution to help refugees' housing

A solution to improve the refugees' housing, consisting of self-sufficient housing and a resource distribution algorithm.