Hi, I'm

Cecilia Micaela
Bolaños

PhD Student in Computer Science · University of Buenos Aires

Researching Explainable AI (XAI) for multimodal models. Passionate about bridging audio and language understanding.

🎓 UBA 🔬 XAI · Audio AI 📄 AAAI · ACL · Interspeech

About Me

I'm a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where I previously graduated with a Licenciatura in Data Science (B.S. + M.Sc. equivalent) with a GPA of 8.9/10.

My research focuses on Explainable AI (XAI) for multimodal models. My thesis explored "Similarity between word representations generated by audio and text models", studying convergence towards universal representations across modalities using metrics like Linear CKA and ASIF with modern architectures (BEATs, EncodecMAE, BERT).

I have published at top-tier venues including AAAI, ACL, and Interspeech, and I'm a recipient of the CONICET Doctoral Fellowship and the IEEE SPS SigMA mentorship award.

🎓

PhD in Computer Science

University of Buenos Aires · April 2025 – Present

Research Focus: Explainable AI (XAI) for multimodal models

📊

Licenciatura in Data Science

University of Buenos Aires · 2018 – 2024 · GPA 8.9/10

📍

Buenos Aires, Argentina

cbolanos@dc.uba.ar

Publications

AAAI 2026

MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence

Interspeech 2025

Benchmarking Time-localized Explanations for Audio Classification Models

ACL 2025

Are Optimal Algorithms Still Optimal? Rethinking Sorting in LLM-Based Pairwise Ranking with Batching and Caching

ORCA: Open-ended Response Correctness Assessment for Audio Question Answering

Research Experience

JSALT Participant

2025

Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies

Selected to participate in JSALT. Collaborated on the "Advancing Expert-Level Reasoning and Understanding in Large Audio Language Models" team.

Grants & Awards

🏆

IEEE SPS Signal Processing Mentorship Academy (SigMA)

Jan 2026 – Present

Selected for a competitive international research mentorship with Prof. Magdalena Fuentes at NYU. The award includes a travel grant to present the resulting co-authored publication at the IEEE ICASSP conference.

🔬

CONICET Doctoral Fellowship

April 2025 – Present

Fully funded competitive fellowship awarded by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina for doctoral studies in Computer Science.

Technical Skills

💻 Programming

Python Julia

⚙️ Deep Learning Frameworks

PyTorch Hugging Face Transformers Hugging Face Datasets DifferentialEquations.jl

🧠 Core Expertise

Explainable AI (XAI) Flow Matching Diffusion Transformers (DiT) VAEs LLMs ALMs

Teaching Experience

University of Buenos Aires (UBA)
  • Teaching Assistant — Machine Learning Mar 2024 – Present
  • Teaching Assistant — Algorithms Aug – Dec 2023
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT)
  • Teaching Assistant — Deep Learning Aug – Dec 2023

Industry Experience

AI Engineer

May – Aug 2024

Entelai

Designed and implemented a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system to optimize the creation of medical reports.

Data Scientist

Oct 2023 – Apr 2024

Quantit

Developed an audience segmentation using embeddings from large language models (LLMs) to analyze opinions on vaccines. Applied advanced statistical analysis techniques to identify and characterize distinct demographic groups.

Data Scientist

Aug – Oct 2023

Interinstitutional Data Center

Developed a predictive model to identify students at risk of dropping out of school.

Other Activities

🎯

Organizer

Spring School on Deep Learning · 2025 & 2026

Led the local organization for the 2025 and 2026 editions of the Spring School on Deep Learning, facilitating academic activities, logistics, and outreach for participants.

📖

Founder — Paper Club

Founded a study group that analyzes and debates academic papers. Organized regular meetings to foster knowledge exchange about industry and academic innovations.

@clubdelpaper
🏛️

Graduate Representative

Academic Program Committee for Data Science · UBA · Mar 2025 – Present

Elected graduate representative contributing to binding decisions on curriculum design, program development, and advocacy for alumni interests.