Researcher · Professor · IEEE & ACM Senior Member

Edwin Puertas, PhD

Inteligencia Artificial, NLP y Visión por Computadora aplicados a problemas reales desde América Latina.

Profesor Asociado en la Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Cartagena. Dirijo los programas de Doctorado y Maestría en Ingeniería, investigo en IA y publico con más de 299 citas en revistas y congresos internacionales.

Cartagena, Colombia Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar IEEE Senior Member · ACM Senior Member
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About

Soy Doctor en Ingeniería por la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (2023), Profesor Asociado y Director de Programas de Posgrado en la Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, e investigador principal del grupo VerbaNexAI. Cuento con amplia experiencia en IA, NLP, Big Data, Data Analytics e Ingeniería de Software, combinando práctica técnica con formación académica para entrenar a la próxima generación de profesionales tecnológicos.

Mis áreas de interés incluyen Inteligencia Artificial (Deep Learning, Transfer Learning, Reinforcement Learning), Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural (perfilado de autores, análisis de sentimientos, recuperación de información), Visión por Computadora (detección de objetos) y análisis de señales multi-dominio. He participado activamente en competencias internacionales: IberLEF, SemEval, CLEF y PAN.

Soy IEEE Senior Member, ACM Senior Member y miembro fundador de la IEEE Colombian Caribbean Section. Best Paper Award en IEEE C3 2023.

Institution Univ. Tecnológica de Bolívar
Location Cartagena, Colombia
PhD PUJ, 2023
Areas AI · NLP · CV · Data Science
Citations 299+
Email epuerta@utb.edu.co

Projects

Apollo

Oct 2023 – Present

Python package for multimodal AI understanding with three channels: Audio (Lyre), Text (Pythia) and Vision (Argus). Includes tools for head analysis, motor pattern diagnostics, facial movements and NLP with syllabification.

Multimodal AI Python Computer Vision NLP

TrueShield

Active

Fake news detection platform using entity recognition, cross-reference from RSS/Twitter/Reddit and a veracity scoring algorithm. Built on microservices with Angular, Django, FastAPI, Hugging Face models and deployed on AWS.

NLP Fake News FastAPI AWS

FrameLens

Active

NLP methodology for analyzing news framing in Spanish-language media. Identifies cultural and political factors shaping narratives; contributes to media literacy and cross-linguistic public opinion analysis.

NLP Media Framing Spanish

MentalGuard

Active

Multimodal AI system for early detection of mental health risk in university students. Integrates NLP techniques on text and audio to provide objective, rapid and scalable risk evaluation beyond traditional self-reporting.

Mental Health Multimodal Deep Learning

Mapping Motion

Active

Cognitive approach to analyzing movement patterns of individuals with dyspraxia using motion capture and advanced signal processing. Results have practical applications in rehabilitation and assistive technology design.

Signal Processing Computer Vision Healthcare

Traffic Monitoring

Jan 2023 – Present

Automated computer vision system for detecting unauthorized vehicle entries (motorcycles) in pedestrian zones in Cartagena. Developed for an energy company to improve urban pedestrian safety enforcement.

Computer Vision Object Detection Smart Cities

PV-ROI

2023

Innovative approach to calculate Return on Investment for photovoltaic systems incorporating system degradation and maintenance factors for a more realistic financial estimation over the asset lifecycle.

Photovoltaics Data Analytics Predictive Models

Selected Publications

Most cited

  • 2021

    A sustainability maturity model for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) based on a data analytics evaluation approach

    Vásquez, J., Aguirre, S., Puertas, E., Bruno, G., Priarone, P. C., & Settineri, L.

    Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 311 · 75 citations

  • 2022

    Cost-effectiveness analysis of strategies of COVID-19 vaccination in Colombia: comparison of high-risk prioritization and no prioritization strategies

    Morales-Zamora, G., Espinosa, O., Puertas, E., et al.

    Value in Health Regional Issues, vol. 31 · 19 citations

  • 2021

    Detection of sociolinguistic features in digital social networks for the detection of communities

    Puertas, E., Moreno-Sandoval, L. G., Redondo, J., Alvarado-Valencia, J. A., & Pomares-Quimbaya, A.

    Cognitive Computation, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 518–537 · 19 citations

  • 2023

    UTB-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Weirdness, lexical features for detecting categorical framings, and persuasion in online news

    Cuadrado, J., Martinez, E., Morillo, A., Peña, D., Sossa, K., Martinez-Santos, J. C., & Puertas, E.

    Proceedings of SemEval-2023 (ACL) · 5 citations

  • 2019

    Bots and gender profiling on Twitter using sociolinguistic features — Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2019

    Puertas, E., Moreno-Sandoval, L. G., Plaza-Del-Arco, F. M., Alvarado-Valencia, J. A., Pomares-Quimbaya, A., & Ureña-López, L. A.

    CEUR-WS, vol. 2380 · 4 citations

Recent

  • 2025

    A computer vision system for detecting motorcycle violations in pedestrian zones

    Hernández-Díaz, N., Peñaloza, Y. C., Rios, Y. Y., Martinez-Santos, J. C., & Puertas, E.

    Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 84, no. 13 · 3 citations

  • 2024

    VerbaNexAI lab at SemEval-2024 Task 10: Emotion recognition and reasoning in mixed-coded conversations based on an NRC VAD approach

    Garcia, S., Martinez, E., Cuadrado, J., Martinez-Santos, J. C., & Puertas, E.

    Proceedings of SemEval-2024 (ACL) · 2 citations

  • 2024

    VerbaNexAI lab at SemEval-2024 Task 1: A multilayer artificial intelligence model for semantic relationship detection

    Morillo, A., Peña, D., Martinez-Santos, J. C., & Puertas, E.

    Proceedings of SemEval-2024 (ACL) · 2 citations

  • 2025

    Enhancing consistency in piping and instrumentation diagrams using DistilBERT and smart PID systems

    Gómez-Vega, F., Acuña, O., Camargo, A. C., Jimenez, J. D., et al., & Puertas, E.

    Systems and Soft Computing, vol. 7 · 1 citation

  • 2026

    Detection of diseases in cucumber using deep neural networks

    Menco-Tovar, A., Martinez-Santos, J. C., & Puertas, E.

    Neural Computing and Applications, vol. 38, no. 5

All publications on Google Scholar →

Experience & Education

Experience

  • 2008–now

    Associate Professor & Program Director

    Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar

    Cartagena, Colombia

  • 2024–now

    Co-Investigator

    Navigating Toward the Future

    Intelligent maintenance in naval environments

  • 2016–2023

    Senior Data Scientist

    CAOBA — Center of Excellence in Big Data & Analytics

    Bogotá, Colombia

  • Jan–Mar 2019

    Visiting Researcher

    Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)

    Valencia, Spain

  • Oct 2018–Jan 2019

    Visiting Researcher

    University of Turin

    Turin, Italy

Education

  • 2016–2023

    PhD in Engineering

    Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

    Bogotá, Colombia

  • 2008–2011

    Master in Engineering

    Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar

    Cartagena, Colombia

  • 1995–2001

    BSc in Systems Engineering

    Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar

    Cartagena, Colombia

Skills

Artificial Intelligence & ML

Machine Learning Deep Learning Transformers BERT / LLMs Fine-tuning MLOps

NLP

Análisis de Sentimientos Detección de Propaganda Named Entity Recognition Text Classification Information Extraction Spanish NLP

Computer Vision

Object Detection OpenCV Vision Transformers

Programming & Tools

Python C++ C# Java Julia PyTorch TensorFlow HuggingFace scikit-learn spaCy NLTK Pandas NumPy SQL Server MongoDB Docker MLOps Git

Contact & Social