Eric Martinez

Eric Martinez

Asst. Director, Department of Business Intelligence & Enterprise Engineering

Part-time Lecturer, Department of Computer Science

Contact Me

About Me

I love technology, solving hard problems, and teaching/mentoring. I focus on delivering state-of-the-art solutions, building small and amazing teams, and constantly learning new things.

I have several roles and each of them is exciting and fulfilling:

I lead the Business Intelligence and Enterprise Engineering Department at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine.

  • I lead data efforts (strategy, architecture, warehousing) for the School of Medicine and am working to build the organization's capacity for data-driven decision making via modern data architecture (Azure, Databricks, dbt, Data Factory, Synapse, Purview), data governance, data modeling, data analytics, and artificial intelligence.
  • I lead software engineering efforts to streamline and automate business processes
  • I care deeply about using data and AI to improve individual and collective productivity and happiness and am building a number of AI-Powered tools for operational AI
  • I am very excited and interested in applying AI to improve healthcare and patient outcomes

I teach courses to help our students break into cutting-edge technology fields.
  • I have the privilege of teaching a wonderful course on building AI-Powered applications
  • I have taught or currently teach courses related to software engineering of large scale web applications and also software engineering of cross-platform mobile applications.

Teaching - Fall 2023

CSCI 4341 - AI-Powered Applications

In this course, students will learn how to build and deploy AI-Powered Applications. Students will design and build solutions that integrate OpenAI models such as GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 as well as the foundations of underlying technologies such as Transformer architectures. Students will explore the state-of-the-art and use self-correcting prompts, Chain of Thought reasoning, tools, embeddings, and vector databases to add power and robustness to their solutions. Students will also learn how to use and fine-tune open-source models as well as considerations for using LLM technology in enterprise.

CSCI 3341 - Software Engineering II

In this course, students learn how to apply modern software engineering practices in order to build cross-platform mobile applications for iOS and Android devices. Students will learn how to use version control, feature branching, pull requests, automated testing, test-driven development, continuous integration, and pair programming to build production-ready software. This course is focused on giving students the practical hands-on experience they need for a career in the industry.

Research

As a researcher, I co-authored work primarily in the areas of molecular computing, DNA nanotechnology, discrete algorithms, and algorithmic self-assembly.

Other research interests are: machine learning, artificial intelligence, large-language models, medical imaging, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

My co-authors are: Cameron Chalk, Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, Bin Fu, Alejandro Huerta, Austin Luchsinger, Mario Maldonado, Robert Schweller, Lucian Silcox, Emmett Tomai, Luis Vega, Andrew Winslow, and Tim Wylie.

Publications

Optimal Staged Self-Assembly of Linear Assemblies. Journal

Cameron Chalk, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, Luis Vega, Andrew Winslow, and Tim Wylie.
In Natural Computing, 18(3) 527-548, 2019.

Link

Optimal Staged Self-Assembly of General Shapes. Journal

Cameron Chalk, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, Luis Vega, Andrew Winslow, and Tim Wylie.
In Algorithmica, 80(4), 1383-1409, 2018.

Link

Freezing Simulates Non-freezing Tile Automata. Conference

Cameron Chalk, Austin Luchsinger, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, Andrew Winslow, and Tim Wylie.
In Proc. of 24th Inter. Conf. on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA'18), 155-172, 2018.

Link

Optimal Staged Self-Assembly of Linear Assemblies. Conference

Cameron Chalk, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, Luis Vega, Andrew Winslow, and Tim Wylie.
In Proc. of 17th Inter. Conf. on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC'18), 32-45, 2018.

Link

Concentration Independent Random Number Generation in Tile Self-Assembly. Journal

Cameron Chalk, Bin Fu, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, and Tim Wylie.
In Theoretical Computer Science, 667, 1-15, March 2017.

Link

Universal Shape Replicators via Self-Assembly with Attractive and Repulsive Forces. Conference

Cameron Chalk, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, Luis Vega, and Tim Wylie.
In Proc. of the 28th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'17), 225-238, 2017.

Link

Optimal Staged Self-Assembly of General Shapes. Conference

Cameron Chalk, Eric Martinez, Robert Schweller, Luis Vega, Andrew Winslow, and Tim Wylie.
In Proc. of the 24th European Symposium of Algorithms (ESA'16), 57, 26:1--26:17, 2016.

Link

Flipping Tiles: Concentration Independent Coin Flips in Tile Self-Assembly. Conference

Cameron T. Chalk, Bin Fu, Alejandro Huerta, Mario A. Maldonado, Eric Martinez, Robert T. Schweller, and Tim Wylie.
In Proc. of the 21st Int. Conf. on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA'15), 87-103, 2015.

Link

Exploring Narrative Structure with MMORPG Quest Stories. Workshop

Tomai E., Martinez, E. and Silcox, L.
In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Games and NLP. Raleigh, NC.

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