Luis Valencia

Luis is a computer science engineer with over 20 years of experience in different technical skills. He started with the first versions of .Net and even the classic ASP and Frontpage editors. He grew fast and became an expert on .Net development and SQL server. During his software development career, he worked as a Developer, a Software Designer (UML), and a Software Architect. 

Around 2009, he became interested in SharePoint Development. SharePoint 2010 came out, and Luis obtained all the certifications for this Microsoft Tool. During the next years, he upgraded his knowledge every time there was a new version of SharePoint, including when it became part of Office 365 Suite as a cloud service offering. 

When in Colombia, Luis worked as a CTO at a company, leading a technical team of juniors and seniors. He guided this team with excellence and provided customers with the required final product. 

In 2016, Luis was awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for sharing his knowledge with the local community through meetups, local conferences, and blog posts. 

He moved to Belgium in 2017 and worked as a Solutions Architect for PwC, leading the design of new and upgrading of existing solutions. PwC was starting with Azure, and Luis was able to design future-proof solutions that comply with all internal regulations and policies. 

Four years ago, Luis decided to change careers. He started learning everything related to Machine Learning and Data Science by himself. He started sharing this knowledge through his social media and at conferences, and for this reason, Microsoft decided to switch the category from Office MVP to AI MVP, which he has held for four years in a row now. 

Luis has knowledge and experience in Recommender Systems, LightGBM for regression, and PyTorch, amongst others. 

Luis specializes in multimodal RAG for documents with embedded images and real-time streaming integrations for chatbots.  At element61, he has also been instrumental in the development and deployment of several cutting-edge chatbot solutions for clients like Argenx, Moore Grants, Liantis, and Cubigo. His work involves using technologies like LangChain, OpenAI models, HuggingFace Hub Models, Azure AI Search, and Pinecone. 

Luis started working at element61 in June 2023.