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 really 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 regarding 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 at a company as a CTO, 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. The award was given 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 just starting with Azure and Luis was able to design future-proof solutions and comply with all internal regulations and policies.

Four years ago, Luis decided to make a switch in his career. He started to learn by himself everything related to Machine Learning and Data Science. He started to share this knowledge through his social media and through conferences, and, for this reason, Microsoft decided to switch the category from Office MVP to AI MVP, which he has held for 4 years in a row now.

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

At the moment, Luis is very interested in all Hugging Face has to offer and their implementation with Pytorch.

Luis started working at element61 in June 2023.