Rolando
Villaseñor

A running study of the Spotify UK Top 50 as a record of collective attention, tracking where chart anomalies originate and how cultural moments (a biopic, a World Cup match, an album drop) travel into streaming behavior. Hand-coded theme and mood annotations first, to build gold-standard ground truth before any automated sentiment work.

Long-format weekly data · theme & mood codebook · NLP automation earmarked for v2, evaluated against human labels.

Building and evaluating language systems and internal AI tools at SWI swissinfo.ch, Switzerland's international multilingual news service. Understanding journalists' needs and issues and translating them into testable AI applications, and evaluating whether the resulting systems are genuinely useful, not merely technically functional.

Journalism · Multilingual · recommendation systems · human-in-the-loop evaluation.

A natural-language hiking search for Switzerland: type “an easy ~10 km loop near Zurich” and an LLM parses it into structured criteria: distance, trail type, surface, loop, which are then matched against the official Swiss hiking network. The interface shows its parsed interpretation of every query, so you always see exactly what the model understood. Working prototype with route stages, maps, and GPX export.

Natural language → structured query · LLM extraction · Swiss open data · Leaflet maps & GPX.

Datathon: Switzerland's largest ML & AI hackathon

Leadership · 2023–24

Led the 2024 edition for the Analytics Club: 150+ participants, profit up 130%, and new sponsors signed including UBS and Axpo, after co-leading the 2023 edition across sponsorships, challenge design, and event operations.

Sponsor & stakeholder management · challenge design · event operations at scale.