a photo of me

Hey, I'm Ariel
Guerra-Adames

ariel.guerra-adames [at] inria.fr

I'm a doctoral student in medical informatics at the Bordeaux Population Health Research Center of the University of Bordeaux, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science (Inria), where I am a member of the REGALIA team. My doctoral thesis develops and evaluates generative AI models as counterfactual audit instruments: models fine-tuned to emulate documented clinical decisions become measuring devices for the demographic asymmetries embedded in those decisions. I work primarily on emergency triage, across French and American emergency department data. My research efforts are supported by a PhD Grant from the Digital Public Health Graduate Program of the University of Bordeaux.

Previously, I obtained a master's degree (MSc) in Machine Learning and Data Mining at Université Jean Monnet/Université de Lyon, graduating ranked 2nd with highest honors. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) in Telecommunications from the Technological University of Panama, specializing in Signal Processing. I've also worked across multiple research labs including GITTS (Panama), Hubert Curien Laboratory (Saint-Étienne), and the IMS Laboratory (Bordeaux).

When I have time (and money) I learn languages, travel and take photos, and I even used to be an audiovisual producer! Anyways, welcome to my website. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

News

  • NEW! 18/08/2026: Our paper "Auditing sex/gender disparities in emergency triage with LLM-based paired comparisons" has been accepted at npj Digital Medicine!
  • 21/07/2026: I have been selected as a winner of the JSPH International Participant Award 2026 at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Public Health.
  • 🎙️ Featured on France Culture's "Avec Sciences" discussing how to create inclusive medical AI
  • 06/05/2026: I gave an invited talk "La IA como espejo: sesgos, gobernanza y auditoría de algoritmos en la práctica" at Ciudad del Saber, Panama City, Panama.
  • 23/04/2026: I'll be speaking at the Panama International Critical Care Congress & FEPIMCTI AI Datathon 2026, Panama City, Panama.
  • 01/04/2026: I was invited to speak at the 14ème congrès SoFraSimS, Bordeaux, France, presenting on explainability methods for AI-assisted detection of cognitive biases in emergency triage.
  • 17/03/2026: I presented "C'est pas moi, c'est mon fine-tuning !" at the Journée llm@hopital.fr, PariSanté Campus, Paris, France.
  • 16/10/2025: I was invited to give a seminar at the Centre d'Épidémiologie et de Recherche en Santé des Populations at the University of Toulouse.
  • 11/07/2025: I was invited to the University of Kyoto by Professor Taku Iwami to collaborate on a new LLM-based companion app for sudden cardiac death prediction.
  • 16/06/2025: I was invited to the Institut de mathématiques de Toulouse by Jean Michel Loubès to collaborate on a novel optimal transport part of my thesis.
  • Check out the INSERM press release about our work!
  • 03/04/2025: Watch our recent presentation on synthetic medical data generation during the 2025 edition of Dataquitaine, in Bordeaux
  • 17/12/2024: My paper "Uncovering Judgment Biases in Emergency Triage: A Public Health Approach Based on Large Language Models" won Best Paper on the "Impact and Society" track at ML4H!
  • 23/10/2024: We got a new publication accepted in JMIR AI - "Harnessing Moderate-Sized Language Models for Reliable Patient Data De-identification in Emergency Department Records".

Research Interests

My main research interest is turning generative models into instruments. A model fine-tuned on hundreds of thousands of real triage decisions reproduces them with reliability comparable to human inter-rater agreement, which makes it something you can experiment on in ways you cannot experiment on a nurse: flip a patient's recorded sex, or age them by forty years, hold every documented clinical detail fixed, and measure what moves. It is fairness methodology aimed at documented human practice rather than at the model itself.

Most of my work sits in the machinery that makes such a measurement trustworthy. Discrete attributes are easy to intervene on; continuous and confounded ones are not, so aging a patient means optimising in the latent space of a Transformer-VAE rather than editing a number and producing a seventy-year-old with the hemodynamics of a twenty-five-year-old. Ordinal acuity outcomes need directional metrics rather than parity measures. And an audit is only as good as its counterfactuals: in recent work, an apparent age effect in stroke presentations dissolved once counterfactual vital signs were made to inherit the original record's missingness pattern, because what the audit had been measuring was the generator inventing reassuring readings for encounters that never took them. I care about validity controls of that kind at least as much as about the estimates they qualify.

A related commitment is that every stage runs on open weights and local hardware. In most jurisdictions patient records cannot be sent to a hosted frontier model, so an audit depending on one cannot be run by the institutions that hold the records and would act on the result.

I also work on explainability methods for locating where these shifts come from, including linear probes, gradient-based saliency, and optimal-transport concept attribution, the latter in collaboration with the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse. Recently I began working on Quantum Machine Learning for sensitive attribute prediction with MIT Critical Data.

Earlier work spans unstructured text analysis, from sentiment analysis and topic modeling to clinical text classification, and non-invasive brain-computer interfaces during my engineering thesis. There's more to it than that; if you have questions about any of it, don't hesitate to ask.

Some Publications

* = Equal contribution

Teaching

I teach 64 hours per year at the Master's and PhD level at the University of Bordeaux, covering core topics in machine learning and its applications to healthcare:

Fundamentals of Machine Learning

Master 2 / PhD level - Master in Public Health Data Science (PHDS) - University of Bordeaux

Core ML concepts including supervised and unsupervised learning, model evaluation, regularization, and practical implementation.

Fundamentals of Deep Learning

Master 2 / PhD level - Master in Public Health Data Science (PHDS) - University of Bordeaux

Neural network architectures, backpropagation, CNNs, RNNs, transformers, and modern deep learning frameworks.

Natural Language Processing for Electronic Health Records

Master 2 / PhD level - Master in Public Health Data Science (PHDS) and Master in Information Systems and Information Technology for Health (SITIS) - University of Bordeaux

Applying NLP techniques to clinical text: named entity recognition, de-identification, clinical coding, and working with medical language models.

Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Programming (Python)

Master 2 / PhD level - Master in Public Health Data Science (PHDS) - University of Bordeaux

Core OOP concepts in Python including classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, and practical software design patterns.

Talks & Presentations

In the Media