Thoughtworks Arts

Carlos G. Gavidia

Carlos G. Gavidia

Carlos G. Gavidia

Carlos is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Software Engineering at The Open University, and part of the SEAD Research Group. He is also a Research Associate at the UKRI TAS Node in Resilience.

He graduated in 2020 from University College London with a PhD in Software Engineering, under the supervision of Earl T. Barr, Federica Sarro and Mark Harman. As a postgraduate researcher, Carlos studied cooperation in software development teams using game-theoretic models. He also has a Masters in Computer Science from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru; with a dissertation on ant colony optimisation algorithms applied to computer vision. Previously, Carlos was an undergraduate student of Systems Engineering at Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria.

As a software engineer, Carlos worked on projects ranging from mobile applications to large-scale information systems. He has also taught courses on programming fundamentals and algorithms to undergraduate engineering students.

Birds of the British Empire

While working with Thoughtworks as a software developer, Carlos developed with artist James Coupe to develop a system for generating images of artificial birds, based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The artificial birds are fantastical &emdash; birds could have more than one head, and not necessarily two eyes. Bird creation was done in two phases: image generation followed by image manipulation. Image generation used AttnGAN to produce an initial image given a textual description. During image manipulation, InterfaceGAN altered this image over a specific attribute, like wing size or feather colour.