Hi! I am Denis, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, in the School of Engineering at PUC Chile. I am also affiliated to three centers of research excellence in Chile: i-Health, CENIA, and IMFD. I am principal researcher at the Millenium Institute for Intelligent Healthcare Engineering (iHealth), as well as associate researcher at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA). I am also adjunct researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research on Fundamentals of Data (IMFD).
I hold a professional title of Civil Engineer in Informatics, class of 2004 from UACh, Valdivia, Chile; and a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, where I was supervised by Professor Peter Brusilovsky. I earned a Fulbright scholarship to pursue my PhD studies between 2008-2013.

My research interests are Recommender Systems, Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Medical AI, Creative AI) and Intelligent User Interfaces. My research has been presented in leading AI venues such as ICML, Neurips, ICLR, ACL and CVPR. I am currently leading the Human-centered AI and Visualization (HAIVis) research group as well as co-leading the CreativAI Lab with professor Rodrigo Cádiz. I am also Faculty member of the PUC IA Lab.
If you are interested on these topics and want to work under my supervision as Master or PhD student, send me an e-mail to denis.parra[at]uc[dot]cl.

News

June 2026 PhD student Pablo Messina as first author, in collaboration with KAUST, had this research article accepted at CVPR 2026, a leading conference in computer vision. This article introduces CURE, a method for adaptive curriculum learning which allow a model like MedGemma improve on Visually grounded report generation tasks. CURE: Curriculum-guided Multi-task Training for Reliable Anatomy Grounded Report Generation.

April 2026 Paper presentar at ICLR 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. A collaboration with researchers at CENIA where we investigated potential redundancy of layers in Transformers, and we introduce a method that identifies these layers better than previous cosine similarity-based methods. Rethinking Layer Relevance in Large Language Models Beyond Cosine Similarity.

December 2025 We presented a paper at Neurips "A compressive-expressive communication framework for compositional representations" in San Diego, CA, USA. This article was co-authored with Rafael Elberg (MSc student) and Mircea Petrache, Professor at Math Departament at PUC.

September 2025 I attended de MICCAI conference in Daejeon, South Korea, were I presented two papers in the HAIC workshop .

August 2024 Attending ACL 2024 conference in Bangkok, Thailand. We are presenting one Findings paper "Extracting and Encoding: Leveraging Large Language Models and Medical Knowledge to Enhance Radiological Text Representation" [link] and two papers in the BioNLP workshop about radiological report generation led by Oscar Loch and Diego Campanini.

July 2024 Attending the ICML 2024 conference in Vienna, Austria. We are presenting the article "On the Unexpected Effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Recommendation"[paper][ppt], with first author MSc student Alvaro Labarca and in collaboration with colleague Rodrigo Toro.

March 2024 I am one of the three Program Chairs at the [ACM IUI conference (along Dorota Glowaka and Ofra Amir), which takes place in Greenville, SC, USA this year.

April 2023-September 2023 On sabbatical leave, I'm spending these 6 months at KU Leuven in Belgium researching on XAI and text report generation from medical images.

...older news

Selected Projects

Automatic Radiology Report Generation from Chest X-rays

Messina et al, CVPR 2026, CURE: Curriculum-guided Multi-task Training for Reliable Anatomy Grounded Report Generation [conf]

Messina et al, ACL 2024, Extracting and encoding: Leveraging large language models and medical knowledge to enhance radiological text representation [conf]

Pino et al, MICCAI 2021, Clinically Correct Report Generation from Chest X-Rays Using Templates CNN-TRG [conf]

Messina et al, MedNeurips 2022, Two-stage Conditional Chest X-ray Radiology Report Generation CRG [conf]

A Survey on Deep Learning for Automatic Generation of Radiological Reports (*for a pre-print of this article, check this ArXiv link)

Slides: Evaluation of radiological report generation [pdf]

Slides: Visual, language and mutimodal models for radiological report generation [pdf]

Intelligent User Interfaces for Recommendation Systems


TalkExplorer [conf][journal][demo]	SetFusion [conf][journal][video] [slides]	Moodplay [conf] [video]
A Survey on Interactive Recommender Systems
*for pre-prints of these articles, check my publications page

Latest Publications

Messina, P., Vidal, R., Parra, D., Soto, Á., & Araujo, V. (2024). Extracting and Encoding: Leveraging Large Language Models and Medical Knowledge to Enhance Radiological Text Representation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024 (pp. 3955-3986) [link].

Labarca-Silva, Á., Parra, D., & Icarte, R. T. (2024) On the Unexpected Effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Recommendation. In Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning ICML 2024 [link].

Garretón, M., Morini, F., Celhay, P., Dörk, M., & Parra, D. (2023). Attitudinal effects of data visualizations and illustrations in data stories. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics [link].

...more publications

Students

PhD

Pablo Messina (co-advised with Prof. Alvaro Soto): Grounded VQA and Radiology Report Generation

Ivania Donoso (co-advised with Prof. Katrien Verbert, KU Leuven): HCAI for explainable medical AI

Oscar Loch: Medical image-based diagnosis in the long tail

Pablo Poblete

Gabriel Acevedo

Joaquin de Ferrari (co-advised with Prof. Jocelyn Dunstan): Multimodal image-based diagnosis

MSc

Alfredo Mahns: RL for music generation

Francisco Madariaga: VL models for radiology report generation

Pedro Palma (co-advised with Prof. Rodrigo Toro): RL Recommender Systems

Alonso Tamayo

Juan Manuel Hernández

Alejandro Plaza

Alumni

Jorge Facuse, MSc

Gregory Schuit, MSc

Manuela Garretón, PhD (now Prof. at School of Design, UC Chile)

Andrés Carvallo, PhD (now at CENIA)

José Miguel Herrera, PhD (now at Pangeanic)

Manuel Cartagena, MSc

Pablo Pino, MSc (now at iHealth)

Daniela Flores, MSc

Isidora Palma, MSc

Tamara Covacevich, MSc

Antonio Ossa, MSc (co-advised with Prof. Hans Lobel)

Pablo Messina, MSc (now PhD student UC Chile)

Ivania Donoso, Eng. MSc (now PhD student UC Chile - KU Leuven)

Lukas Svicarovic, MSc

Vicente Domínguez, MSc

María Fernanda Sepúlveda, MSc

Jorge Schellman, MSc

Maribel Alvarado, MPGI MSc (now at Bibliotecas UC)

Teaching

Graduate

Second Semester 2024: IIC3633 Recommender Systems
First Semester 2024: IIC3633 Recommender Systems
2023: No teaching, on sabbatical leave.
Second Semester 2018: Recommender Systems
Second Semester 2017: Recommender Systems
Second Semester 2016: Recommender Systems
Second Semester 2015: Recommender Systems
First Semester 2015: Data Mining (MPGI Master Program )
Second Semester 2014: Recommender Systems (CS Master Program). The page for this class is here
First Semester 2014: Data Mining (MPGI Master Program )

Undergraduate

First Semester 2024: Introduction to Programming.
Second Semester 2018: Information Visualization.
First Semester 2018: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
Second Semester 2017: Information Visualization.
First Semester 2017: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
First & Second Semester 2016: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
First & Second Semester 2015: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.
First & Second Semester 2014: Introduction to the Major in Computer Science.

Academic Service

Workshop Organization

Journal Reviews

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
ACM TiiS (distinguished reviewer)
Interacting with Computers, Oxford University Press
Computer Communications, Elsevier
Social Network Analysis and Mining, Springer
Knowledge-Based Systems, Elsevier

Conference Reviews

2026: ICML, IUI, RecSys
2025: ACL, ICML, Neurips, IUI, RecSys
2024: IUI, RecSys
2018: WWW, RecSys, UMAP, IUI
2017: WWW, RecSys, IUI
WWW 2016 (Web Science Track)
ACM Conference in Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2016
ACM RecSys 2015 (Posters and Demos)
CIKM 2015
I-KNOW 2015
RDSM 2015 Workshop, collocated at WWW 2015
MSM 2015 Workshop, collocated at WWW 2015
VISLA 2015 Workshop, collocated at LAK 2015
Web Science Track at WWW 2015
ACM CHI 2015
I-KNOW 2014
Web Science Track at WWW 2014
SocialCom 2014
ACM Hypertext 2014
LiUD 2014 Workshop, collocated at UMAP 2014
MSM 2014 Workshop, collocated at WWW 2014
I-KNOW 2013
Springer Volume on RecSys for TEL, 2013
EDM 2012
CARS 2012 Workshop (co-located with Recsys 2012)
RecSys, 2010
Web Intelligence Conference, 2011
Web Intelligence Conference, 2009