Computer scientist building Cuba's AI future — from research labs to public-health policy.
Yudivián is one of Cuba's foremost AI researchers and educators. He founded and directs the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of Havana's School of Mathematics and Computer Science, where he has been a professor since 2004. His work spans machine learning, knowledge discovery, computational epidemiology, and the modeling of Cuban Spanish.
With doctorates in Mathematical Sciences (Havana) and Informatics (Alicante), and over two decades of research, he has co-authored more than sixty peer-reviewed papers, six books, and several national-award-winning works — including the country's COVID-19 modeling effort. He led the development of Cecilia, the first language model trained on Cuban Spanish corpora.
Beyond research, Yudivián serves on Cuba's national advisory bodies on AI, big data, and public health, including the Innovation Committees of the Ministry of Public Health and the University of Havana, and the Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence at the Ministry of Communication. In 2023 he received the "For Cuban Education" distinction from the Cuban Council of State.
President, University Scientific Council
Member, Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence
President, National Commission of Data Science Degree
Vice Dean of Research and Postgraduate Studies
Director, AI Research Group
Professor
Cecilia: The Cuban Language Model
Continual Pretraining of a Small Language Model on Cuban Spanish Corpora
Bias mitigation for fair automation of classification tasks
General-purpose hierarchical optimization of ML pipelines with grammatical evolution
Automatic extension of corpora from intelligent ensembling of eHealth knowledge discovery systems outputs
La Habana: Atlas de la COVID-19
Habilitando la Transformación Digital
Introducción a la Teoría de Conjuntos y a la Lógica
"For Cuban Education" Distinction
Best Professor or Researcher
National Award for Technological Innovation
National Annual Award
Special Award · Most Scientifically Relevant Work
Co-organizer of the eHealth Knowledge Discovery Challenge (IberLEF / TASS, 2018–2021). Regular panelist on AI ethics, sign-language technology, and public-sector AI in Cuba and Latin America — recent venues include the UNESCO Andean Peace Encounter, Tecnociencia, Cibersociedad, and SaberUH. Member of national tribunals for PhD degrees in Computer Science (since 2017) and Data Science (since 2023). Consultant for the COVID-19 response of the Cuban national health system.