Biography

I am a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind where I work on multi-modal generative models and world models. I received my PhD from the Computer Science & Engineering Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor under the supervision of Professor Honglak Lee. During my PhD, I mainly focused on building conditional video generation models and contributed to one of the first world models from pixels successfully used to improve sample-efficiency in model-based reinforcement learning.

Fun Facts: I played for my national basketball team (I am originally from Ecuador). I was also second best scorer in the nation in a national championship I played back in the day. I was part of a team that beat the media's projected champion during a championship in Quito (the guy that was best scorer in the national championship played for the other team :P). Let's have a Curry-range 3-point shootout. Ok, I'll stop now ...

News

• 05/2026: Our first multi-modal generative model, Gemini Omni Flash, was announced at Google I/O 2026, and made available through the Gemini App, Flow, and YouTube Shorts.
• 08/2025: Our general purpose world model, Genie 3, was announced to the public.
• 05/2025: Our state-of-the-art audio and video generation model, Veo 3, was announced at Google I/O 2025, and made available through Gemini Ultra.
• 12/2024: Our state-of-the-art video generation model, Veo 2, was announced and made available to a selected group of users.
• 05/2024: Our most capable video generation model to date, Veo, was announced at Google I/O 2024. Stay tuned for our official model release!.
• 05/2023: Our text-to-video model, Phenaki, was highlighted at Google I/O 2023.
• 03/2023: Honored to be giving a talk on Generative Models at Khipu2023, taking place in Montevideo, Uruguay.
• 02/2023: Our paper "Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description" has been accepted to ICLR 2023.