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Salva Rühling Cachay

I am a third-year PhD student at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Rose Yu and Prof. Duncan Watson-Parris. My goal is to develop and use machine learning (ML) methods for positive real-world impact in areas like climate modeling and weather forecasting. On the ML side, I am particularly interested in self-supervised learning, large-scale forecasting, and generative modeling.

I was a research intern at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) during the summers of 2023 and 2022, focusing on machine learning for climate modeling. Before, I had the pleasure to work with Prof. David Rolnick on climate change+ML at Mila - Quebec AI Institute.

I got started in ML research through a project on weakly supervised learning with Ben Boecking and Prof. Artur Dubrawski at Carnegie Mellon University's Auton Lab. I also led a diverse team of fellow undergraduates in our research project on improving El Niño forecasts with graph neural networks, in terms of both performance and interpretability. We were supported by a Microsoft AI for Earth grant (see our spotlighted profile).

I am German-Peruvian, and was privileged to be able to grow up in both countries and that volunteering/work enabled me to have a wonderful time living in Colombia, India, and Canada for extended periods of time. I enjoy immersing myself into nature and new cultures, dancing, beach life, and exotic fruits.

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, are interested in my research, or just want to chat! I'm particularly happy to support underrepresented minorities :)

news

Sep 2024 Probabilistic Climate Emulation with Spherical DYffusion is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 as a spotlight!
Jul 2024 Honoured to receive the best paper award at ICML ML4ESM workshop!
Jul 2024 Honoured to receive a best reviewer award at ICML!
Feb 2024 Excited to join Arash Vahdat’s team at NVIDIA as a research intern this summer!
Dec 2023 New blog post on DYffusion released!

selected publications [full list]

(*) denotes equal contribution

  1. NeurIPSSpotlight
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024.
    Spotlight Presentation; Best Paper Award at ICML ML4ESM workshop 2024
  2. NeurIPS
    Salva Rühling CachayBo ZhaoHailey Joren, and Rose Yu
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023.
  3. NeurIPS
    Salva Rühling Cachay*, Venkatesh Ramesh**, Jason N. S. ColeHoward Barker, and David Rolnick
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2021.
  4. NeurIPS
    Salva Rühling CachayBenedikt Boecking, and Artur Dubrawski
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2021.
  5. arXiv
    Salva Rühling Cachay, Emma Erickson, Arthur Fender C. Bucker, Ernest Pokropek, Willa Potosnak, Suyash BireSalomey Osei, and Björn Lütjens
    arXiv:2310.14189, 2021.