Hi! I am Denis, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, in the School of Engineering at PUC Chile. I am principal researcher at the Millennium Institute for Intelligent Healthcare Engineering (iHealth), associate researcher at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), and 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 Prof. 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 work has appeared in leading AI venues including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, and CVPR. I lead the Human-centered AI and Visualization (HAIVis) group, co-lead the CreativAI Lab with Prof. Rodrigo Cádiz, and am a faculty member of the PUC IA Lab.

Interested in these topics and want to work with me as a Master's or PhD student? Email me at denis.parra[at]uc[dot]cl.

News

  • June 2026PhD student Pablo Messina (first author), in collaboration with KAUST, had a paper accepted at CVPR 2026. It introduces CURE, an adaptive curriculum-learning method that helps models like MedGemma improve on visually grounded report generation. CURE paper.
  • April 2026Paper presented at ICLR 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — a collaboration with CENIA on redundancy of Transformer layers, introducing a method that identifies such layers better than prior cosine-similarity approaches. ICLR paper.
  • December 2025Presented a paper at NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego — "A compressive-expressive communication framework for compositional representations", with Rafael Elberg (MSc) and Prof. Mircea Petrache (Math, PUC). NeurIPS poster.
  • September 2025Attended MICCAI 2025 in Daejeon, South Korea, presenting two papers in the HAIC workshop. HAIC workshop.
  • August 2024Attended ACL 2024 in Bangkok — one Findings paper on leveraging LLMs and medical knowledge for radiological text representation, and two BioNLP workshop papers on report generation led by Oscar Loch and Diego Campanini. ACL Findings.
  • July 2024Attended ICML 2024 in Vienna, presenting "On the Unexpected Effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Recommendation" with MSc student Álvaro Labarca and Rodrigo Toro. ICML paper.
  • March 2024Program Chair of the ACM IUI 2024 conference (with Dorota Głowacka and Ofra Amir), held in Greenville, SC, USA. IUI 2024.
  • Apr–Sep 2023Sabbatical leave at KU Leuven, Belgium, researching XAI and text report generation from medical images.

Older news →

Selected Projects

Automatic Radiology Report Generation from Chest X-rays

Vision–language and multimodal models that generate clinically correct radiological reports from chest X-rays, with work on anatomy grounding, curriculum learning, and evaluation.

Intelligent User Interfaces for Recommender Systems

Interactive and hybrid recommendation interfaces — TalkExplorer (multiple prospects of relevance), SetFusion (hybrid recommendation of conference papers), and Moodplay (music artist recommendation).

Latest Publications

  1. 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. Findings of the ACL 2024 (pp. 3955–3986).
  2. Labarca-Silva, Á., Parra, D., & Toro Icarte, R. (2024). On the Unexpected Effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Recommendation. ICML 2024.
  3. 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.

More on Google Scholar →

Students

PhD

  • Pablo Messina (co-advised, Prof. Álvaro Soto) — Grounded VQA and radiology report generation
  • Ivania Donoso (co-advised, Prof. Katrien Verbert, KU Leuven) — HCAI for explainable medical AI
  • Oscar Loch — Medical image-based diagnosis in the long tail
  • Pablo Poblete
  • Gabriel Acevedo
  • Joaquín de Ferrari (co-advised, 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, 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., 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, Prof. Hans Lobel)
  • Pablo Messina, MSc — now PhD student, UC Chile
  • Ivania Donoso, 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

Undergraduate

  • 2024-1 Introduction to Programming
  • 2018-2 Information Visualization
  • 2018-1 Introduction to the Major in Computer Science
  • 2017-2 Information Visualization
  • 2017-1 Introduction to the Major in Computer Science
  • 2014–2016 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
  • 2017–2018: WWW, RecSys, UMAP, IUI
  • 2015–2016: WWW, IUI, CIKM, CHI, RecSys (posters & demos)
  • 2012–2014: Hypertext, EDM, SocialCom, WWW Web Science, Web Intelligence