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Manuel Carbonell

AI/ML Engineer

Education

PhD in Computer Science

Autonomous University of Barcelona
2017-2020

MSc in Modeling for Science and Engineering

Autonomous University of Barcelona
2014-2016

BSc in Applied Mathematics

Autonomous University of Barcelona
2009 - 2014

Past Projects

OpenMicList

Discover open mics and jam sessions near you. AI pipelines gather and enrich venue data from across the web. Django, React, PostgreSQL on Hetzner.

DocIntelligence

A RAG-powered interface to chat with your documents. Connects to Google Drive, vectorizes PDFs, and lets you query your knowledge base using natural language.

HikeGroups

A social app for hikers to organize group hikes, discover trails, and connect with fellow outdoor enthusiasts in their area.

Tailored Mindfulness

An AI-powered meditation app that generates personalized voice-guided meditation sessions tailored to your mood and preferences.

Experiences

Freelance AI/ML Engineer

Apr 2025 - Present
Self-employed

Delivering LLM and CV projects on Upwork. Recent project: contributed a VLM approach replacing a YOLO + embeddings pipeline for a food waste estimation client.

Top Rated on Upwork, 100% Job Success ★★★★★ 5.0 (9)
★★★★★ 5.0
It was an pleasure working with Manuel! He was organized, communicated clearly, laid out his plan and timeline, and followed it.
Train Openwakeword LLM model with custom words Upwork client
★★★★★ 5.0
Excellent professional and very committed. Manuel's contributions were vital to the project's success. He is attentive, proactive, and easy to work with. 100% recommended!
AI/ML Engineer - Speech-to-Text & Audio Processing… Upwork client
★★★★★ 5.0
Manuel was truly exceptional. He delivered on time and with high quality. His very responsove and extremely flexible. Thank you.
Local replica of napkin.io as an app using Azure… Moe W., Upwork client
★★★★★ 5.0
Manuel is always a great freelancer to work with, he is knowledgable and really understand's his business
OCR table recognition Christian S., Upwork client
★★★★★ 5.0
Manuel is excellent to work with due to his exceptional skill, great communication, ability to adapt to situations, and ability to find solutions to get the job done.
Refactor GCP Gen 2 Cloud Functions in Python… Sheldon L., Upwork client
★★★★★ 5.0
It was great to work with Manuel, I can highly recommend him!
Document Split with Convolutional Neural Networks Christian S., Upwork client
★★★★★ 5.0
Great job, went over and beyond to find a solution. Will surely hire again. Highly recommended.
AI developer Upwork client
★★★★★ 4.7
It was a pleasure to work with Manuel.
Machine Learning/AI for Image Recognition… Upwork client

AI/ML Engineer

Jan 2024 - Apr 2025
Kantar Media

LMM video APIs, RAG pipelines, full-stack delivery.

Senior Data Scientist (Consulting)

Feb 2022 - Sep 2023
Repsol (via Quant AI Lab)

Led document AI with GNN and RetinaNet.

Senior Data Scientist (Contract)

Mar 2021 - Sep 2021
Huawei

Multilingual NER and entity linking for news.

Industrial PhD Researcher

Apr 2017 - Dec 2020
Computer Vision Center & omni:us

Invented CNN-RNN and GNN for document understanding.

Publications

  • Named Entity Recogntion and Relation Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Semi-Structured Documents
    • Manuel Carbonell, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornés, Josep Lladós
    International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2020 (oral)
  • A Neural Model for Text Localization, Transcription and Named Entity Recognition in Full Pages
    • Manuel Carbonell, Alicia Fornés, Mauricio Villegas, Josep Lladós.
    Pattern Recognition Letters, 2020
  • End-to-End Handwritten Text Detection and Transcription in Full Pages
    • Manuel Carbonell, Joan Mas Romeu, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornés, Josep Lladós.
    International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition Workshops, 2019
  • Joint Recognition of Handwritten Text and Named Entities with a Neural End-to-End Model
    • Manuel Carbonell, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornés, Josep Lladós.
    International Conference on Document Analysis Systems, 2018
  • PhD Thesis: Neural Information Extraction from Semi-structured Documents
    • Manuel Carbonell

    Skills & Proficiency

    Python (pytorch, transformers, tensorflow, pandas, numpy, django, fastapi, pytest)

    Shell

    Azure DevOps, GCP

    SQL

    JavaScript

    C

    Java

    Get in Touch

    Have a project, a question, or just want to say hi? Send me a message and I will get back to you by email.