Aarón Ayllón Benítez

AI / ML Leader · Product & Platform Strategy · Research ↔ Production

PhD Computer Science · MSc Artificial Intelligence · Four years line-managing ML teams at BASF Digital Solutions. I build the bridge between research rigor and production pragmatism.

Español English Français
Aarón Ayllón Benítez

Executive Summary

Leading ML teams is a translation problem — between research and production, between long-term R&D and short-term commitments, between what models can do and what the business actually needs. I have spent the last four years doing that translation at BASF Digital Solutions, scaling direct reports from 8 to 16 within a 60-person multi-function portfolio, and leading two production ML platforms adopted across multiple internal teams.

My path is deliberate: PhD in Computer Science (Bordeaux), MSc in Artificial Intelligence, postdoctoral research applying ML to gene regulatory networks, first-author publications in Q1 journals and IEEE, and competitive research grants as main author — followed by industry because the most interesting ML problems are the ones that have to ship. Portfolio decisions, team scaling, and platform thinking are where I operate best.

Focus Areas

  • Production ML platforms & self-service data products
  • Portfolio rationalization, ROI-driven decisions, cost avoidance
  • People leadership: hiring, performance, career paths, underperformance management
  • Computer vision, time-series forecasting, knowledge graphs, GenAI applications
  • Research-to-production translation & AI-native engineering culture
  • Cross-functional alignment: business, engineering, data science, operations

Selected Projects & Platforms

Four initiatives that illustrate how I bridge research and production — from academic tools adopted by bioinformatics communities to enterprise ML platforms with measurable business impact.

⚙️
Production Platform
Computer Vision Platform

Led a Computer Vision platform offering reusable templates for classification, segmentation and detection — now in production across multiple internal teams. Delivered multi-million-euro cumulative cost savings during my ownership.

📈
Self-Service Platform
Forecasting Platform

Led evolution and maintenance of a self-service time-series forecasting platform aimed at business users rather than data scientists — generating significant recurring annual savings for the organisation.

🧬
Research Software
GSAn

Interactive web platform transforming high-throughput gene data into actionable biological insights. Published in NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics (Q1, 2020). Used by researchers as an alternative to classical enrichment analysis.

🌱
Research + Industry
EPPO Ontology

Contributed to an internal ontology integrating regulatory and biological data. Enabled flexible data extraction, improved decision-making and reduced manual effort in crop-protection workflows. Published in Frontiers in AI (2023).

Experience

Publications

First-author peer-reviewed publications in Q1 journals and IEEE proceedings. Click on any item to expand details.

GSAn: a Web server as an alternative to enrichment analysis for annotating gene sets

NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics · 2020 · Q1
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, R. Bourqui, P. Thébault, F. Mougin

Presents GSAn, a web server offering an alternative to classical over-representation analysis. Clusters semantic relationships between annotation terms to provide richer, more interpretable gene-set annotations.

A new method for evaluating the impacts of semantic similarity measures on the annotation of gene sets

PLoS ONE · 2018
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, F. Mougin, J. Allali, R. Thiébaut, P. Thébault

Introduces a novel evaluation methodology for semantic similarity measures applied to gene set annotation, quantifying how measure choice affects downstream biological interpretation.

Deciphering gene sets annotations with ontology-based visualization

IEEE 21st International Conference on Information Visualization (IV) · London · 2017
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, P. Thébault, J.T. Fernández-Breis, M. Quesada-Martinez, F. Mougin, R. Bourqui

Proposes an ontology-driven visualization approach for interpreting gene set annotations. Invited talk — travel grant awarded by the Société Française de BioInformatique (SFBI).

Development and Characterization of a Fixed Repertoire of Blood Transcriptome Modules Based on Co-expression Patterns Across Immunological States

bioRxiv · 2019 · Collaborative
+
M.C. Altman, D. Rinchai, N. Baldwin, M. Toufiq, E. Whalen, M. Garand, B. Ahamed Kabeer, M. Alfaki, S. Presnell, P. Khaenam, A. Ayllon Benitez et al.

Large multi-author collaboration producing a reproducible module framework for blood transcriptome analysis across immunological conditions.

EPPO Ontology Application in Crop Protection

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · 2023 · Industry
+
Industry contribution — BASF Digital Solutions

Contributed to the development of an internal ontology integrating regulatory and external biological data for crop-protection workflows. Enabled flexible data extraction and reduced manual effort.

rGSAn: An R package dedicated to gene set analysis using semantic similarity measures

useR! Conference · Toulouse · 2019 · Invited talk
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, F. Mougin, P. Thébault

Presented the R implementation of GSAn at the useR! Conference, opening the methodology to the broader R and bioinformatics community.

Teaching & Mentoring

100+ hours of university teaching at the masters and bachelor's level, plus mentoring of 25+ students across four academic years — covering bioinformatics, databases and computer science fundamentals.

University Teaching
Course Institution & Level Year Hours
Applied Functional Genomics (VT20) Umeå University · Master in Biology (2nd semester) 2019–2020 40
Introduction to Databases (M1104) Université de Bordeaux · DUT Informatique 2017–2018 54
Introduction to Environment Systems (M1101) Université de Bordeaux · DUT Informatique 2017–2018 10
Total 104
Student Mentoring
Year Level Students Duration
2019 2nd year Master in Software Engineering 7 2 months
2018 2nd year Bachelor in Biology 1 2 months
2018 2nd year Master in Software Engineering 8 2 months
2017 1st year Master in Bioinformatics 4 2 months
2016 1st year CS Engineering 1 2 months
2016 1st year Master in Bioinformatics 4 2 months

Editorial & Peer Review

Guest Editor

Plants (MDPI, Q1) — Special issue: "Bridging the Annotation Gap in Non-Model Plant Species". 2020–present. JCR category rank 58/234 (Q1) in Plant Sciences. Keywords: gene annotation, non-model organisms, gene network inference, machine learning.

Journal Peer Review
  • Microorganisms (MDPI) — Reviewer · 2020
Conference Peer Review
Conference Role Location Year
useR! 2020 — The R User Conference Sub-reviewer Virtual 2020
16th ISCB Student Council Symposium Sub-reviewer Virtual 2020
15th ISCB Student Council Symposium Sub-reviewer Switzerland 2019
3rd BR-SCS Network(ING): ISCB Brazilian Student Council Symposium Sub-reviewer Brazil 2018
4th International Conference on Technologies and Innovation (CITI) Reviewer Ecuador 2018

Talks & Public Speaking

Industry Talks & Podcasts
  • Cluster IA Comunidad de Madrid · Podcast: "Build vs Buy vs Open Source in GenAI" · Apr 2026
  • Expoquimia 2023 · Barcelona · Industry talk: "Supporting the chemical industry through advanced image analysis"
  • TECNALIA · Podcast: "Tecnología, Pasión y Futuro" · Jun 2023
Scientific Communication
  • My PhD in 1024 characters · Published essay · Bulletin de la société informatique de France · Nov 2019
  • SMS Debate (Science-Media-Society) · TousEnScience · Bordeaux · 2018 & 2019 editions
  • Scientific Game Jam Bordeaux · 1st Prize — video game based on PhD research · Mar 2018
  • My PhD in 180 seconds (MT180s) · French PhD pitch competition · Bordeaux · Feb 2018

Education

MSc Artificial Intelligence

Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR) · 2023–2024

UNIR
PhD in Computer Science (Informatics)

Université de Bordeaux / LaBRI · Ministerial funding (MESR) · 2016–2019

UB
MSc Bioinformatics (Avg. 9/10)

University of Murcia · 2014–2015

UMU
BSc Biochemistry

University of Murcia · 2009–2013

UMU