PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Marcelo Mendoza

Marcelo Mendoza is a computer scientist whose AI research brings together natural language processing, information retrieval and social-network analysis. He earned degrees in engineering and computing in Chile, held academic and research posts at the University of Valparaíso, Yahoo! Research and UTFSM, and has served as president of the Chilean Association for Pattern Recognition since 2015. His work includes social-bot detection, a BERT-style approach to discourse, the CLNews misinformation dataset and language-model methods for extracting key facts from news. In 2025, he was named to the World's Top 2% Scientists list, and as of October 2026, he is an associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a principal investigator at CENIA.

Now at
Chilean Association for Pattern Recognition, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and National Center for Artificial Intelligence
Badges

Timeline

  1. 1997–2007

    Engineering and a computing PhD

    At UTFSM, he earns a licentiate in engineering in 1997 and a master's in informatics engineering in 2001. At the University of Chile's Department of Computer Science, he earns a doctorate in computing in 2007.

  2. 2002–2014

    Valparaíso and Yahoo Research

    From 2002 to 2009, he is a full-time associate professor at the University of Valparaíso. From 2009 to 2010, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Yahoo! Research in the University of Chile's Department of Computer Science. He also works part-time as a Yahoo Labs researcher from 2009 to 2014.

  3. 2010–2022

    Associate professor at UTFSM

    From 2010 to 2022, he is a full-time associate professor in the Department of Informatics at UTFSM.

  4. Since 2015

    President of ACHIRP

    He serves as president of the Chilean Association for Pattern Recognition from 2015.

  5. 2020–2022

    Bots, BERT and CLNews

    His research spans text mining, information retrieval and data mining in social networks. In 2020, he coauthors “Bots in Social and Interaction Networks: Detection and Impact Estimation”; in 2021, he coauthors a BERT-style approach that uses predictive coding for discourse representations and improves performance in six of 11 tasks. In 2022, he coauthors CLNews, a dataset for disinformation analysis of Chile's social outbreak.

  6. April 2025

    Extracting 5W1H from news

    At The ACM Web Conference in April 2025, he presents “Imitating Human Reasoning to Extract 5W1H in News.” The paper introduces extractive and question-level reasoning methods that guide language models through news extraction.

  7. 2025

    The World's Top 2% Scientists

    CENIA includes him in the 2025 edition of the World's Top 2% Scientists list for the sustained impact of his work.

  8. As of October 2026

    UC professorship and Spanish medical AI

    As of October 2026, he is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In March 2026, he serves as a principal investigator at CENIA and co-investigator on a CENIA and UC project selected for an NVIDIA academic grant to develop a Spanish-language medical AI model.

Career

  1. Since 2026National Center for Artificial IntelligencePrincipal Investigator
  2. Since 2015Chilean Association for Pattern RecognitionPresident
  3. NowPontifical Catholic University of ChileAssociate Professor
  4. 2010–2022Federico Santa María Technical UniversityAssociate Professor
  5. 2009–2014YahooPostdoctoral Researcher, Researcher
  6. 2002–2009University of ValparaísoAssociate Professor

Education

  1. 2007University of ChileDoctorate in Computing
  2. 2001Federico Santa María Technical UniversityMaster's in Informatics Engineering
  3. 1997Federico Santa María Technical UniversityLicentiate in Engineering

From the biography.

  1. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes National Center for Artificial Intelligence. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes Yahoo. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  4. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Yahoo. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Marcelo Mendoza yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Pagina DCC - Marcelo Mendoza R. users.dcc.uchile.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. PDI - Resultado de Búsqueda investigadores.anid.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Marcelo Mendoza – Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data imfd.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Augmenting BERT-style Models with Predictive Coding to Improve Discourse-level Representations aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. PUBLICATIONS – Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data imfd.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Investigador de Cenia presenta en The ACM Web Conference 2025 método de IA que mejora extracción de información en noticias cenia.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Investigadores de CENIA Pablo Barceló y Marcelo Mendoza destacan en ranking mundial del 2% de los científicos más influyentes - CENIA cenia.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Investigadores CENIA y UC obtienen apoyo de NVIDIA para el primer modelo de IA médica especializado en español - CENIA cenia.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Marcelo Mendoza - Licenciatura en Ingeniería en Ciencia de la Computación cienciadelacomputacion.uc.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.