sal.aguinaga
Lead ML Architect · Agentic AI & LLM systems

Sal Aguinaga, PhD

AI/ML Engineer & Data Scientist

AI design and solutions builder, software developer, data scientist & hardware engineer. I take machine learning from research to production — agentic AI, LLMs, and graph ML — on top of a decade-plus of hardware and systems engineering.

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Black and white portrait of Sal Aguinaga
8+ yrsML/AI, research to production
PhDComputer Science, Notre Dame
AAAI-25LLM trustworthiness research
2 patentsTelecom & network hardware
Selected code

From the lab

All repositories →
Stats from GitHub
Experience

Research to production

  • 2021 – Present
    Lead ML Architect · Deloitte Global
    Agent orchestration for vulnerability detection and patching. End-to-end LLM and agentic AI systems on AWS and Kubernetes; replaced proprietary graph infrastructure with PyTorch Geometric GNNs, saving $120K+ in licensing.
  • 2019 – 2021
    Enterprise Data Scientist · Anthem, Inc.
    Graph neural networks over 100M+ claims records for fraud, waste, and abuse detection.
  • 2018 – 2019
    Postdoctoral Researcher · Northwestern University
    ML for clinical analysis of wearable sensor data under real-world power and compute limits.
  • 2017 – 2018
    Cognitive Memory Lead & XAI Data Scientist · Kyndi
    Explainable, ontology-driven NLP for document analysis.
  • 1997 – 2011
    Hardware & Design Engineer · 3Com, Motorola, Northwestern
    VoIP backplanes and line cards, mobile-phone audio and signal integrity, research-grade DSP audio systems.

Toolbox

PyTorchPyTorch GeometricTransformers Agentic AIMulti-agent systemsRAG / GraphRAG RaySageMakerKubernetesTriton SparkNeo4jPythonC / C++ MITRE ATT&CKAI governance

Education

  • Ph.D., Computer ScienceUniversity of Notre Dame · 2018 · Dissertation
  • M.S., Computer ScienceUniversity of Notre Dame · 2016
  • B.S., Electrical EngineeringNorthern Illinois University · 1995
Research

Selected publications

Full list on Google Scholar →
AAAI-25
Citations and Trust in LLM-Generated Responses
Y. Ding, M. Facciani, E. Joyce, A. Poudel, S. Bhattacharya, B. Veeramani, S. Aguinaga, T. Weninger
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
PhD · 2018
Generating Networks by Learning Hyperedge Replacement Grammars
S. Aguinaga · Advisor: T. Weninger
Doctoral dissertation, University of Notre Dame · PDF (1.9 MB)
2018
Learning Hyperedge Replacement Grammars for Graph Generation
S. Aguinaga, D. Chiang, T. Weninger
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IEEE
QuOp: A Quantum Operator Representation for Nodes
A. Vlasic, S. Aguinaga
IEEE

Patents: US 7,522,614 B1 — Multi-service access platform for telecommunications and data networks (2009) · US 6,977,821 B2 — Backplane apparatus and board for use therewith (2005)

Off the clock

Beyond the code

Family travelExploring new places together
SailingWind, water, and patience
RunningMiles that clear the mind
Good coffeeFuel for every model run