Ari Ugarte graduated from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (Mexico) in 2006. He worked in the industry as a software engineer for 4 years learning the best practices in software production. He then moved to Paris, where he completed a Master degree in Bioinformatics and modeling (2012) and obtained his PhD in functional annotation of metagenomics data (2016) from the Pierre and Marie Curie University. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cardio-metabolism and Nutrition (ICAN) where he is exploiting big data methods in large scale analysis for the functional annotation of the human microbiome. His research focuses on the characterization and prediction of highly diverged protein sequences and the use of meta-learning strategies to improve the accuracy and precision of predictions. He is also interested in new algorithms for the abstraction and reduction of multi-dimensional data.