Alexandre TRILLA, PhD

• Research Engineer & Data Scientist
• Barcelona, Catalunya (Spain)
• alex.trilla@proton.me

Short Bio

Alexandre Trilla graduated from La Salle - Ramon Llull University in Barcelona with a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 2008, a M.Sc. in Information Technology Management in 2010, and a Ph.D. in 2024. He has an academic research background in Spoken Language Processing, and an industrial research background in Prognostics and Health Management. With 20 years of work experience he has consistently delivered many added-value solutions and authored several publications (available here) in technical conferences and scientific journals. At present, Dr. Trilla is a Senior Data Scientist, R&D Project Manager and Internal Trainer at Alstom, leading the development and deployment of Predictive Maintenance products for the railway business. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference.

Publications

Journals and Conferences

• Possamai, Q., Bonangi, R., Trilla, A., Yiboe, O., Saiah, K., and Mijatovic, N. Leveraging Few-Shot In-Context Learning for Scaling Railway Log Anomaly Detection. In the Proc. of the Asia Pacific Prognostics and Health Management Conference, 2025, Dec., Singapore. link pdf
• Chouchani, N., Trilla, A., Yiboe, O., Rajendran, R., and Bhoge, A. RaiLog RCA : Railway Log-based Root Cause Analysis. In the Proc. of the 2nd Workshop on Railway Operations, Modeling, and Safety, 2025, Apr., Florianopolis, Brazil. link pdf
• Trilla, A., and Mijatovic, N. Unsupervised Pairwise Causal Discovery on Heterogeneous Data using Mutual Information Measures. In the Proc. of the 26th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, 2024, Oct., Barcelona, Spain. link arXiv pdf
• Trilla, A., Yiboe, O., Mijatovic, N., and Vitria, J. Industrial-Grade Smart Troubleshooting through Causal Technical Language Processing: a Proof of Concept. In the 2nd Workshop on Causal Inference and Machine Learning in Practice at the KDD Conference, 2024, Aug., Barcelona, Spain. link arXiv pdf
• Trilla, A., Rajendran, R., Yiboe, O., Possamai, Q., Mijatovic, N., and Vitria, J. Industrial-Grade Time-Dependent Counterfactual Root Cause Analysis through the Unanticipated Point of Incipient Failure: a Proof of Concept. In the Causal Inference for Time Series Data Workshop at the 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 2024, Jul., Barcelona, Spain. link arXiv pdf
• Trilla, A., Mijatovic, N., and Vilasis-Cardona, X., Unsupervised Probabilistic Anomaly Detection over Nominal Subsystem Events through a Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder. In the International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management, vol. 14 (1), 2023. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Mijatovic, N., and Vilasis-Cardona, X., Towards Learning Causal Representations of Technical Word Embeddings for Smart Troubleshooting. In the International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management, vol. 13 (2), 2022. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Bob-Manuel, J., Lamoureux, B., and Vilasis-Cardona, X., Integrated Multiple-Defect Detection and Evaluation of Rail Wheel Tread Images using Convolutional Neural Networks. In the International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management, vol. 12 (1), 2021. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Miralles, D. and Fernandez, V., Pushing Distributed Vibration Analysis to the Edge with a Low-Resolution Companding Autoencoder: Industrial IoT for PHM. In the Proc. of the Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2020. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Fernandez, V. and Cabre, X., Enhancing Railway Pantograph Carbon Strip Prognostics with Data Blending through a Time-Delay Neural Network Ensemble. In the Proc. of the Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2020. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Janjua, F. and Bermejo, S., Developing a Hybrid Expert/Data-Driven Health Index for Railway Axleboxes Using Auto-encoder Neural Networks. In the Proc. of the Prognostics and System Health Management Conference, 2019, May, Paris, France. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Dersin, P. and Cabre, X., Estimating the Uncertainty of Brake Pad Prognostics for High-Speed Rail with a Neural Network Feature Ensemble. In the Proc. of the Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2018, Sep., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. link pdf
• Trilla, A. and Cabre, X., Determining the Equivalent Conicity for Railway Wheelset Maintenance with Deep Ensembles. In the Proc. of the Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, 2018, Sep., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. link pdf
• Borrell, J., Coca, M., Fuerte, V., Gratacos, P., Sospedra, G. and Trilla, A., Un cambio de paradigma en el planteamiento y ejecucion del Plan de Mantenimiento: paso de la estrategia tradicional a otra dinamica. In the 6th Conference of the Spanish Society for Maintenance, pp. 1-10, 2017, Mar., Tarragona, Spain. (in Spanish) pdf
• Trilla, A. and Gratacos, P., Maintenance of bogie components through vibration inspection with intelligent wireless sensors: a case-study of axle-boxes and wheel-sets using the Empirical Mode Decomposition technique. In the Proc. of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit, vol. 230, issue 5, pp. 1408-1414, Jul., 2016. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Gratacos, P., Guinart, D., Alessi, A. and Lamoureux, B., Health assessment of traction-motor blowers regarding their deformation degradation. In the Proc. of the Third European Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, pp. 712-718, 2016, Jul., Bilbao, Spain. link pdf
• Trilla, A. and Coca, M., New tools for predictive maintenance of railway vehicles taking advantage of IT. In the Maintenance magazine of the Spanish Society for Maintenance, BCNRail 2013 conference, pp. 20-22, 2013, Nov., Barcelona, Spain. (in Spanish) pdf
• Trilla, A. and Gratacos, P., Condition Based Maintenance On Board. In the Chemical Engineering Transactions Journal, vol. 33, pp. 733-738, Sep., 2013. link pdf
• Trilla, A. and Alias, F., Sentence-based Sentiment Analysis for Expressive Text-to-Speech. In IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, vol. 21 (2), pp. 223-233, Feb., 2013. link pdf
• Trilla, A. and Alias, F., Three-class Sentiment Analysis adapted to short texts. In the XXVIII Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing, 2012, Sep., Castellon, Spain. pdf
• Lozano, I., Trilla, A. and Alias, F., Spanish JavaSimLib: a tool to compute the semantic similarity between words in Spanish. In the XXVIII Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing, 2012, Sep., Castellon, Spain. (in Spanish) pdf
• Trilla, A. and Alias, F., Sentiment Analysis of Twitter messages based on Multinomial Naive Bayes. In the XXVIII Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing – Workshop on Sentiment Analysis, 2012, Sep., Castellon, Spain. pdf
• Alias, F., Socoro, J. C., Iriondo, I., Formiga, L. and Trilla, A., Application of automatic speech generation techniques for audiovisual production. In Quaderns del CAC, n. 37, Dec., 2011 (in Catalan) link
• Formiga, Ll., Trilla, A., Alias, F., Iriondo, I. and Socoro, J.C., Adaptation of the URL-TTS system to the 2010 Albayzin Evaluation Campaign. In the Proc. of VI Jornadas en Tecnologia del Habla, pp. 363-370, 2010, Nov., Vigo, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A., Alias, F. and Lozano, I., Text classification of domain-styled text and sentiment-styled text for expressive speech synthesis. In the Proc. of VI Jornadas en Tecnologia del Habla, pp. 75-78, 2010, Nov., Vigo, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A. and Alias, F., Sentiment classification in English from sentence-level annotations of emotions regarding models of affect. In the Proc. of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, pp. 516-519, 2009, Sep., Brighton, UK. pdf

Invited Talks

• Potential Impact of Causal Inference on Railway Predictive Maintenance. 8th Intelligent Maintenance Conference. Sep., 2024, Lausanne, Switzerland. link
• Causal Inference for Railway Predictive Maintenance. 2nd Causal AI Conference. Sep., 2023, New York City, USA. link

Dissertations

• Trilla, A., Neural Approaches to Prognostics and Health Management of Rolling Stock, PhD Thesis, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, 2024, Barcelona, Spain. link pdf
• Trilla, A., Natural Language Processing techniques applied to speech technologies, Master’s Thesis (Advanced Studies), Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A., Magnus: Mouse Advanced GNU Speech, Master’s Thesis, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, 2008, Barcelona, Spain. (with honours) pdf
• Trilla, A., Sniffer: the Line Following Robot, Bachelor’s Thesis, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, 2006, Barcelona, Spain. (in Catalan)

Teaching

Causal Inference for Data Science (and Decision-Making)

• Trilla, A., 2025. Overview: Introduction to the science of Causality, mainly centered around Predictive Maintenance and Troubleshooting. Data are currently being collected from many different environments such as signaling, rolling stock or services, but oftentimes the engineering teams lack the ability to interpret them and get actionable insights. In light of this uncertainty, Causal Inference provides the statistical method to address these concerns by leveraging both experience and data for the purposes of explaining what will happen (any why) if action is taken (in contrast to predicting previous passively collected observations).

Data Analysis for Prognostics and Health Management

• Trilla, A., 2019. Overview: Introduction to the field of Machine Learning-based data analytics for railway Predictive Maintenance. This short course has been designed for a technical audience, including both individual contributors as well as related industrial management roles.

Discrete-Time Signal Processing

• Trilla, A. and Sevillano, X., Scilab tutorial oriented toward the Practice of Discrete-Time Signal Processing, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• ProcLib - Signal processing library for Scilab tarball
• Trilla, A. and Sevillano, X., Filter analysis and design, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A. and Sevillano, X., Sampling of continuous-time signals, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A. and Sevillano, X., Multirate Discrete-Time Signal Processing, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A. and Sevillano, X., Discrete Fourier Transform, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A. and Sevillano, X., Noise cancellation with adaptive filtering, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. pdf

Software

Open-source code repository - GitHub link

• ccia24 - Causal Discovery based on Functional Models @ CCIA 2024 zip
• ci4ts - Causal Inference for Time Series Data Workshop @ UAI 2024 zip
• emolib - Natural Language Processing for Sentiment Analysis zip
• ntk - Neural Network Toolkit zip
• aima - Artificial Intelligence, A Maker’s Approach zip
• tadts - Typical Abstract Data Types zip
• vsmpy - Bare bones Vector Space Model zip
• nlptools - Natural Language Processing Toolkit for PHP zip
• ants - Ant foraging simulation zip
• twitterScraper.js - Script bundle to build a text corpus based on tweet IDs zip
• lsystem - Parallel string rewriting system zip
• nlg - Natural Language Generator based on n-gram Language Models zip
• pipeskel - Skeletal application based on a pipeline architecture zip
• magnus - Computer mouse pointer controller through voice commands zip link

Miscellaneous

• Resume: LinkedIn profile link
• Microblog: Dr. LabRat in the Fediverse link
• Trilla, A., A skim through HARK, a modular OSS system for robot audition, Working Presentation, 2011, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A., Enhanced Face Recognition, Working Paper, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, 2009, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A., Natural Language Processing techniques in Text-To-Speech synthesis and Automatic Speech Recognition, Working Paper, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, 2009, Barcelona, Spain. pdf
• Trilla, A., Waiterbot: el robot cambrer, High School Project, Col.legi Episcopal Mare de Deu de l’Academia, 2002, Lleida, Spain. (in Catalan) pdf pic pic