pmorelr
flow past a cylinder · lattice Boltzmann, live
von Kármán vortex street

Pedro
Morel

I'm a machine learning engineer with a background in dynamical systems and fluid mechanics. I'm drawn to civic tech and to the politics of technology: who it serves, and who gets to decide.

About

Born in Rio, based in Paris. My first research, as an undergraduate at UFRJ's Institute of Physics, was on the logistic map: how a one-line equation slips between order and chaos. That led me to fluid mechanics, from rising bubbles at ESPCI to turbulence models at ONERA, and through data-driven turbulence modelling to machine learning.

Today I lead the AI and ML behind Calldesk's voice agents: LLM agents, retrieval, the models we train in-house, and the evaluation that tells us whether any of it really works. Outside work I'm drawn to civic tech, and I photograph, mostly in the street and mostly in black and white.

Selected work

Voto Lá Fora

In the first round of Brazil's 2026 presidential election, 6 in 10 Brazilians living abroad didn't vote, largely because of distance: 164 polling places for 102 countries. Between the two rounds, I built a non-partisan noticeboard where people offered a seat in their car or a bed for the night to voters far from their polling place.

Next.js, Postgres with row-level security and 126 database tests, privacy by design, and electoral law turned into product requirements. Covered by TV Cultura, Folha de S.Paulo, DW and others.

votolafora.com.br →   code →
1,571
volunteers offered rides or a place to stay
39
countries
62.7→58.4%
abstention abroad, 1st to 2nd round
+39,677
more Brazilians voted abroad
TV Cultura, Jornal da Cultura · 17 October 2026 · English subtitles
Path
2025 — now

Lead Machine Learning Engineer · Calldesk

Technical owner of every AI and ML feature as the company's only ML specialist, from research spike to production: AI engineering (LLM agents, prompts, retrieval) and classic ML (in-house models trained on production data) for voice agents that take real phone calls.

  • Data platform. Built it from the ground up: anonymised production calls, multi-model pre-annotation with a blind human-validation gate in Label Studio, and versioned ground-truth datasets, with MLflow and Langfuse as the results layer.
  • Evaluation. Designed the unified framework that measures production components as they run (speech recognition, synthesis, classification, entity extraction, LLM decisions), plus LLM agents that role-play callers through TTS to run full calls end to end. It powers CI regression gates, client benchmarks and calibrated LLM judges in production.
  • Retrieval and tools. Shipped the company's first MCP server and RAG pipeline, so voice agents answer from client documentation, catalogues and FAQs mid-call and trigger actions.
  • Multilingual expansion. Took the product beyond French: speech-recognition benchmarks per language on telephony audio, a synthetic TTS pipeline for regional languages, cross-lingual intent qualification and multilingual in-house models.
  • Models shipped on measured benchmarks. A FastText classifier for context-aware acknowledgements, served by a dependency-free TypeScript engine (under 15 µs p99, six languages); an LLM human-handoff fallback that keeps recall above 99% while cutting false triggers from 14% to 4%.
  • Client diagnostics. Automated the onboarding diagnostic with topic modelling over calls (embedding clustering with weak supervision), producing the reports that shape each bot's design.
  • Research culture. Led biweekly paper discussions and internal workshops, and co-designed the company's shared library of AI-agent skills.
LLM agentsRAGMCPASR/TTSevaluationFastTextLangGraphMLflowLangfuseLabel StudioDVCPythonTypeScriptAWS
2023 — 2025

Document AI Lead · Qantev 2024 — 2025

Health-insurance AI. Led a team of five responsible for document classification, OCR, named entity recognition and medical coding: set the R&D direction of each project, ran sprint planning and kept the work aligned with business and technical goals.

Machine Learning Engineer · Qantev 2023 — 2024

In the AI research division, designed NLP, computer vision and multimodal models to extract information and structure from the documents of health insurers.

  • Took medical code inference from 31% to 82% accuracy with label-wise attention.
  • Made the database-mapping tool 400× faster with Levenshtein-based scores and locality-sensitive hashing.
  • Built quantisation, LoRA fine-tuning and evaluation routines for LLMs.
  • Joined demos and pre-sales meetings as the technical voice with clients.
  • Ran biweekly paper discussions and supervised research interns.
  • Wrote two articles on automated medical coding: a review of PLM-ICD and tackling it with generative AI.
TransformersLLMsQLoRARAGNLPcomputer visionMLflowDatabricks
2022

Research intern · ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab

Data-driven turbulence modelling for the aeroelasticity of laminar wings: laminar separation flutter at transitional Reynolds numbers, turbulence models corrected by data assimilation (variational field inversion) under the Navier–Stokes equations, then generalised to unseen configurations with deep learning. Advised by Vincent Mons and Olivier Marquet.

2021

Research intern · ESPCI Paris – PSL, PMMH lab

How a bubble rises when gravity changes quickly in time: numerical and theoretical modelling of the interface, and how the cell's geometry and the bubble's size lead to toroidal bubbles and chaotic behaviour. Simulations in Basilisk.

2019 — 2020

CFD intern · Wikki Brasil

Computational fluid dynamics with OpenFOAM for the oil and gas industry, alongside the company's engineers.

2018 — 2019

Research intern · NIDF, UFRJ

Statistical models of erosive wear: built a wear database and a simulator comparing empirical models, and wrote the technical reports.

2017 — 2019

Research intern · Institute of Physics, UFRJ

My first research: the critical behaviour of the logistic map's bifurcation diagram where chaos gives way to a periodic window, and the map extended to the complex plane to study its stability.

2017 — 2023

Education

  • ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris · Diplôme d'ingénieur and M.Sc. in Computer Science, AI and ML. Thesis: Medical code classification from free-text clinical notes.
  • École Polytechnique · M.Sc. in Fluid Mechanics, data-driven models. Thesis: Data-driven turbulence model for transitional aeroelastic instabilities.
  • UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro · B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, selected for the French double-degree programme. Final project: deep reinforcement learning for active flow control.
  • Excellence scholarships from ENSTA Paris (2022) and BRAFITEC (2020) · Gold medal, Brazilian Physics Olympiad for Public Schools (2016).
Elsewhere