Research
PhD · 20+ publications
Peer-reviewed machine learning research at IEEE, SIGKDD and other venues.
About Rod Rivera
I’m Rod Rivera. I teach engineers and researchers the applied-AI and research work frontier labs do. This site holds my book, courses and experiments.
You may be moving from notebooks to agent systems, heading from a PhD to a research role, or already on a lab team and filling gaps.
Rod Rivera
London
The research question
What happens to the firm when intelligence becomes programmable?
My research informs what I teach about building and judging agent systems. I call the practical experiment a Zero-Employee Organization: an organization designed so that headcount stops being the unit of scale.
The name works like “serverless”: there are still people, as there are still servers. What shrinks is the headcount growth requires. The aim is to give small teams leverage, not to cut jobs at large ones.
Background
Industry
15+ years in production ML
Machine learning systems at Alibaba Cloud, Huawei and Samsung.
Teaching
Professor of the Practice
AI at ITAM, with teaching at CDTM/TUM in Munich, workshops at LBS and LSE, and courses at Nebius Academy.
The book
An agent from scratch
Twenty-one chapters in Python. Each derives the math, runs on Colab and measures a real model.
Founder
Emplido
Built the company and sold it.
Current work
Teaching to the job ads
Reads the technical postings at frontier labs and builds each course from what they ask for.
Related projects
Prof Rod teaches you to build and operate AI systems. These projects cover other parts of that work.
Organizations
Zero Employee Organizations
Research and practice for the organization around the agents. Visit Zero Employee when organizational design and operation are the problem you are working on.
A related program
AI Product Engineer
A separate learning program exploring AI product development. Its name is distinct from the applied AI practice taught here.
Code
Open Source
Inspect the public code behind the teaching. Follow a course’s setup instructions and version requirements before running its examples.
This site
Prof Rod
Courses, articles and worked examples for building, evaluating and operating AI applications.
The characters
Prof Rod
Teacher
Slows the idea down, draws the architecture and shows the working.
Mator
Builder, visiting
Builds exactly what was specified, so gaps in the specification show up.
Quackster
Alchemist, visiting
Questions the confident answer.
They help explain the lessons. Rod is accountable for what they teach.
How this site is made
I use agents to run this site, and the examples come from that work, including what failed.
Where to start
Take a course for a sequence, read an article for one idea, or read a note for one check.
