CV
APPLIED RESEARCH SCIENTIST · M.SC. MACHINE LEARNING · B.SC. PHYSICS
Professional Experience
ServiceNow
Senior Applied Research Scientist | September 2022 - Present
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Working on Workflow Generation and AI-related features for Flow Designer
- Leading projects related to automation of business processes and workflow management
Applied Research Scientist - Natural Language Processing | January 2021 - September 2022
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Led language modeling team
- Trained language models on enterprise data
- Worked on automating incident resolution in IT domain
Intact Financial Corporation
Data Scientist II @ intactlab | May 2019 - January 2021
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Worked on the NLP team
- Used language models to understand call center topics
- Built insurance-domain conversational agents
- Applied deep learning techniques (transformers) to telematics domain
Data Science Intern | September 2018 - May 2019
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Worked on the usage-based insurance (UBI) telematics team
- Used big data tools such as PySpark and Hive to process multiple terabytes of data
- Developed visualization tools in Python for data exploration
- Worked on interpretable machine learning methods to better explain models to clients
Université de Montréal
Teaching Assistant | January 2017 - April 2017
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- TA for the special relativity course (PHY1652)
Astrophysics Research Center of Quebec
Research Assistant | May 2016 - August 2016
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Created a statically unbiased census of white dwarf stars within a radius of 40pc of the Sun
- Conducted telescopic observations at the Mont-MĂ©gantic Observatory (OMM)
Education
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), Université de Montréal
M.SC. MACHINE LEARNING | September 2017 - May 2019
GPA: 4.2/4.3
Université de Montréal
B.SC. PHYSICS | September 2014 - April 2017
GPA: 4.0/4.3
Skills
Technical Skills
- Programming Languages: Python (fluent), MatLab, Octave, R, C, C++, Fortran77, SQL, bash
- Frameworks & Libraries: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, Scikit-Learn, Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, PySpark
- NLP & AI: Large Language Models (LLM), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Information Retrieval, Transformers
- Other: UNIX, git, LaTeX, Big Data processing
Languages
- French (Native)
- English (Full Professional)
- Spanish (Elementary)
Publications
See my Google Scholar for a complete list of publications.
- Béchard, Patrice, et al. “StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.21889 (2025).
- Béchard, Patrice, and Orlando Marquez Ayala. “Multi-task retriever fine-tuning for domain-specific and efficient RAG.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.04652 (2025).
- Ayala, Orlando Marquez, and Patrice Béchard. “Generating a Low-code Complete Workflow via Task Decomposition and RAG.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.00239 (2024).
- Béchard, Patrice, and Orlando Marquez Ayala. “Reducing hallucination in structured outputs via Retrieval-Augmented Generation.” Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track). 2024. Link
Presentations
- 2018-2019: Pattern Recognition with Geospatial Data, McGill Hackathon, PolyHx Hackatown
- Nov. 2018: Understanding Human Language: Neural Approaches, Flash-Bac, Physics Department, UdeM
- Apr. 2018: Deep Learning: Introduction and Applications in Physics, Flash-Bac, Physics Department, UdeM
- Mar. 2018: Classification of Stars According by Machine Learning, Symposium-SAPHARI, UdeM
- Aug. 2017: Network Science, Summer Interns Conferences, Physics Department, UdeM
Certifications
- Learning XAI: Explainable Artificial Intelligence
- Dieter Rams: Principles of Good Design
- COVID-19 Contact Tracing
- Rasa Certification Workshop
Honors & Awards
- Recipient, Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) from the NSERC (2016)
Committees
- 2018: Member, Perspectives on the social issues of artificial intelligence, Montreal, QC