By Ursula Gonzales-Barron | March 20, 2026

Lucas Silva who serves as PIF Informatician since November 2024 has concluded his MSc with the dissertation of the thesis: “Development of an Intelligent Agent for Knowledge Extraction in the Pathogens in Foods (PIF) Database with Machine Learning”, in which he designed and developed a visualization-oriented natural language interface (V-NLI) chatbot capable of enabling domain experts to query complex pathogen data, perform meta-analyses, and generate dynamic reports and visualizations through the integration of embedding models, SLMs, vector search, and advanced prompt engineering techniques. PIF researchers congratulate him on his success.

MSc DISSERTATION OF LUCAS SILVA