Daniel Felipe Sacristán Ávila — Helicopter Pilot to Data Scientist

Photo of Daniel Sacristán

MSc Data Science candidate · 🇨🇴 Colombia · 🌎 Spanish (native) · English (B2)

👨‍✈️ About me

I'm a Captain in the Colombian Air Force — UH-60 Black Hawk copilot and UH-1 pilot with 1500+ flight hours — transitioning into data science.

My path into data began while recovering from a stroke: I started building dashboards to track my own rehabilitation — therapy, training load, sleep and recovery — and what began as personal tracking grew into deployed, tested analytics applications and a new career direction.

I work end to end: ingestion pipelines that update themselves on GitHub Actions, SQL and pandas over parquet, transformer fine-tuning published to the Hugging Face Hub, and apps other people can actually open. Every model ships with a card and a datasheet, because a number without its limits is not a result.

Flying taught me habits that transfer directly: checklists become reproducible pipelines, risk management becomes honest uncertainty, and a preflight brief becomes a result someone can act on.

📂 Projects

🏋️ Rehab Strength Dashboard

LIVE
Estimated 1RM for one exercise before and after the stroke, with a 15-day moving average

Streamlit dashboard integrating three independent data sources, with SHAP-explained models and stationarity testing (ADF/KPSS). Sleep-quality classifier scores ROC-AUC 0.77 and 0.70 accuracy under 5-fold cross-validation.

That AUC swings from 0.56 to 0.92 across folds (±0.15) on a small personal sample — the model is directional, not diagnostic. Same discipline applies to the data: no forward-filling, no assumed "today".

🧪 Nothing to upload. One click loads a fully synthetic dataset — every tab, model and SHAP plot is explorable with zero real health data.

📰 NLP — Fake News Colombia

LIVE
Test-set confusion matrix: the Verdadero row is empty, every example misclassified

BETO fine-tuned on 2,935 fact-checks harvested from ColombiaCheck's ClaimReview markup, published on the Hugging Face Hub with model card, datasheet and data statement.

macro-F1 0.405 vs 0.386 for the TF-IDF baseline — but "Verdadero" scores 0.00 with only 93 examples. It is a Falso/Cuestionable discriminator, not a truth detector, and the model card says so.

⚡ Energy Price Forecasting

IN PROGRESS
Stylised hourly spot price series with a scarcity peak

Self-updating GitHub Actions pipeline that backfilled 1,107,336 raw records into 101,256 continuous hourly observations of Colombia's spot price (precio de bolsa) since 2015 — no gaps, no nulls — and refreshes daily with no server.

XM's settlement versions don't mature in name order: TX3+ adjustments are published after the TXF invoice, so the naive ordering left 47% of hours stale.

🚁 ASRS Rotorcraft NLP

THESIS
Rotorcraft silhouette whose rotor dissolves into narratives feeding a classifier

MSc thesis: NLP over NASA ASRS incident narratives for taxonomic coverage of rotorcraft operations.

Evaluation is disaggregated by slice and audited against the ~250 reports covering aircraft I have flown — ASRS is voluntary and self-selected, so it cannot measure rates.

🛠️ Tech & Tools

🐍 Python 🐼 Pandas 🤖 scikit-learn 🤗 Transformers ⚡ Streamlit 📓 Jupyter 🗄️ SQL 📊 Power BI 📈 Excel 🔧 Git & GitHub Actions