Undergraduate Researcher @ FutureLab/UFMG · Building Solitus & Junto
I don't just study AI. I deploy it.
Computer Science student at UFMG. Undergraduate researcher working on model optimization and SLM applications. Building Solitus and Junto Finance on the side.
Co-Founding · Events Ecosystem Platform
01About me
Gustavo Barra
CS UFMG · Researcher & Founder
I'm Gustavo Barra Felizardo — a Computer Science student at UFMG and Undergraduate Researcher at FutureLab DCC/UFMG in partnership with Morada AI, elected Brazil's #1 AI startup by Top 100 Startups. I work with SLM and LLM optimization techniques such as QLoRA, PEFT, Knowledge Distillation, Fine-Tuning...
I'm also the Co-Founder of Solitus, a B2B2C events ecosystem, and the founder of Junto, an AI-powered iOS finance app with on-device ML. I'm a national olympiad medalist (OBMEP, OBA, ONC) and did a high school exchange semester in Vancouver, Canada.
Journey
2023
Exchange Semester in Vancouver
High school exchange semester at Burnaby Mountain Secondary School in Vancouver, Canada. Sharpened English, broadened perspective, and came back ready to build.
2025
UFMG + FutureLab Research
Joined Computer Science at UFMG and one month later became Undergraduate Researcher at FutureLab, working on LLM optimization techniques and Lead classification for Morada AI — Brazil's #1 AI startup.
Now
Solitus, Junto & Research
Co-founding Solitus (B2B2C events platform), building Junto (AI iOS finance app with on-device ML), and co-authoring 2 research papers on LLM optimization and Lead Classification pipeline.
02Vision
Technology as a means, not an end.
I believe the world is shaped by people willing to take risks, which is why I like to get involved with ambitious projects that create deep impact in a niche.
Human neuroplasticity decreases over time, the window to build deep skills is shorter than it feels. That keeps me always in motion: exchange in Canada, one of Brazil's most demanding CS programs at UFMG, two businesses in parallel. Each one forced me to think in ways I couldn't before.
Build things that matter.— Gustavo Barra Felizardo
03Projects
Here's what I've been building.
Co-Founding · Events Ecosystem Platform
B2B2C platform for the live events industry. Unifies ticketing, cashless payments, parking management, stock control, consuming-software and behavioral analytics into a single ecosystem spanning a producer app, ticket validation, and consumer-facing app.
Founder & Full-Stack Engineer · iOS Finance App
iOS app combining on-device ML and cloud services for intelligent expense tracking and financial insights. Uses MLX-Swift with QLoRA-finetuned models for local inference and integrates Open Finance APIs for automated bank syncing. Preparing for App Store beta release.
Personal Project · Small Language Model built from the ground up
End-to-end SLM implementation based on Dr. Raj Dandekar's (MIT PhD, ML) teachings. Covers the full pipeline: tokenization, input–target pair construction, model architecture design, pre-training setup and execution, and inference. Also explores the theory behind it: Backpropagation, activation functions (ReLU & GeLU), and the step-by-step reasoning behind each architectural decision.
FutureLab · Real Estate Lead Scoring
XGBoost model for real estate profile scoring using Target Encoding, Feature Engineering, and 5-fold Cross Validation. This project was for Morada AI, the model was part of a bigger pipeline of lead scoring and was used to predict the profile of real estate leads based on their messages, behavior and attributes.
FutureLab · Research · Knowledge Distillation
Bibliometric analysis of 12,209 scientific publications on LLM and Knowledge Distillation, sourced from Scopus. Built co-occurrence networks in VOSviewer and plotted publication trends in Python — mapping where the research field is heading and what emerging terms are gaining traction.
04Posts & Ideas
Perspectives from research, building business, and learning things the hard way — from fine-tuning LLMs to shipping iOS apps.
Mar 09, 2026
How young people outpace PhDs through attitude.
Mar 06, 2026
How I'm building a privacy-first finance app using local LLM inference with MLX-Swift, QLoRA fine-tuning, RAG, and Open Finance APIs — and the real tradeoffs nobody talks about.
Mar 01, 2026
From an Nvidia article to fine-tuning with QLoRA at UFMG's FutureLab — why I believe SLMs are the most important shift happening in AI right now.
05Contact
Open to research collaborations, startup ideas, technical questions, or any conversation about AI, entrepreneurship, and technology.
gbarra2511@icloud.comEmail me directlyBelo Horizonte · Juiz de Fora, Brazil