Fernando Zhapa-Camacho
Hi, I am Fernando Zhapa-Camacho. I am a PostDoc at KAUST in Saudi Arabia in the BORG group, led by prof. Robert Hoehndorf, where I also completed my Ph.D. My research interests are neuro-symbolic AI, ontology embedding and representation learning, with applications to bioinformatics.


Hobbies

I practice football (usually as defender) and chess (currently playing a lot the Italian game as white and 1... g6 as black).

News

June, 2026

I successfully defended my Ph.D. at KAUST and continued in the BORG group as a Postdoctoral Researcher

January, 2026

NeSy 2026: Invited as reviewer

October, 2025

Our paper on agent-based protein function prediction was accepted at PSB 2026

June, 2025

Added to the CEMSE Dean's List 2025

February, 2025

NeSy 2025: Invited as PC member

September, 2024

Attending NeSy 2024 at Barcelona

August, 2024

Attending BioHackathon Japan 2024 in Fukushima

August, 2024

Added as PC member in AAAI Fall Symposium

July, 2024

Attending ESSLLI 2024 at KU Leuven

June, 2024

Publication accepted in NeSy 2024

June, 2024

Added to the CEMSE Dean's List 2024

March, 2024

Publication accepted in ISMB 2024



Preprints

A homotopy-type-theoretic generalization of neurosymbolic inference

Preprint

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf

@misc{zhapacamacho2026hottnesy,
      title={A homotopy-type-theoretic generalization of neurosymbolic inference},
      author={Fernando Zhapa-Camacho and Robert Hoehndorf},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2606.17851},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG}
}
ArXiv GitHub


Selected Publications

INDIGENA: inductive prediction of disease-gene associations using phenotype ontologies

Bioinformatics

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf

@article{Zhapa_Camacho_2026_indigena,
  title={INDIGENA: inductive prediction of disease–gene associations using phenotype ontologies},
  volume={42},
  ISSN={1367-4811},
  url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btag325},
  DOI={10.1093/bioinformatics/btag325},
  number={6},
  journal={Bioinformatics},
  publisher={Oxford University Press (OUP)},
  author={Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando and Hoehndorf, Robert},
  editor={Robinson, Peter},
  year={2026},
  month=May
}
Paper GitHub


Fully Geometric Multi-Hop Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Transitive Relations

ESWC 2026

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf

@inbook{Zhapa_Camacho_2026_geometre,
  title={Fully Geometric Multi-hop Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Transitive Relations},
  ISBN={9783032251565},
  ISSN={1611-3349},
  url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-25156-5_14},
  DOI={10.1007/978-3-032-25156-5_14},
  booktitle={The Semantic Web},
  publisher={Springer Nature Switzerland},
  author={Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando and Hoehndorf, Robert},
  year={2026},
  pages={258–277}
}
ArXiv GitHub
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LLM Agent Based Protein Function Prediction

PSB 2026

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Olga Mashkova, Robert Hoehndorf, Maxat Kulmanov

@inproceedings{Zhapa_Camacho_2025,
title={LLM Agent Based Protein Function Prediction},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/9789819824755_0036},
DOI={10.1142/9789819824755_0036},
booktitle={Biocomputing 2026},
publisher={WORLD SCIENTIFIC},
author={Zhapa-Camacho,
Fernando and Mashkova, Olga and Hoehndorf, Robert and Kulmanov, Maxat},
year={2025},
month=dec,
pages={508–519} }
Paper GitHub


Lattice-Based ALC Ontology Embeddings With Saturation (Extended Version)

Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf

@article{Zhapa_Camacho_2025,
title={Lattice-Based ALC Ontology Embeddings With Saturation},
volume={1},
ISSN={2949-8732},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/29498732251340186},
DOI={10.1177/29498732251340186},
journal={Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence},
publisher={SAGE Publications},
author={Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando and Hoehndorf, Robert},
year={2025},
month=jun }
Paper GitHub
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Ontology Embedding: A Survey of Methods, Applications and Resources

IEEE TKDE

Jiaoyan Chen, Olga Mashkova, Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf, Yuan He, Ian Horrocks

@article{Chen_2025,
  title={Ontology Embedding: A Survey of Methods, Applications and Resources},
  ISSN={2326-3865},
  url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2025.3559023},
  DOI={10.1109/tkde.2025.3559023},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering},
  publisher={Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)},
  author={Chen, Jiaoyan and Mashkova, Olga and Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando and Hoehndorf, Robert and He, Yuan and Horrocks, Ian},
  year={2025},
  pages={1–20}
}
Paper


Neuro-Symbolic AI in Life Sciences

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications

Robert Hoehndorf, Catia Pesquita, Fernando Zhapa-Camacho

@inbook{Hoehndorf_2025,
title={Neuro-Symbolic AI in Life Sciences},
ISBN={9781643685793},
ISSN={1879-8314},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/FAIA250239},
DOI={10.3233/faia250239},
booktitle={Handbook on Neurosymbolic AI and Knowledge Graphs},
publisher={IOS Press},
author={Hoehndorf,
Robert and Pesquita, Catia and Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando},
year={2025}, month=mar }
Paper


Lattice-preserving ALC ontology embeddings

NeSy 2024

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf

@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-031-71167-1_19,
author="Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando
and Hoehndorf, Robert",
editor="Besold, Tarek R.
and d'Avila Garcez, Artur
and Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto
and Confalonieri, Roberto
and Madhyastha, Pranava
and Wagner, Benedikt",
title="Lattice-Preserving {\$}{\$}{\backslash}mathcal {\{}ALC{\}}{\$}{\$}Ontology Embeddings",
booktitle="Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning",
year="2024",
publisher="Springer Nature Switzerland",
address="Cham",
pages="355--369",
isbn="978-3-031-71167-1"
}
Paper GitHub
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Predicting protein functions using positive-unlabeled ranking with ontology-based priors

ISMB 2024

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Zhenwei Tang, Maxat Kulmanov, Robert Hoehndorf

@article {Zhapa-Camacho2024.01.28.577662,
	  author = {Fernando Zhapa-Camacho and Zhenwei Tang and Maxat Kulmanov and Robert Hoehndorf},
          title = {Predicting protein functions using positive-unlabeled ranking with ontology-based priors},
          elocation-id = {2024.01.28.577662},
          year = {2024},
          doi = {10.1101/2024.01.28.577662},
          publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
          abstract = {Automated protein function prediction is a crucial and widely studied problem in bioinformatics. Computationally, protein function is a multilabel classification problem where only positive samples are defined and there is a large number of unlabeled annotations. Most existing methods rely on the assumption that the unlabeled set of protein function annotations are negatives, inducing the false negative issue, where potential positive samples are trained as negatives. We introduce a novel approach named PU-GO, wherein we address function prediction as a positive-unlabeled ranking problem. We apply empirical risk minimization, i.e., we minimize the classification risk of a classifier where class priors are obtained from the Gene Ontology hierarchical structure. We show that our approach is more robust than other state-of-the-art methods on similarity-based and time-based benchmark datasets. Data and code are available at https://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/PU-GO.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.},
        URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2024/01/31/2024.01.28.577662},
        eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2024/01/31/2024.01.28.577662.full.pdf},
        journal = {bioRxiv}
}
Paper GitHub
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From axioms over graphs to vectors, and back again: evaluating the properties of graph-based ontology embeddings

NeSy 2023

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Robert Hoehndorf

@inproceedings{zhapa2023axioms,
  author       = {Fernando Zhapa{-}Camacho and
                  Robert Hoehndorf},
  editor       = {Artur S. d'Avila Garcez and
                  Tarek R. Besold and
                  Marco Gori and
                  Ernesto Jim{\'{e}}nez{-}Ruiz},
  title        = {From Axioms over Graphs to Vectors, and Back Again: Evaluating the
                  Properties of Graph-based Ontology Embeddings},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Neural-Symbolic
                  Learning and Reasoning, La Certosa di Pontignano, Siena, Italy, July
                  3-5, 2023},
  series       = {{CEUR} Workshop Proceedings},
  volume       = {3432},
  pages        = {85--102},
  publisher    = {CEUR-WS.org},
  year         = {2023},
  url          = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3432/paper7.pdf},
  timestamp    = {Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:14:10 +0200},
  biburl       = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/nesy/Zhapa-CamachoH23.bib},
  bibsource    = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}
Paper GitHub
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mOWL: Python library for machine learning with biomedical ontologies

Bioinformatics, Volume 39, Issue 1

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho, Maxat Kulmanov, Robert Hoehndorf

@article{10.1093/bioinformatics/btac811,
	author = {Zhapa-Camacho, Fernando and Kulmanov, Maxat and Hoehndorf, Robert},
    	title = "{mOWL: Python library for machine learning with biomedical ontologies}",
    	journal = {Bioinformatics},
    	year = {2022},
    	month = {12},
    	issn = {1367-4803},
    	doi = {10.1093/bioinformatics/btac811},
    	url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac811},
    	note = {btac811},
   	}
Paper GitHub
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