on 04-06-2020
I completed my PhD program in 2016, and left IT to start working as a Postdoc in the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. (see more)
I joined newly created DaRTES lab in IT Porto as a researcher in 2010, after completing my Master degree in the University of Aveiro. Shortly after joining the group, I started my PhD in the University of Porto under the supervision of Luis Almeida and Pedro Lima. In the following years, I developed my thesis work in wireless communications and relative localisation for mobile agents, with focus in ad-hoc teams of mobile robots. That period was a great learning experience as I also had the opportunity to collaborate in several research projects being developed within the group, ranging from distributed control systems to large scale reliable video streaming. I completed my PhD program in 2016, and left IT to start working as a Postdoc in the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. In my current position my research focus changed to a different topic: reproducible computationally-driven science. Recent awareness of a reproducibility crisis in science has made this a topic of increasing importance within every scientific community. In fact, governments, institutions, publishers, and communities themselves are pushing for increased transparency and reusability of research artefacts, and for reproducible published results. As part of that work, I'm working within my research group in the development of Occam, available in https://occam.cs.pitt.edu. Occam is an experiment management system with focus on preserving all the data and metadata used in an experiment, from software and datasets, to configurable parameters essential to replicate previous conclusions. Notably, it enables the reproducibility of experimental results by preserving their provenance, thus allowing to trace each result to the experiment that was executed to generate it. I have also been involved in several Artefact Evaluation committees, a process that is being increasingly adopted by many major conferences, and that intended to help testing and verifying the software artefacts that were used to produce paper's main results. Recently, I have been teaching a computer science course on computer organization and assembly language as a part-time instructor in the University of Pittsburgh.
on 04-06-2020
Currently I work for Babylon Health, in London, as a technical lead in a backend development team. (see more)
Born and raised in Coimbra, I took the Computer Science and Software Engineering 5 year pre-bologna degree there. As I finalised the degree in the summer of 2006 I joined IT as a researcher where I worked on European Projects C-Mobile and C-Cast. In those projects I had the pleasure to work in close collaboration with Professors Rui Aguiar and Diogo Gomes, designing and implementing proof-of-concept architectures for context information management. In the tackled scenarios context information (e.g. location, proximity, activity, ...) was gathered and used by an application or service for adaptation, in order to improve the user experience. In 2008 I was hired by Portugal Telecom Inovação (now Altice Labs) and simultaneously enrolled in the MAP-i Doctoral Programme. After a curricular year I had to submit a thesis proposal and I asked Professors Rui Aguiar and Diogo Gomes if they would be my supervisors for a thesis targeting the privacy of context information - something familiar to us from our European projects work but that hadn't been specially focused at the time. They kindly agreed to collaborate once again. Back in 2009 privacy wasn't a hot topic, but that changed dramatically in the following of years, especially after the Snowden case in 2013. Throughout this period I often worked in the IT Aveiro premises and collaborating with the ATNoG research group there, where I got support setting up infrastructure for my experiments and taking my first steps in machine learning, as it became a need for my thesis. I defended my PhD in 2015, at a time when I had already left Portugal Telecom Inovação and moved to Belgium. This was the last professional collaboration to this date with IT, as since then I have been focusing mostly in industry software development positions, but I've kept informal contact with my supervisors. Currently I work for Babylon Health, in London, as a technical lead in a backend development team. We use Scala (programming language), semantic web technologies and machine learning to build services that support a medical chatbot.