“Having decided to become a AI researcher at the age of 12, I started working on Machine Learning (ML) as part of my undergrad studies at the U. Minho. I then started research on AutoML as part of my M.Sc. thesis and haven’t stopped since, with contributions that include the co-authorship of the first book on AutoML, “Metalearning – Applications to Data Mining”.
I am now an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the U. Porto (FEUP), subdirector of the Dep. of Informatics Engineering, director of the Ph.D. programme on Informatics Engineering, researcher at INESC TEC, post-graduation supervisor at the Universidade de São Paulo, co-director of the post-graduate programme on Business Intelligence & Analytics at the Porto Business School, tired and overweight.
I participated in more than 20 national and international R&ID as well as consulting projects, published/edited several books and more than 100 papers in journals and conferences, participated in the organization of several events, including Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD 2009) and the European Conference on Machine Learning/ Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2012) and was programme co-chair for the ECML PKDD 2015 and Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA 2016) conferences.
I am a late adopter of deep learning. In fact, I’m so late, I haven’t adopted it yet. Still, I was awarded the Scientific Merit and Excellence Award of the Portuguese AI Association, in 2009.”
