on 01-09-2021
My journey in IT started in 2011 when I joined the Porto Interactive Center (PIC) team as a Computer Vision researcher.
Just one year later, Verónica Orvalho challenged me into doing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, focused on the development of Machine Learning methods for real-time facial recognition and 3D facial animation. I can proudly say that I was part of the very primordial discussions around Didimo and couldn't be more impressed by the incredible work that Verónica and the team did to make all those dreams come true.
After finishing my Ph.D., I joined Deloitte, where I worked as an Artificial Intelligence lead specialist for 3 years. Later, I moved to London, UK to join Square Enix as a Data Analytics and Data Science Manager. Around 2 years ago, I decided to get back to financial services and joined the Data Science team of Lloyds Banking Group as a Senior Manager, where I lead a team of around 30 people, including data scientists and data engineers.
Since I arrived in London, I've been focused on transforming how companies use data and Machine Learning for process automation and decision-making. This not only involves consolidation of data warehouses for data storage, building data pipelines for data processing and feature engineering, and developing prediction models; but also, software development and migrations to the public cloud required to interface our Machine Learning outputs, automating model re-training/data and models' controls, plus making all of this software work at scale from a computational perspective.
on 11-11-2020
I recently joined DeepMind as a Research Scientist, to study richer forms of representation that can guide planning and prediction of learning agents into more informed goals. (see more)
I started my research path at IST as Physics Engineering undergrad. Later I enrolled into a dual CMU/Portugal PhD program in Robotics/Machine learning. During this period I studied how spectral methods impacted prediction and planning algorithms. I was affiliated with both the IT and the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) at IST together with the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I had the pleasure to be co-advised by André Martins also from IT, and Geoffrey Gordon and Siddartha Srinivasa from CMU.
After finishing my PhD, I joined Sacoor Brothers as a Data Scientist and later joined Priberam Labs as a Leading Research Scientist, where I was able to participate in different research projects in the area of Natural Language Processing, some of which were connected with IT such as the GoLocal project.
As a student, I participated several times as a mentor and later co-organised, the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School in close connection with IT.
Currently, I am part of the Reinforcement Learning team at DeepMind and I am affiliated with ISR as an invited researcher. I am currently focused on studying questions related with rich representations for planning and how these can impact useful and informative forms of exploration.
I hope to leave my home in the near future and to continue on building good research collaborations with IT.