About
I am a researcher on automated planning, goal and plan recognition, multiagent systems, BDI agents, and machine learning. I currently hold a Chair of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, and I am part of the Agents at Aberdeen research group. I also hold a Bridges Professorship at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, where I lead the Group on Artificial Intelligence. I am a Senior Member of the ACM and of AAAI. I am the guest editor of the topic on Advances in Goal, Plan and Activity Recognition in the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal. I am currently a councillor in the Executive Council of the AAAI, and a board member of the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence for the Brazilian Computer Society for the period of 2021 to 2022. As a UK-based researcher, I am a member of the UKRI Talent Panel College, and of the EPSRC Peer Review College. In Brazil, I held CNPq's highly productive researcher fellowship, and according to CSRankings, I am one of the most productive AI researchers from South America, having received the following professional recognitions:
- received the best SPC member award from AAMAS 2021;
- the planner developed in my lab HyperTensioN won the International Planning Competition (IPC) in 2020;
- our article Identification of autism spectrum disorder using deep learning and the ABIDE dataset is among the most cited and downloaded at Neuroimage: Clinical;
- received the Distinguished Visiting Fellow award from the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), culminating in a master class on goal recognition;
- our paper on An Application to Support Visually-Impaired People through Deep Convolutional Neural Networks won the best student paper at IJCNN 2017;
- our paper on Norm Conflict Identification Using Deep Learning was recognised as visionary workshop paper at AAMAS 2017;
- received a Google Research Award for Latin America in 2016 as well as in 2019;
- the team I advised won the 2016 Multi-Agent Programming Contest;
- was part of the team that took second place on the 2016 Predictive Analytics in Mental Health Competition (PAC);
- finished as one of the four runners up to the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2013; and
- my student Ramon Pereira was recognised as having the second best MSc dissertation and later the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence in Brazil.
Before my current position, I worked as a Project Scientist in Multiagent Systems at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University after completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same university with Professor Katia Sycara. I obtained my PhD degree at King's College London, with a thesis on Extending agent languages for multiagent domains under the supervision of Professor Michael Luck and co-supervised by Professor Andrew Jones. I started my studies at the University of Southampton in 2005, and moved to King's College London in September of 2006.
Prior to my full-time academic career, I worked in the industry as a contractor for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, and worked on a variety of projects with some very interesting people. Previously I was a research assistant at FACIN/PUCRS, and an MSc student in Computer Science at PPGCC/PUCRS, where I also obtained my undergraduate degree. Information about my academic and professional career can be checked out in my complete CV, or in a more academic CV.
I chaired the following events over the years:
- I am Area Chair for the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI);
- I was area chair for area of Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms for AAMAS 2022;
- I co-chaired the Demo Tracks for AAMAS 2021;
- I co-chaired the 2017 Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms held together with AAMAS 2017 in São Paulo, Brazil;
- I co-chaired the Porto Alegre local chapter edition of Brainhack since 2014;
- I was chair of the AAAI Symposium on Proactive Assistant Agents;
- I was area chair for Planning and Scheduling for the 2014 IBERAMIA;
- I co-chaired the 5th International Workshop on Collaborative Agents (CARE 2014).
I currently serve in the program committee of the following conferences (and have served in the past):
- 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI);
- 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS);
- 34th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS);
- Senior Program Committee for the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI);
I also regularly serve as a reviewer for the following journals:
- ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology;
- Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience;
- Artificial Intelligence and Law;
- Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) (German Journal of Artificial Intelligence);
- Knowledge Engineering Review (KER) from Cambridge Press;
- Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) from Elsevier;
- Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS) from Springer;
- Web Intelligence and Agent Systems (WIAS) from IOS Press; and
- Group Decision and Negotiation (GRUP) from Springer.