Current Status

• Tenured Research Scientist at Computer and Robot Vision Laboratory, located in the Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica, one of the research centers at Instituto Superior Técnico, which is the Engineering school of Universidade de Lisboa.

Ongoing research projects

• Co-Principal Investigator on the RePAIR H2020 FET Open project.
• Senior Researcher on the HAVATAR project.
• Senior Researcher on the Responsible AI project.

Research interests

• Healthcare and well-being: Activity detection from wearable-based signals, social robotics
• Robotics: Visually oriented grasping, object affordances, robot-human engagement and in-hand object manipulation
• Computer Vision: Visual object recognition and human activity recognition in videos

Society membership

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Senior Member
• European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Member

Experience

Teaching

• Academic year 2015/2016. Visting Professor (Professor convidado) at the Electrical and Computers Engineering Department of Instituto Superior Técnico
• 2012-2017. Assistant Professor at the Engineering Faculty of Universidade Lusófona

Academic Degrees

• Ph. D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Instituto Superior Técnico, 2008
• M. Sc. in Computer Science and Software Engineering. Universidad de los Andes, 2002
• Computer Science and Software Engineering. Universidad de los Andes, 2000
• Mechanical Engineering. Universidad de los Andes, 1998

Ph. D. Thesis

Title: “Object component models using Gabor filters for visual object recognition.” (PDF)

Supervisor: José Santos-Victor

Co-supervisor: Alexandre Bernardino

Short summary: In this thesis we explore the properties of Gabor functions in the context of component-based object recognition. Current component-based object recognition approaches represent objects as constellation of sub-parts, dividing the problem in three stages: interest region selection, image region description and, eventually, the recognition step. We introduce novel methods using Gabor filters for interest point selection and image region description. Performance is evaluated with state-of-the-art object recognition architectures.

Previous research projects

• Co-Principal Investigator on the IntelligentCare project
• Co-Principal investigator on the RbCog-Lab project
• Researcher on the AHA project (Augmented Human Assistance)
• Researcher on the INSIDE project (Intelligent Networked Robot Systems for Symbiotic Interaction with Children with Impaired Development)
• Co-principal investigator on the First-MM project (Flexible Skill Acquisition and Intuitive Robot Tasking for Mobile Manipulation in the Real World).
• Researcher on the MAIS+S project (Multiagent Intelligent Surveillance System).
• Research assistant on the URUS (Ubiquitous Networking Robotics in Urban Settings) project.
• Research assistant on the CAVIAR (Context Aware Vision using Image-based Active Recognition) project.

 Previous research interests

• Teleoperation