In a nutshell: I’m an Entrepreneur, Physicist, Professor, Data Mining Analyst & IT consultant. Incurable learner, Passionate about Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Web 2.0, Recommender Systems, Complex Networks & Tourism. Owner of Lidinwise – Data Analytics. See my Linkedin profile for more details.

• My Passions

  Data analysis, algorithms, machine learning, social networks, complexity.

• My Education

  I had the privilege to take my degree of Physics, in 1990, at one of the best Portuguese engineering schools, Instituto Superior Técnico, in the beautiful city of Lisbon.
  In 1993 I took the master degree in Plasma Physics to study the hot plasma of the ISTOK tokamak using function parametrization. I moved to Coimbra in 1993 for my PhD in Theoretical Physics. Though I didn’t love the city, I got fascinated by the personality and character of Professor Carlos Fiolhais. The thesis was on fission of metallic clusters – building blocks of nanotechnology.

   

• My researh

  After spending a year in Grenoble, France, as a Postdoc, I decided to do something new.
  From 1998 to 2000 I worked on the Portuguese Nuclear Reactor at Sacavém, studying neutron diffusion and radiation protection. I also started the collaboration with two of the major portuguese experimental physicists Nuno Barrradas and Paulo Freitas.

  Since 1998 I fell in love with Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Machine Learning. I applied these approaches  to any kind of problems that I put my hands on: from physics to economics or even deep oil discovery. We were able to successful apply ANN to several Rutherfod  BackScattering (RBS) spectra analysis of thin films and revolutionize the field of real-time RBS.

  In 2003, I was able to propose a new algorithm to train Neural Networks for classification problems and apply it to complex tasks, namely financial distress prediction of private French companies.

  In 2004 I took a Sabbatical leave at Los Alamos National Laboratory to engage in the study of Complex Network Analysis with Luis Rocha and Tiago Simas.  A topic that I eventually resume early in 2011 and in which I have a keen interest, especially in its applications to recommendation systems and correlated credit events (dominó bankruptcies). Early 2011 Tiago and I were the first portuguese team to be accepted at Seedcamp London, the biggest enterpreneurship meeting in Europe with a project to revolutionize the Search Engine Algorithms and Recommendation Systems – see the aftermatch at quarksearch.com.

   

• Teaching

  Beside being a full professor of physics at ISEP, I lectured on several international post-graduated degrees, like master in Bioinformatics in University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and at a MBA on real estate in ISEG, Lisbon.