Arlindo Oliveira, a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico and president of the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores (INESC), was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) on 27 March, at the institution’s 25th anniversary ceremony.
According to Arlindo Oliveira, this honour is ‘recognition not only of the collaboration we have had with that university but also of the university’s interest in strengthening relations with Portugal in general and with Instituto Superior Técnico in particular’.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher is the first Portuguese to receive this honour from the University of Macau, which has ‘special significance’ since Arlindo Oliveira has ‘always argued that Portugal should boost its relationship with China through the privileged relationship it has with the Macau Special Administrative Region’, he concludes.
Biography
Arlindo Oliveira was born in Angola and lived in Mozambique, Portugal, Switzerland, United States (California and Massachusetts), and Japan. He has a degree from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a Distinguished Full Professor at Técnico, President of the Instituto de Sistemas e Computadores (INESC), non-executive director of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, researcher at INESC-ID, member of the National Council for Science, Technology and Innovation and member of the Advisory Board of the Science and Technology Panel of the European Parliament (STOA). He has published four books, translated into several languages, and hundreds of scientific and scientific dissemination articles. He was director of several companies and institutions and president of Técnico, the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence and INESC-ID. He was the director of the Portuguese node of the European Biological Data Network ELIXIR, a visiting professor at MIT and the University of Tokyo, and a researcher at CERN, INESC, Cadence Research Laboratories and the Electronics Research Lab at Berkeley. He is a member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering and a senior member of the IEEE. He has received several awards and distinctions, including the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa / Santander award for excellence in research in 2009. At Instituto Superior Técnico, he has taught Programming Fundamentals, Algorithms and Data Structures, Analysis and Synthesis of Algorithms, Machine Learning, Computer Architecture, Computational Biology and Advanced Algorithms. In March, he received the “Career Award” from Galp and the Portuguese Academy of Engineering. He recently published a book for the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation titled ‘Generative Artificial Intelligence’.
