What brought you to the USA?
Actually (and unlike most of my PhD colleagues), I was not planning at all to study at the US until just a couple of months before my arrival. So I was not brought here by any “long term plan,” but instead led by the CMU-Portugal dual program that had just started in Language Technologies, which was already my research area. As SCS/CMU is one of the leading schools in the area of Computer Science, this was a great opportunity and I decided to apply. And… here I am.

In what are you currently working on?
My current research project involves applying machine learning techniques to solve problems in natural language. More specifically, I’m investigating how kernel-based methods like support vector machines can be applied to tackle complex and structured problems that arise in natural language, like topic categorization, summarization, semantic role labeling, parsing, etc. Since it is often hard to obtain labeled data for these problems, I am also interested in extending these methods to a semi-supervised learning framework, where unlabeled data (which are abundant) can be exploited.

What conditions do you have here that you do not have in Portugal?
Technically, I could pursue the exact same research in Portugal that I am doing here, up to a difference in computational resources and university facilities (actually, I am going back to Portugal next year since this is a dual program, also carried out at Instituto Superior Técnico). There are a number of things, however, that make SCS/CMU particularly attractive, and that contrast with my academic experience in Portugal: there is a huge scientific interaction, with a lot of talks, seminars, and other interesting events going on. Many of these seminars are organized by students themselves and are very “low-budget” and informal. This happens not only within a department, but also across departments. Scientific networking extends across universities, making it easy to interact with similar groups in other universities. There is also a strong presence of industry, something that is only starting to happening in Portugal.

What are your future plans?
I am going back to Portugal next year and finish my PhD there (tentatively at 2010). After that, I plan to work in research in Language Technologies at Priberam Informática, the Portuguese company that I am affiliated with. My goal is to be part of a research group there that will be in a close relationship with academia.

Why did you join PAPS?
I was invited to join PAPS by a Portuguese department colleague (actually, the only other Portuguese PhD student in this department, who is graduating soon). I became enthusiastic with the idea of making new friends and participating in interesting activities that otherwise would be very unlikely to be carried out in Pittsburgh (like the Portuguese Magusto, at November 11th: I doubt that anyone else would ever consider roasting chestnuts here…).