Short Bio

PhD and Habilitation in Informatics Engineering, Full Professor at the University of Coimbra, where he teaches Artificial Intelligence, Computational Creativity, Programming for Design, Sound Design and other topics. He is a member of the Cognitive and Media Systems group (CMS) of the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), a research unit funded by the Portuguese FCT. He was Vice-President of Instituto Pedro Nunes, the knowledge transfer and incubation interface of the University of Coimbra, from 2017 to 2023. He was the Academic Ombudsman of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra from 2016 to 2022.

He is currently co-chair of the IJCAI-2024 Special Track on AI, Arts & Creativity, to be held in Jeju, South Corea, and Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Association for Computational Creativity since 2023.

He developed pioneering work on Computational Creativity in the '90s, ever since assuming an active role in the establishment of a Computational Creativity community by chairing the Working Group on Computational Creativity of Action COST 282 (2001-2003), which promoted a series of meetings that spurred the formation of a core group of European researchers in the area, by co-founding the series of "Creative Systems Workshops" co-located with important international conferences (2001-2003), the “International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity” series (2004-2008), and the International Conference on Computational Creativity [2010-present], and by co-founding The Association for Computational Creativity (2017). He was General Chair of the 7th International Conference on Computational Creativity, ICCC 2016, Paris, France, and the 11th International Conference on Computational Creativity, ICCC 2020, Coimbra, Portugal (online). He was co-chair of the IJCAI-2023 Special Track on AI, Arts & Creativity, held in August 2023, in Macau. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Computational Creativity (2006-2020) and Treasurer of The Association for Computational Creativity (2015-2022). He is co-editor of the book “Computational Creativity - The Philosophy and Engineering of Autonomously Creative Systems”, published by Springer in 2019.

He is currently involved in the PRR-funded project NextGenAI - Centre For Responsible AI, a nationwide partnership with companies and Universities, and in the project EA-Digifolk, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action. He was involved in the FET Coordination Action ProSECCo - Promoting the Scientific Exploration of Computational Creativity (2013-2016) - and in the FP7-ICT STREPS project ConCreTe - Concept Creation Technology (2013-2016).

His research interests also extend to Affective Computing and Multi-Agent Systems, especially in contexts of creative systems, automatic music composition, sound and music computing, sonification and interactive music. He has been involved in FP7, FET and H2020 evaluation panels (2009, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2022).

He was President of the External Evaluation Commission for the HE Polytechnics programs in Informatics (2010-15). He was also Director of the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, CISUC (2008-12). Former Cognitive and Media Systems Group coordinator, CMS (2007-15).

He serves in the Program Committees of IJCAI, ICCC, CogSci, EvoMusArt, ISEA and other conferences. He is a member of the Association for Computational Creativity (ACC), the Cognitive Science Society and the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA).