Short Bio

Francisco B. Pereira is a Professor at the Coimbra Institute of Engineering from the Polytechnic Coimbra, Portugal. He is also a researcher at the Evolutionary and Complex Systems Group (ECOS), a research line from the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), Portugal. He edited one book on bio-inspired approaches to the vehicle routing problem and published over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers in journals and conference proceedings. In the past 15 years he has given several invited talks/lectures in scientific events and academic institutions and organized seven workshops/special sessions in international conferences from the evolutionary computation area. Also, he has been a regular member from the program committee of several international conferences. His current expertise is focused on the field of Artificial Intelligence, more specifically on the application of Optimization and Machine Learning methods to problems arising in different domains. He has been involved in longstanding multidisciplinary collaborations with researchers from the areas of chemistry, physics and biochemistry. In the chemistry/physics areas ECOS-CISUC has been working for the past 15 years with groups from Portugal, Spain and Brazil in the development of bio-inspired optimization methods for prediction of the optimal 3-dimensional structures of atomic and molecular clusters and also for the fitting of potential energy functions. This collaboration is supported by several national and international scientific projects and has been presented in a solid publication record. As for the collaboration with the biochemistry area, we have been applying our expertise in the development of innovative exploratory techniques for unveiling relevant patterns in biological data and to the creation of prediction/diagnosis computational classifiers