João Magalhães, Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (FCT NOVA) and coordinator of the Multimodal Systems Group at the NOVA LINCS research center, was appointed in October 2024, as the new National Co-director of the CMU Portugal Program by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT).
Magalhães now shares the leadership of the international partnership with Inês Lynce (INESC-ID), taking over from Nuno Nunes, who has held the position since the program’s renewal in 2018. José Fonseca de Moura continues as the Director of the CMU Portugal Program at Carnegie Mellon University.
According to the newly appointed co-director, “I’m thrilled to contribute to the CMU Portugal program and build upon the exceptional legacy established by the previous Directors. Today, the CMU Portugal program stands as a flagship initiative and a model of excellence in education, science, and innovation. It’s an honor to join Inês Lynce and José Fonseca de Moura in this remarkable program and to bring fresh ideas to the table.”
João Magalhães holds a Ph.D. degree (2008) in Computer Science from the Imperial College London, UK and before joining Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in 2009, he was a Research Assistant at The University of Sheffield.
His research interests cover the different problems of vision and language AI algorithms and applications: foundational vision and language models, multimedia search, multimodal conversational systems, and trusted LLMs. He is passionate about the generalization of his research to different real-world domains.
In recent years, João Magalhães has achieved considerable milestones in his research career. He hosted the prestigious ACM Multimedia 2022 conference in Lisbon and coordinated a FCT NOVA team of research students to the 1st prize in the Alexa TaskBot Conversational AI Challenge 2023, which included CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. students Diogo Tavares and Diogo Silva.
João Magalhães has in fact been a long-time contributor to the CMU Portugal Program, both as a faculty member and student supervisor, having advised four Ph.D. students over the years. He participated as a PI and researcher in two Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives (2014) – GoLocal and BioVisualSpeech – and served as the Local PI for the Large-scale Collaborative project Farfetch Chat R&D from 2020 to 2023. In September 2024, he assumed the coordination of the Advancing Training Program in AI, Data Science, and Machine Learning within the newly launched CMU Portugal Academy.
