Dual Degree PhD student at Instituto Superior Técnico and Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. My research focuses on using AI and LLMs to automate and accelerate scientific discovery. Prior to my PhD, I worked in quantum communication and software engineering, and completed an integrated Master’s degree in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering.
João Matos is a Dual Degree PhD student in the CMU Portugal Program. He holds a Master’s from IST Lisbon, with specializations in Security and Algorithms. He was a visiting student at AGH University of Kraków and Université Grenoble Alpes, and has served as a teaching assistant at IST since 2024, teaching lab classes of Computer Science courses.
I am interested in programming languages as tools for effective communication with computers. In my PhD I want to explore the design of type systems for programming languages that are expressive and efficient by using substructural logics to capture parts of program behaviour such as resource management or evaluation order.
Lara Sá Neves is a Biomedical and Data Science Engineer passionate about transparent, adaptive AI. She’s an incoming CS PhD student, and her goals are to advance trustworthy machine learning and build impactful healthcare solutions through research and innovation.
As I am a fan of extremely high performance, I enjoy looking at problems such as lock-free data structures, software transactional memory, memory allocation, memory reclamation, garbage collection, and performance-related operating systems problems. During my Msc’s thesis, I built a lock-free Memcached, reaching up to 6x speedup.
I’m an incoming Computer Science PhD student at CMU and Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), co-advised by José Fragoso Santos, Limin Jia and Pedro Adão. I received my BSc (2021) and MSc (2023) in Computer Science and Engineering from IST. My research interests lie primarily in the areas of software security and formal methods.
Álvaro Silva, a Ph.D. candidate at FEUP in Portugal, aspires to research the interconnection between Formal Verification and generative AI applications. Previously, Álvaro was an ASIC Digital Design Staff Engineer at Synopsys, where he performed functional and formal digital IP verification for automotive-grade products. In this role, Álvaro gained an appreciation for software verification and the challenges it presents. He holds an integrated Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from FEUP, where he graduated with a GPA of 19/20. Recognized for his academic excellence, Álvaro was awarded two merit scholarships.
Afonso Vilalonga holds a BSc and an MSc in Computer Science Engineering from the School of Science and Technology at NOVA University of Lisbon, obtained in July 2020 and December 2022, respectively. His main research areas of interest are network security and privacy, privacy-preserving machine learning and communications, cloud and IoT security, and Internet censorship circumvention.
