About Me
I should have become a scientist, not a researcher.
My name is Jorge Tavares and welcome to my weblog! This is mostly a homepage about my work, related stuff, as well as bits and pieces of anything that I find interesting. Not regularly updated in terms of blog posts but I try to do my best.
Since I was always interested in Space Exploration, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, it was more or less natural that I end up doing my degree in Informatics Engineering with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence, at the University of Coimbra. Following that it came the master and the Ph.D., all in the same topic. Although I have a general interest in all AI fields, I become more interested in Nature Inspired approaches to Intelligence. Unfortunately, so far I didn’t have the opportunity to work with Robotics (LEGO Mindstorms don’t count I’ve been told) or anything Space related but I did work on some interesting problems, like Golomb Rulers.
During this period I had the opportunity to spend one month at the Santa Fe Institute for the Complex Systems Summer School. This month has been my most worthwhile experience as a researcher until today. After finishing the Ph.D. I went to INRIA for a year to do a postdoc in Bioinformatics using evolutionary techniques. More recently, I did a postdoc at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), in Boston. I worked on projects of the MIT Portugal Program related to the Transportation Systems Focus Area in the Intelligent Transportation Systems Lab, as well as collaborating with the SenseableCity Lab.
At the moment, I am at the University of Coimbra again in a new research position. I am working with Genetic Programming and Ant Systems with the aim to build Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems. I am also a big Common Lisp fan and I use it a lot for my own research (unless I am forced by external factors, e.g., colleagues). Because of that, the blog side of this page is more dedicated to Lisp and programming than anything else :-)
