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.
I come from Portugal, more precisely, from a small town in the middle of the Portuguese Alps called Gouveia. The interesting bit is that I’ve never actually lived there, only in nearby places, like Seia where I spent most of my younger years. After that period, I lived for some years in Macau, China, although by that time it was still under Portuguese administration. When I returned, I went to study in Lisboa for a period and after that, I moved and spent most of my time in Coimbra/Figueira da Foz, with lots of regular trips to Limerick, Ireland (starting in 2006). After concluding my Ph.D. I went abroad once again, first to Lille, France, and later to Boston in the US. I do plan to settle in Munich, Germany, soon preferable!
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 returning back to the University of Coimbra to start a new research position.
Other Places
Although I have the intention of focusing here most of my online presence, there are other places where I post some content, more serious or just for fun. Some of these are:
- My Delicious: literally the warehouse of my bookmarks
- Twitter: still need to find the usefulness of it I believe I’ve found it now :-)
