About

Fernando Batista received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering in 2011 from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) of the Technical University of Lisbon. He previously received the Mestre degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2003 also from IST, and the Licenciado degree in in 1997 in Mathematics and Computer Sciences from Universidade da Beira Interior (UBI).

In terms of academic activities, he is currently a lecturer at ISCTE-IUL, being Assistant Professor from 2011 onwards and team coordinator of several courses, namely: Operating Systems (2011-2015), Probabilistic Learning for Natural Language Processing (2015/2016); and Computational Language Processing (2014/2015). Since early 2015 he has been elected member of the Permanent Committee of the ISCTE-IUL Pedagogical Council and member of Pedagogical Committee of the ISTA School. From 1997 to 2000, he started his teaching experience as monitor at IST (on Introduction to Programming and Informatics). In 2000 he became lecturer at the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), teaching courses on Computer architecture, Operating Systems, Introduction to Programming, Computer Science, and Applied Computer Sciences.

In terms of research activities, he is also researcher at the Spoken Language Systems Lab. of INESC-ID, Lisbon, where he has participated in 3 European projects: METANET4U (2011-2013), DIRHA (2012-2014), and SpeDial (2014-2015); and 4 national projects: POSTPORT (2008-2012), PT-STAR (2009-2012), COPAS (2012-2015), and MISNIS (2013-2015). He coordinated the INESC-ID team in the SpeDial project during 2014 and 2015. He was previously a researcher at INESC, from 1996 to 2000, in the Natural Language Processing Group, participating in several European and National projects. Later in 2001 he became a member of the Spoken Language Systems Lab (L˛F) of INESC-ID.

Recently, he was the handbook chair of the EMNLP 2015 that was held in Lisbon in September 17-21, achieving a record number of more than 650 participants, and exceeding 1300 submissions (acceptance rate of 23%). He has been a member of the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS) technical staff from 2011 to 2015, and he is now part of the organisation team for LXMLS 2016.

He was member of the Program Committee of several conferences, including: Interspeech (2014, and 2015), SLATE (2013, 2014, and 2015), KDIR 2013, ICT 2014. He was also a reviewer for the Neurocomputing Journal, EPIA 2013, ACL 2013, Interspeech 2013, ACL 2014, Speech Prosody 2014, and for several other national conferences.

He is currently Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).