We are a group of PhD and MSc students from the NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics at the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Portugal, with experience in information retrieval, deep learning and multimodal systems.
TWIZ (Task WIZard) is our Alexa TaskBot. Our ambition is to move AI and search closer to the way humans communicate and solve tasks. With TWIZ, our vision is to create a multimodal conversational assistant to guide users solving step-by-step tasks.
The novelty of our approach is the multimodal curiosity-exploration paradigm allowing for a more fun and rich interaction with the system.
Rafael F. - Team leader
My name is Rafael, and I am a Computer Science PhD student at NOVA School of Science and Technology in Portugal, and I am the team lead of the TWIZ team. I concluded my master's thesis in 2021 in conversational search, and I am currently working on the subject of dialogue policy for conversational dialogue agents to guide the conversation to a successful state using the underlying context to choose the next system action. My research aims to improve the behavior and naturalness of conversational agents with the aim of developing next- generation systems that exhibit more human-like characteristics.
Frederico V.
Frederico holds a BSc degree in CS and is currently a MSc CS student. He has focused his studies in Machine Learning and Deep Learning fields, where he has already done some Scientific Research using Generative Models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoenconders, to map Image Classifiers’ view of the classes learnt. He is interested in researching the interpretability of neural networks, Computer Vision and Conversational Agents. Recently, he has been researching about the VQA field and getting to know the current state-of-the-art approaches to VQA problems.
Gustavo G.
I am a 4th year PhD student working co-supervised by Professors João Magalhães and Jamie Callan. I have focused my work on discovering the role of entities and knowledge bases in conversational search sessions. My research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, and social media mining. When I am not doing research you can find me rock climbing, or if the weather and chance allows it, skiing.
Diogo S.
My name is Diogo and I am a student at NOVA. Throughout the past year I have taken an interest in Language Generation, specifically in making it more natural sounding and appealing to humans, to close the human-machine gap. After my MSc I intend to transfer to the PhD program at NOVA FCT.
Rui M.
Rui holds a BSc degree in CS and is currently a MSc CS student.His expertise is at the cross-roads of Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems. He believes the next step for Humanity is the reduction of barriers between us and the internet. For this integration, he believes AI as well as the IoT will play a big role. He did an internship in the Computer Vision field, focusing on image segmentation.
Mariana B.
Mariana holds a BSc degree in CS and is currently a MSc CS student. She has directed her studies to software engineering and HCI, having published a paper on domain engineering of historical soundscapes systems. She is keen in applying machine learning to improve UX.
Paula F.
With a professional career developed managing both IT and Customer Care teams, passionate about Advanced Analytics and Technology, I love to merge business, analytical and technical knowledge as the basis to strategic thinking and solution designing. I hold a master’s degree in Probability and Statistics, and I am currently a PhD Researcher in the Artificial Intelligence field, focusing on Conversational Agents implementation options and on how to evaluate them in terms of User Experience. This is a great opportunity to apply state-of-the-art research to real business problems, innovation and business transformation.
Helder R.
Helder is a Data Science student (Masters in Analysis and Engineering of Big Data), specialized in Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, NLP and Big Data. He wrote a paper where he compares the performance of several NLP deep learning models for conceiving a Conversional Search. Parallelly, he works for the private sector as lead AI Solutions Architect at La Javaness in Paris, where he conceives Search, Bots and AIOps solutions. Experience in Oil and Gas, Pharma, Cosmetics, Telecoms, Banking, and public sector. He’s also a Computer Engineer with a MSc diploma from Nova School of Science and Technology in Portugal.
João Magalhães - Faculty advisor
Coming soon!
