Team members
Henrique Paz - Team leader
Incoming PhD student at NOVA FCT with strong industry background as a backend engineer. Secured 2nd place in the 2025 Amazon Nova AI Challenge (Team RedTWIZ). Research focuses on AI safety and the development of safe agentic planning, with emphasis on robust safety reasoning across diverse domains.
Iago Paulo
Computer Science master's student at NOVA FCT, specializing in artificial intelligence, LLM red teaming, and automation. Experience developing adversarial frameworks, AI assistants, and safety evaluation tools. Strong interest in model robustness and applied AI research.
Mariana Aguiar
Professional experience in backend development. Developed a multimodal sports-video highlight system using LLaVA and BERT, implementing full pipeline for frame captioning, semantic retrieval, and automated short-form video generation. Hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks, cloud infrastructure, and deep learning.
James Hertz
Track record of research in Distributed Systems and Web3 technologies. Contributing to AMALIA, the Portuguese sovereign LLM, responsible for safety evaluation and model safety alignment using RL strategies.
Diogo Silva
Fourth-year PhD student at NOVA University of Lisbon with Master's degree focusing on polite language generation. Research focuses on language generation in plan-following conversational systems, with emphasis on enabling LLMs and VLMs to adhere to and follow plans accurately.
Diogo Tavares
Computer Science PhD student focusing on Language Model controllability. Works on making AI systems more reliable and aligned with human needs, improving how we guide and direct large language models.
Rafael Ferreira
Computer Science PhD finalist specializing in conversational assistants. Previously led the award-winning TWIZ team. Research focuses on user modeling via controllable user simulators and deep-research systems, essential for identifying limitations and enhancing robustness of AI-based assistants.
Faculty advisors
David Semedo
Assistant Professor at FCT NOVA (PhD, 2020). Research focuses on AI for vision and language problems, with emphasis on neural approaches for conversational and contextualized media understanding. Faculty co-advisor of the TWIZ team, winner of the 2022 Alexa TaskBot Challenge.
António Ravara
Associate Professor at NOVA University of Lisbon (PhD, 2000, Technical University of Lisbon). Research focuses on producing safe, sound, and trustworthy software. Develops techniques, program constructions, and tools to create safe systems with correctness guarantees.
João Magalhães
Full Professor at NOVA University of Lisbon and national co-director of CMU Portugal (PhD, 2008). Research focuses on generative AI and multimodal systems, with emphasis on vision-language understanding and the national AMALIA LLM project. Faculty co-advisor of the TWIZ team, winner of the 2022 Alexa TaskBot Challenge.