People

Hernani Pereira Gomes Costa

Address

Departamento de Engenharia Informática
Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

Universidade de Coimbra
Pólo II - Pinhal de Marrocos
3030-290 Coimbra

Tel: +351 239 790 000
Fax: +351 239 701 266

Email

Other Info:
Researcher

Home Page

http://eden.dei.uc.pt/~hpcosta

CV Short

Member

Cognitive and Media Systems

Research interests

My main research interests lie in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially its practical application in the fields of Information Extraction (IE), Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Recommender Systems (RS), Multiagent Systems (MAS) and Affective Computing (AC).

Affiliation

CISUC, University of Coimbra
Coimbra, Portugal

Short Bio

Nowadays, Hernani Costa is a researcher at the Center of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), in Portugal. His main research interests lie in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) area, especially its practical application in the fields of Natural Language Precessing (NLP), Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems (RS), Multiagent Systems (MAS) and Affective Computing (AC).

Hernani completed his BSc on Informatics Engineering at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra (UC). He has also finished his Master degree in Computer Science (MSc) in 2010, at the same institution. It was during his Master degree he started his research activities. In particular, he developed a system capable of acquiring semantic knowledge from any kind of Portuguese text. Besides that, he also analysed the benefits of applying similarity distributional metrics, based on the occurrence of words in documents, on the system outputs. As a result, two papers were published: one at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'10) workshop and another at the INForum'10 symposium. Furthermore, another paper resulted from his thesis, which has been nominated for best paper award in the Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA'11). Additionally, in September 2011, he was invited by LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing to publish his MSc thesis, that was published with the title: "Automatic Extraction and Validation of Lexical Ontologies from Text: Creating Lexical Ontologies from text".

In a total of six years, he studied at the aforementioned institution, developing skills on the field of Computer Science, except in the academic year of 2007/2008 where he integrated the Erasmus program for a year at the University of Vigo, Spain. During this period, besides starting to acquire skills in the Natural Language Processing area, he developed his skills in interpersonal relations (meeting Erasmus students from other cultures and languages), teamwork, research, organisation and autonomy which enabled him to develop writing and speaking skills in Spanish, as well as in English.

In October 2010, he applied for a scholarship and, between December 2010 and October 2013, he worked on the project "Forms of Selective Attention in Intelligent Transportation Systems", at the Cognitive and Media Systems (CMS) group, at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra. During this period, three papers were published. The first one, in Spetember 2012, on the ACM Recommender Systems conference. The second one, in May 2013, on the International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems conference (PAAMS). Finally, the third one, in September 2013, in the Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA). In this project, a two-parted agent architecture was implemented, with an agent responsible for gathering Points of Interest (POIs) from a location-based service, and a set of Personal Assistant Agents (PAAs) collecting information about the context and the intentions of its respective user. In each PAA were embedded a set of Machine Learning algorithms, with the purpose of ascertaining how well-suited these classifiers are for filtering irrelevant POIs, in a completely automatic fashion.

During the Autumn 2011, he also developed an online service for browsing Portuguese semantic relations for the Linguateca project. As a result three articles were published: one in the International Conference on the Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR); another in the Linguamática journal; and the third one in the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (EACL).

While a researcher, Hernani also has three years of experience in the teaching area. More precisely, between 2010 and 2012, he taught at the Lousã Professional School, then, in 2013 he taught at Coimbra Institute of Engineering (ISEC).