Good to know that our AIRES team received an honorable mention on the MIT-Portugal entrepreneurship competition.

Here is a summary from my Linkedin profile.
Check out my other homepage: armando.sairmais.com

In a nutshell: I’m an Entrepreneur, Physicist, Professor, Data Mining Analyst & IT consultant
Passionate about Artificial Intelligence, Web 2.0, Recommender Systems, Complex Networks & Tourism.

The AIRES project: From 2004 I’ve working on AIRES with João Carvalho das Neves and Bernardete Ribeiro. It´s a big project to automatically rate SMEs. Latter Tiago Silvério Marques join the group. See the beta version at http://aires.dei.uc.pt (see section credit risk analysis).

At 2009 I started the  Sair+ project, in which we are still working. It’s a tourism portal with a recommendation system.

MORE ABOUT ME

My early studies: I had the privilege to take my degree of Physics, in 1990, at one of the best Portuguese engineering schools, Instituto Superior Técnico, in the beautiful city of Lisbon.

In 1993 I took the master degree in Plasma Physics to study the hot plasma of the ISTOK tokamak using function parametrization. For those who never heard about a tokamak, here is a schematic picture (see also the ITER project that will revolutionize nuclear energy production):

My PhD: I moved to Coimbra in 1993 for my PhD in Theoretical Physics. Though I didn’t love the city, I got fascinated by the personality and character of Professor Carlos Fiolhais. The thesis was on fission of metallic clusters – building blocks of nanotechnology.

My early days as a researher:

After spending a year in Grenoble, France, as a Postdoc, I decided to do something new.
From 1998 to 2000 I worked on the Portuguese Nuclear Reactor at Sacavém, studying neutron diffusion and radiation protection. I also started the collaboration with Nuno Barrradas and Paulo Freitas.

Since 1998 I’ve been working with Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Artificial Intelligence. I applied these tools to any kind of problems that I put my hands on: from physics to economics or even deep oil discovery.

We were able to successful apply ANN to several Rutherfod BackScattering spectra analysis of thin films:

In 2003 I has able to propose a new algorithm to train Neural Networks for classification problems and its application to complex tasks, namely financial distress prediction of private French companies.

More info:

  • From 2003 to 2005 I was vice-president of the Physics Department @ ISEP, Porto.
  • I lectured on several international post-graduated degrees, like master in Bioinformatics in University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and at a MBA on real estate in ISEG, Lisbon.
  • In 2006 I published a paper on Physics Teacher on the physics of kicking a ball. Since it was the year of the world football cup, this turns out to be a very successful story, being published on TV and Newspapers.

I have also been engaged in some Ignite events:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5910388/Press/futebol_jan_2012.jpg

You can mail me at armando.vieira (@) sairmais.com