Tuesday, 2/27/2018
The retirement ceremony
of José Maia Neves, UMinho’s Full Professor,took place on the 9th February. The
founder of Artificial Intelligence’s area at the University of Minho (UMinho) has
coordinated pioneer projects such as the digital dermatologist, the online
archive of the Ministry of Justice, the computerisation of the Public Ministry
of Macau, and received the awards “Hospital of Future”, “Good Health Practices”
and “Portugal Digital”, among others.
The last lecture of Professor José Maia
Neves addressed several aspects of his academic career. The ceremony started with
the intervention of the Vice-Dean for the University's Institutional
Development, Ricardo Machado, the President of the School of Engineering of the
University of Minho (EEUM), João L. Monteiro, the Director of the Department of
Informatics, Pedro Henriques, the Director of the ALGORITMI Research Centre
(ALGORITMI), José Machado, and the President of the Portuguese Association for
Artificial Intelligence, Paulo Novais.
José Carlos Ferreira Maia Neves was born 70 years ago in Vila do Conde. He is graduated in Chemical Engineering and got his PhD in Computer Science
from the universities of Coimbra and Heriot Watt (Scotland), respectively. Maia
Neves was Professor at the UMinho between 1977 and 2018, when the production
engineering degree began with the branch of systems and informatics, which
became autonomous in 1983. He was the first to provide services abroad (in the textile,
footwear, clinical, and judicial sectors) and founded the AI area at the UMinho,
involving today 70 researchers. His career is internationally recognised, with
more than 300 scientific publications and thousands of references.
The retired Full Professor from the Department
of Informatics and researcher at the ALGORITMI of the EEUM worked in areas such
as knowledge representation and reasoning, logical computing and computer learning,
but also including fields such as psychology, economics, law, and health. He
has received grants from the British Council and the Gulbenkian Foundation, led
projects with national and European funds and developed partnerships with
scientific institutions of Russia, China, United Kingdom, Angola, Germany,
Sweden, Australia, Japan, Spain, and the United States, among others.
The retirement ceremony marked the
culmination of a career with an intense commitment to education and research at
the service of the EEUM.
