Renato Cerqueira

I am Senior Research Manager and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research Brazil (BRL), where I lead the Knowledge-centric Systems group, creating technologies to enable Human-AI co-creation and scalable knowledge management in knowledge intensive processes, such as scientific discovery, decision making under uncertainty and data interpretation. We have been exploring the application of our research to different problems in Geosciences, Materials Design, and Finance, in partnership with several clients and external collaborators. Our current research agenda builds on our prior work on advanced digital technologies for Natural Resources. A good example of our work can be seen at https://ibm.biz/Bdf8q8 and https://ibm.biz/Bdf8qV.

Prior to join IBM Research, from 2002 to 2011, I was professor at the Department of Informatics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), pursuing research on the intersection of Software Engineering, Programming Languages and Distributed Systems. From 1993 to 2011, I was also researcher at Tecgraf/PUC-Rio, leading research on Distributed Systems Engineering and conducting several R&D projects with partners from industry and academia.

During 2001, I was Visiting Researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Roy H. Campbell on middleware technologies for Ubiquitous Computing. I received my Ph.D. (2000) and M.Sc. (1996) degrees in Computer Science and my Computer Engineer degree from PUC-Rio.

Currently my research interests include Human-AI co-creation, knowledge representation & reasoning, knowledge management & evolution, Neuro-symbolic AI, engineering of AI-based systems, and pragmatics of programming languages and tools.

I have already published more than 120 papers, issued more than 20 patents, and advised several Ph.D. and M.Sc. students. I was Technical Program Co-chair of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference 2007, having served as Steering Committee member, TPC member, Tutorial Chair, Local Arrangements and Financial Chair in other editions of this conference. I was also Steering Committee member of the Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware for almost 20 years. I am member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society, and Brazilian Computer Society (SBC).