Good to know that our AIRES team received an honour mention on the MIT-Portugal entrepreneurship competition.
Here is a summary from my Linkedin profile
In a nutshell: I'm a physicist, professor, data mining analyst, entrepreneur & IT consultant (mainly Social Media).
My early studies: I had the privilege to take my degree of Physics, in 1990, at the best Portuguese engineering school, 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):
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:
In 1997 I spend a year in the wonderful city of Grenoble – France, on CIEA, Centre de Ions e des Atomes.
From 1998 to 2000 I worked on the Portuguese Nuclear Reactor at Sacavém on neutron diffusion and radiation protection. I also started the collaboration with on of the major portuguese experimental physicists Nuno Barrradas and Paulo Freitas.
Since 1998 I fell in love 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 deep oil discovery.
After successful application of ANN to several Rutherfod BackScattering spectra analysis of thin films,
Finally, 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.
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, which will be a breakthrough as a tourism portal with a recommendation system. I managed the project, the marketing strategy and the promotion on digital media.
Other
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.
You can mail me at armando.vieira (@) sairmais.com