Rogério Pontes came to HASLab looking for new challenges and expand his knowledge on computer science. In his first year, he completed his Master’s thesis on a Linear Algebra Approach to OLAP systems. The master thesis, the great group environment and the possibility to work on research projects relevant to the needs of users and the industry sparked his interest for research.  With this new found interest, he enrolled on the MAP-i Doctoral programme. His thesis, still in progress, deals with one current issue on today’s society, the privacy of data. With close proximity to the european project SafeCloud-eu, his research tackles the existing issues on data storage privacy and secure data processing.