Bio

I was born in Luanda, Angola. In 1975, just before the independence of Angola (until then it was a Portuguese colony), I came to Portugal. I did almost all my studies in Porto where I live. I have graduated in Electrotechnic and Computers Engineering, by the University of Porto in 1991. I then came to the University of Minho, in Braga to take the MSc. course in Computer Science. My thesis was about the relationship between subclassing and subtyping in object-oriented languages and was concluded in 1994. I joined the Distributed Systems Group of the University of Minho, led by Francisco Moura, in 1992 as a teaching assistant.

In 1995 I started my PhD. work at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne under the supervision of André Schiper and Rachid Guerraoui. I received my PhD. degree in 2000. In this work I studied the distributed consensus problem in an environment where participants could fail by crashing and then recover. The thesis presented two major contributions: the definition of Stubborn communication channels which seem to be a pretty useful abstraction to implement fault tolerant algorithms and are incredibly simple, almost trivial, to implement in practice, and a new class of failure detectors with a corresponding algorithm to solve consensus. This keeps being a line of research we pursue with emphasis on scalable and adaptive algorithms for large scale environments.

I am currently associate professor at the Informatics Department of University of Minho, where I teach Distributed Systems in undergraduate, master and doctoral courses. I've been the director of the Computer Science and Technology Center (CCTC) of University of Minho from 2005 to 2010 and coordinator of the High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab), a research unit of University of Minho and INESC TEC, from 2010 to 2015. Currently, I serve as Member of the Administration Board of INESC TEC.

My research interests are in dependable distributed systems, in particular with application to dependable distributed database systems and large scale systems. My work has been focused on on epidemic communication protocols, large scale data management and high-performace transactional middleware for cloud computing and data science. I've been involved in several research projects funded by the EU, FCT and national and international companies, having coordinated GORDA, ESCADA, StrongRep and Stratus. I currently coordinate the H2020 SafeCloud project.

I publish in conferences such as IEEE Dependable Systems and Networks, IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, ACM Eurosys, IFIP Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems as well as in the IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. I have served in the Program Committee for conferences and workshops such as SRDS, Middleware, EDCC, ICDCS, SAC, DOA, DAIS, SSS, DILSOS, ARES, and as PC chair of DAIS 2009 and SRDS 2010.

Currently, I serve on the Steering Committees of the IEEE SRDS, ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware, IFIP DAIS conferences, on the Scientific and Technologic Committee of Instituto do Petróleo e Gás (ISPG) and as vice-chair of IFIP WG6.1. I've served as project reviewer for portuguese and european funding institutions.