Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOS
7.9.2017
Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS has now a new leader. Liliana Ferreira is, from today (September 7th), the new Director of the research centre. With a considerable academic and professional career, she is also Invited Full Professor at Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.
The new Director is a known face of Fraunhofer Portugal, where she worked for five years. Liliana Ferreira was President of the Scientific Board as well as Senior Researcher in the area of Health Informatics, at Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, until 2016, when she took up new functions as Senior Cardiology Informatics Scientist at Philips Research, in Eindhoven.
She has previously researched for many years in several industry and research organizations as the IBM Research & Development Böblingen, the Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro, and the Ubiquitous Knowledge Lab of the Technical University of Darmstadt. Her research is mainly focused in the areas of Human Language Technologies and Artificial Intelligence, namely, Clinical Language Understanding, Clinical and Health Knowledge Representation, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Extraction, and Healthcare Informatics.
Liliana Ferreira has a PhD in Informatics Engineering and a MSc in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, by the University of Aveiro (Portugal). Her academic education started in 1998 at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (also in Portugal), where she concluded a Bachelor in Mathematics Applied to Technology.
Liliana also taught in higher education institutions, as the University of Aveiro. Presently, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto is receiving Liliana Ferreira as Invited Full Professor.
Since 2003, the researcher participated in several national and European projects, published several book chapters, journal papers, and conference proceedings, having also been invited to talk in international meetings.
In 2012, she received the Best PhD Dissertation Award on the Computational Processing of Portuguese Language by PROPOR, the international conference of Computational Processing of the Portuguese language.
Her journey started in her youth with community service. After collaborating on the nature conservation, she monitored children summer activities, having been responsible for large groups. Now, Liliana Ferreira is 37 years old and is one of the youngest directors of a Fraunhofer’s research centre.