Born in Angola and lived in Mozambique, Portugal, Switzerland, United States, China, and Japan. He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and his PhD degree, also in EECS, from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He was invited professor at MIT and a researcher at INESC, CERN, the Electronics Research Laboratory of UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Cadence Laboratories and the University of Tokyo. He is a distinguished professor of IST, president of INESC, distinguished visiting professor at Macau University of Science and Technology, member of the board of Caixa Geral de Depósitos and a researcher at INESC-ID. He authored four books, translated into different languages, and more than two hundred articles in international conferences and journals, in the areas of algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioinformatics and computer architecture. He has been on the boards of several companies and institutions and is a past president of Instituto Superior Técnico, of INESC-ID and of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering, of the National Council for Science Technology and Innovation, of the Advisory Board of the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel of the European Parliament, of IEEE and of ACM. He received several prizes and distinctions, including the Technical University of Lisbon / Santander prize for excellence in research, in 2009.