Claudio Santos Pinhanez

Claudio Pinhanez is a scientist, a professor, and a leader of research and innovation groups.Claudio is currently a Principal Research Scientist of IBM Research (Brazil) and the manager of the Conversational Intelligence Research group in the IBM Research Brazil laboratory. He leads a 12-member group of Ph.Ds, software engineers, and students focused on advancing research and innovation in conversational systems, artificial intelligence, machine teaching, social computing, ubiquitous computing, and human-computer interfaces. He is also the Deputy Director of the IBM-USP-FAPESP Center for Artificial Intelligence, a 10-year, US$ 20M effort to build a world-class Artificial Intelligence laboratory in Brazil and a Visiting Professor of the University of São Paulo.Claudio got his Ph.D. in 1999 from the MIT Media Laboratory where he conducted multidisciplinary research on computer vision, interactive spaces, temporal algebras, and interactive art and theater. In his works he created the precursors of many innovative camera-based interaction systems which were brought to the market 15 years later in devices such as the Kinect. During this time, he also created the first Internet blog in 1994.After the Ph.D., Claudio was hired as a researcher at the T.J. Watson laboratory of IBM Research in New York where he worked from 1999 to 2008. There he invented the Everywhere Interactive Display, a revolutionary steerable projector-camera system. This work was internationally recognized by a string of world-class publications, best paper awards, patents, and the 2003 Most Promising Scientist award from HENAAC (Hispanic Engineers National Achievement Awards Conference). In 2008 he was sent by IBM to Brazil to study the feasibility of a new IBM laboratory in Brazil. After 2 years of intensive conversations with Brazilian government, academia, and industry, the IBM Research Brazil laboratory was founded in June of 2010. From 2010, Claudio has worked in all aspects of the research and innovation management, including business and scientific strategy, research talent management, intellectual property, business development, and university relations. He has also built one of the premier artificial intelligence and human-computer interface groups in Brazil, developing advanced conversational systems in Portuguese and English. Since 2023 he has focused on the NLP of Brazilian Indigenous languages using advanced AI techniques, and specially on building writing-support tools to foster use of those languages on the Internet and social media. During this period, he has also worked as a liaison between IBM Research and IBM Brazil, supporting science-based innovation projects in key IBM clients.Claudio has more than 30 refereed journal papers and 140 articles and abstracts published in international conferences, including 3 best paper awards and 31 patents awarded in US, Japan, and Europe. His work has been cited more than 5400 times (h-index of 38 and i10-index of 105). He is a Senior Member of ACM and an associate editor of 4 scientific journals.Earlier in his career Claudio was a faculty member of the department of Computer Science of the University of São Paulo from 1987 to 1993. From 1990 to 1992 he was in Japan with a Mombusho research scholarship from the Japanese government. He was also a visiting researcher at the ATR-MIC Laboratory in Kyoto in 1996 and at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo in 1998. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)