Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo

He received his PhD and associate professorship in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics at ICMC-USP, where he also completed his postdoctoral studies. At UFSCar, he got his master's and bachelor's degrees in Computer Science. He is currently an associate professor at ICMC-USP, where he has worked in teaching, research, outreach, and university administration for nearly 20 years. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of AI, addressing topics such as sentiment analysis, automatic summarization, computational linguistic modeling at syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels, and automatic textual analysis methods. He is the coordinator of NILC (Interinstitutional Center for Computational Linguistics), the largest and oldest NLP group in Brazil, which is approaching 30 years of existence and brings together researchers from institutions other than USP, such as UFSCar, UNESP, and IFSP. He has coordinated several funded scientific projects throughout his career, created national research collaboration networks, and participated in international collaborations with researchers from other countries, including Portugal, Spain, France, England, Canada, and the United States. He currently coordinates a university-industry partnership project with Motorola and is principal investigator at the USP Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI, an Engineering Research Center funded by FAPESP and IBM). Together, these two projects counts with over 100 researchers and associated students, forming a research network involving several USP units (ICMC, IME, POLI, EACH, and FFCLPR), UFSCar, UNESP, UFBA, UFS, and UFMG. He has a history of university-industry partnerships: in addition to Motorola, notable ones include Samsung, SiDi, and Microsoft. He actively participates in the national and international research community, striving to publish and regularly attend official national events of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) (such as STIL, BRACIS, ENIAC, and associated workshops), related forums (such as ELC and Linguistics events), and renowned international events (such as PROPOR, LREC, RANLP, EMNLP, ACL and associated workshops), being a frequent member of their program committees. He is a founding member of the SBC's Special Interest Group on NLP, having chaired it for two terms and served as a regular member on several occasions. He was also a member and chair of the steering committee of PROPOR, the main event dedicated to the computational processing of Portuguese. Furthermore, given his involvement in the field, he has organized several scientific events (such as STIL and PROPOR) and has created some workshops that continue to this day. He regularly publishes in renowned journals in the fields of NLP, AI, and Computing, such as JBCS, RITA, RELIN, DELTA, LinguaMÁTICA, NLP, LREV, ACM Transactions, and ESWA, among others. With his advisees, he has accumulated numerous awards and nominations for best graduate theses and dissertations (for example, he had a doctoral student who was a finalist in the SBC Thesis and Dissertation Competition in 2025), as well as several awards for best papers (recently, he won the best paper awards at the last two editions of the national NLP conference). At USP, at the graduate level, he has trained more than 30 students; at the undergraduate level, he has advised more than 60. He is passionate about teaching and sharing knowledge with society, regularly offering various undergraduate and graduate courses, organizing project expositions and teaching extension courses. Of note is the regular offering of a NLP course for all undergraduate courses at USP (the last edition had 2,000 students), an extension course on programming for NLP (last edition had 12,500 students), and an introductory course to AI (with over 35,000 students). He has also received numerous awards for teaching excellence in undergraduate programs (in the last five years, it has been awarded seven times). (Source: Lattes Curriculum)