Ana Paiva

Ana Maria Severino de Almeida e Paiva is Secretary of State for Science in Portugal since April 5, 2024. The Portuguese-born secretary is a computer scientist that researches and explores the creation of intelligent interactive robots. Using her knowledge in robotics and artificial intelligence, she designs AI robots to learn and interact with humans the same way other humans do. Along with her organization in GAIPS and students at University of Lisbon, she has written multiple scientific articles about her findings and research, winning notable awards such as Blue Sky Awards at the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) in 2022. would be her Ph.D. thesis she published and allowed her to recevive her doctorate.

Since 1997, she has been working at IST as a professor and coordinates the master’s and PhD programs in computer science and computer engineering. Paiva would take a total of 25 Ph.D. students under her program and help her students with research and formatting their thesis that they would later research in. In 2011, she took her aggregation exam at IST, an exam that publicly evaluates a person’s academic, professional, and research excellence. In 2020, Paiva would earn a fellowship at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, located at Harvard University.

Organizations In 2000, Paiva founded the Group of AI for people and society (GAIPS). The organization is affiliated with the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores - Investigação e Desenvolvimento (INESC-ID) and IST. This research group dedicates its research on Artificial Intelligence, specifically in machine learning and human-robot interaction. Their main goal is to develop empathetic agents and understand their behavior. Additionally, they research ways to improve user-machine interaction. Their purpose behind their research is to innovate AI and human interactions. Since the creation of GAIPS, the organization has had over 70 PhD students in their program and helped further their knowledge and education in artificial intelligence. GAIPS have created over 25 projects ranging from games to robot and human interactions.

Dias, João; Paiva, Ana (2005), Bento, Carlos; Cardoso, Amílcar; Dias, Gaël (eds.), "Feeling and Reasoning: A Computational Model for Emotional Characters", Progress in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 3808, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 127–140, , , retrieved 2022-01-02 Poklukar, Petra; Vasco, Miguel; Yin, Hang; Melo, Francisco S.; Paiva, Ana; Kragic, Danica (2022-06-28). "Geometric Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning". Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR: 17782–17800. Alves-Oliveira, Patrícia; Arriaga, Patrícia; Xavier, Carla; Hoffman, Guy; Paiva, Ana (2022). "Creativity Landscapes: Systematic Review Spanning 70 Years of Creativity Interventions for Children". The Journal of Creative Behavior. 56 (1): 16–40. . Alves-Oliveira, Patrícia; Arriaga, Patrícia; Paiva, Ana; Hoffman, Guy (2021-03-08). "Children as Robot Designers". Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. HRI '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 399–408. . Elgarf, Maha; Calvo-Barajas, Natalia; Alves-Oliveira, Patricia; Perugia, Giulia; Castellano, Ginevra; Peters, Chirstopher; Paiva, Ana (2022-03). ""And then what happens?" Promoting Children's Verbal Creativity Using a Robot". 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): 71–79.

Awards and honors In 2018, Paiva received first place in the Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Paiva was named a fellow for the European Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2019 and of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In 2023, Ana Paiva also received the research.com computer science leader award in Portugal, three years in a row from 2022 to 2024.