Team-People

Project INVITE involves the collaboration of several researchers:

Rui Prada (INESC-ID)

Rui Prada is an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of Instituto Superior Técnico – Technical University of Lisbon (IST-UTL), where he teaches courses on User Centred Design, Social Intelligent Agents and Game Design and Development. He is a senior researcher at INESC-ID, member of GAIPS, Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Character Group and is currently the vice-president of the SPCVideojogos (Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos Videojogos).
His research interests are on social intelligence of virtual agents and its application to games. The current research focus is on social power and social identification as means to achieve believability in complex social situations and on the use of online platforms, such as Facebook and OpenSimulator, for serious gaming.
More information

Carlos Martinho (INESC-ID)

Carlos Martinho is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico from the Technical University of Lisbon and a member of GAIPS, Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Character Group at INESC-ID. At Instituto Superior Técnico, Carlos Martinho has been helping educating Engineers, Masters and Doctors since 1996. His teachings cover subjects such as computer graphics, human-computer interaction, game design and technology, and artificial life. At GAIPS, since its foundation, he works at the frontier between computer graphics and artificial intelligence, building agent-based synthetic characters, using approaches from several subfield of artificial intelligence such as anticipatory computing, affective computing and artificial life.
More information

Pedro Santos (INESC-ID)

Pedro Alexandre Simões dos Santos is Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico – Technical University of Lisbon (IST-UTL). He is a member of CEAF (Center for Functional Analysis and Applications) and an Associated Researcher at INESC-ID. He teaches at IST since the last milenium, having started as Teaching Assistant (Monitor) in 1989. Since then, he has taught from Calculus and Linear Algebra to advanced Operator Algebra courses to Game Design and Development courses.
His numerous scientific interests include Operator Theory, Artificial Inteligence, Game Theory, Game Design and History.
More information

Jorge Peña (University of Austin, Texas/University of California, Davis)

Jorge Peña examines the cognitive, emotional and behavioral foundations of computer-mediated interaction. He is interested in how people communicate and develop impressions when interacting through recreational and instrumental technologies (video games, email, instant messenger, etc.). His most recent work looks at how priming users with social stereotypes through uniforms and roles facilitates non-conscious responses in virtual contexts. Dr. Pena employs experiments and content analysis as primary research tools.
More information

Luís Landeiro Ribeiro (PDM&FC)

Has built and now co-founded a Massive Multiplayer Online Browser Game called Almansur http://www.almansur.net with some friends. Since that inception has largely left the enterprise world behind and drunk the startup spirit kool-aid, started a large evangelization on his day job company @ http://www.pdmfc.com to get everybody up to speed with the lastest piece of tech. Since 2005 has been pushing for Ruby On Rails, Git, Coffescript, JQuery (the list seams to go on forever) and lean development techniques as a replacement for the old arts our company used to built upon. As a technical evangelist his day job gets him to explore all kinds of cool stuff, from building and SMS gateway in mirah http://www.mirah.org for android, testing jruby head and Openjdk 1.7 invokedynamic patches to extract every once of performance from our game engine, integrating RoR apps into a Liferay corporate portal and seamlessly integrate them through SSO. More recently, has been focused on improving web applications to leverage on the HTML5 goodies, exploring canvas, offline storage, javascript frameworks (underscore.js, backbone.js, sproutcore) along the way, this normally includes sleepless nights debugging some weird edge case on some weird browser (read IE9) and trying to get performance up to a reasonable level. Though ruby continues to be a great love affair, finds himself slipping into scala or golang more often when in need of good performance or for highly concurrent apps.

Joana Dimas (INESC-ID)

Joana Dimas is graduated in Social Psychology and is currently doing a PhD in Information Systems and Computer Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Rui Prada.
She is interested in game design, player experience, emotion in games and cognitive science.
More information

Guida Preto (IST)

Guida Preto is graduated in Mathematics and is currently working as a research assistant under the supervision of Professor Pedro Santos. She had previously participated on a project related with automated annotation of images from the surface of Mars, in the development of algorithms for analyzing images.
Beyond Mathematics in general, her main scientific interests include Mathematical Finance, Mathematical Morphology, Game Theory, and also Physics, Astronomy and Cosmology.

Nick Brody (University of Austin TEXAS)

Nicholas Brody is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines the interplay of mediated communication, technology, and personal relationships. He received his M.A. in Communication at Arizona State University, and his B.S. in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He will join the faculty of the University of Puget Sound in Fall, 2013.

Matt Morris (University of Austin TEXAS)

Matt Morris is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores the relationship between media technology and social/political movements, focusing on contemporary populist rhetoric. He received his M.A. in Communication at Arizona State University and his B.A. in English at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Kate Blackburn (University of Austin TEXAS)

Kate Blackburn is a doctoral candidate at Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on exploring how language reflects, shapes and positions communication between individuals and groups.