A. Short Description of LIACC

A. Short Description of LIACC

The Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (LIACC) of the University of Porto is a research centre that has already attained a good degree of visibility at both the national and the international levels. Its main aim is to pursue research, both at the theoretical and practical levels, in order to increase the quality of software in what concerns, for instance, declarativity, distributiveness, adaptativeness and flexibility. The main areas of research are (in alphabetic order):

• Computer Networks: scalable Quality of Service solutions, security services and signalling protocols in heterogenous and next generation networks;
• Declarative Programming and Parallelism: design and implementation (sequential or parallel) of declarative programming languages;
• Distributed Artificial Intelligence: multi-agent systems techniques and applications, agents negotiation and adaptation, Electronic Commerce;
• Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: design and implementation of methods for extracting of non-trivial, potentially useful and easily interpretable information from data;
• Logic, Language and Computation: algorithmic complexity, formal systems, cryptography and language theory;
• Machine Learning: design and implementation of automatic inductive learning methods useful in classification and regression;
• Innovative Applications: development of practical applications based on recent languages and tools;
• Coordination of Teams of Agents: agent-based robot control, hybrid architectures, simulated robosoccer;
• Optimization, Constraints and Heuristics: constraint programming, heuristics and meta-heuristics for optimization and problem-solving;
• Parallel and Distributed Systems: design and implementation of programming environments with support for mobility and distribution of computations.

Results of this research have been extensively used by other institutions, both in the academic milieu and in the industry, and both in Portugal and abroad. Three examples of this are: the YAP Prolog compiler, the Data Mining Advisor (DMA), and the ARCA Expert System.

LIACC provides a research environment for the activities of several PhD students, and gives support to MSc courses organized by the Faculties of Science, Economics and Engineering.

LIACC participates in the activities of several international research networks, and has projects in colaboration with several institutions abroad and in Portugal.

Since its creation, back in 1988, LIACC has been able to maintain a good level of scientific production, as confirmed by previous independent evaluations, while giving an important contribution to the formation of a new generation of young researchers (as demonstrated by the conclusion of 23 doctoral degrees in the period 1999/2003). This in turn enhances the potential of LIACC to achieve not only higher production both in terms of quality and quantity, but also extend the research to new potentialy useful areas.

A. Short Description of LIACC