Inês Lynce was appointed on January 27th as co-director of the CMU Portugal Program by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT). The Associate Professor with habilitation at Instituto Superior Técnico and Presidente of INESC-ID assumes the national co-direction of the international partnership alongside Nuno Nunes, replacing Rodrigo Rodrigues who has been in office since the renewal of the Program in 2018.

According to the newly appointed co-director, “It is with great pleasure and some expectation that I assume this position. I have been connected to the CMU Portugal Program for several years as a researcher, having already belonged to the team of several projects supported under the Program. Now the commitment will be entirely different and focused on helping the partnership to achieve its strategic goals by 2023 ”. “Personally, I am honored to have been appointed to this position and join such a prestigious and dynamic team with remarkable results achieved in recent years,” she says.

Inês Lynce, who will be the first woman to lead the CMU Portugal Program, is highly recognized for her work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, namely in the area of ​​problem solving with restrictions and optimization. Her main contributions refer to the development of algorithms and computational tools and their application to solve practical problems as diverse as developing timetables in universities, software package upgradability, the functioning of biological networks and the automatic creation of programming code from examples.

Since 2021, she has been a member of the Editorial Board of the prestigious scientific magazine “Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research” and is a recurring member of international conferences committees on Artificial Intelligence. This year she will be also part of the “Women in Science” initiative, promoted by Ciência Viva, the National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture.

Inês Lynce is also the President of INESC ID, the Portuguese research center for combined Computer Science/Engineering (CSE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), a role she assumed last year and where she already was a senior researcher.