João Pavão Martins is a Full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon). He holds a Licentiate degree in mechanical engineering (1976) from Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon), as well as a Master of Science in computer science (1979) and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence (1983) from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was one of the figures behind the creation of the Computer Science and Engineering degree at Instituto Superior Técnico in 1988 and one of the founders of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the institute in 1998. He served as the head of this department between 2002 and 2004, and again for a two-year term starting in 2009.[1]
Martins is also a software industry entrepreneur. In 1986, together with Ernesto Morgado, he founded SISCOG – Sistemas Cognitivos, SA, a start-up company devoted to applications of Artificial Intelligence. Together they led the company to develop and deploy a series of complex software systems in railway and metro companies throughout the world. These systems plan and manage more than 20,000 people, affect the life of millions of passengers, and have been awarded by several prestigious organisations in Europe and the United States.
Publications
João Pavão Martins is an author and co-author of numerous publications, including EPIA-89 Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 390 (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, West Germany, 1989), co-authored with E. M. Morgado. In 1989, he published Introduction to computer Science using PASCAL (Wadsworth Inc.), followed by the paper "An AI-Based Approach to Crew Scheduling" with E. M. Morgado in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on AI Applications - CAIA 93 (1993), and Introdução à Programação usando o PASCAL (McGraw-Hill Portugal, 1994). His subsequent computer science and logic publications include Programação em scheme with Maria dos Remédios Cravo (IST Press, 2004), Lógica e Raciocínio in Cadernos de Lógica e Computação Volume 6 (College Publications, 2014), and Programação em PYTHON: Introdução à Programação Utilizando Múltiplos Paradigmas (IST Press, 2015). Martins has also written on collecting and writing instruments, co-authoring The Chronicle of the Fountain Pen (Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2007), Parker: An Illustrated History (www.blurb.com, 2011), and Sheaffer: An Illustrated History (www.blurb.com, 2011) with Luiz Leite and António Gagean. Additionally, he authored Pipes@eBay (1999-2010) and served as editor for Meerschaum Pipes@eBay (1999-2010), both published through www.blurb.com in 2010.