I am Full Professor at the Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil.

I was leader of the TRAPHU research group and member of the Information Systems Research Group at UFRGS. I’m also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society, and of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC).

My research activities are related to text mining, information extraction, information retrieval and recommender systems. I’m also interested in social network analysis and big data.

In the year of 2008, I acted as an invited researcher at TELECOM SudParis (former Institut National des Télécommunications – INT), France. This was part of a fellowship project entitled AdContext, which was sponsored by CAPES (CAPES-COFECUB  agreement). In such period, I was involved with the databases’ research group of their Computer Science department. Particularly, I worked more directly with prof. Bruno Defude, prof. Amel Bouzeghoub and prof. Samir Tata. I also started a cooperation with other researchers in the field of Web Services discovery, selection, and matchmaking. 

In 2004, I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UFRGS. My project was about “cluster analysis” and I dealt with textual data. My advisor was José Palazzo Moreira de Oliveira.

I have received a master degree from the same university (UFRGS) in the year of 1999. The focus of my work was to study how to build and use text mining techniques to give a competitive advantage to enterprises (Competitive Intelligence). My advisors were José Mauro Volkmer Castilho (in memoriam) and José Palazzo Moreira de Oliveira.

I finished my undergraduate studies in 1996 at the Catholic University of Pelotas (UCPEL), which is located in a small city in the south of Brazil. My research was focused on query expansion techniques for Information Retrieval, and I was advised by Stanley Loh.

I was born in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.