Pedro C Diniz

Dr. Diniz received his BSc. and M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technical University in Lisbon, Portugal and in 1997 his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. From 1997 to 2017 he was a Research Associate with the University of Southern California¿s Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) and a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, California. In 2000 he co-founded and was the V.P. for Engineering of Quantum Semiconductor (QSemi), a semiconductor company in San Jose, California, and from 2017 to 2019 he was a Senior Scientist at Custom Silicon Solutions (CSS), a small company specializing in advanced VLSI full-custom and high-performance IC solutions. He was a Senior Researcher with INESC-ID in Lisbon and recently joined the Informatics Engineering Department at the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto as a Full Professor where he is engaged in various research aspects related to high- performance and efficient computing as well as large-scale simulations for the application domain of urban mobility and autonomous vehicles. At USC/ISI he led a small research group focusing on the application of compilation and synthesis techniques for high-performance embedded and reconfigurable computing. Over the years, and while at USC/ISI, he funded his own salary (100%) and those of his graduate students, through a long series of research grants from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), US Department of Defense (DoE) and US Department of Energy (DoE) with an estimated annual budget of $500K for him and his research group. From 2007 to 2009 he took a sabbatical from USC/ISI and joined the Technical University of Lisbon (IST) in Lisbon, Portugal as an Associate Professor with the Informatics Engineering Department where, in addition to his teaching duties, he was the co-PI of an EC-funded FP7 Programme project among other nationally- funded research projects. Throughout his professional career, he has been the technical and management lead of a long list of research contracts and grants, being responsible for a wide range of reporting and publication activities as well as presenting findings at scholarly events. He graduated 5 PhD students both at USC and at IST and has authored or co-authored 28 internationally recognized scientific journal articles and over 75 international conference papers (all peer reviewed). He is also the author or co-author of 3 scientific textbooks and editor of more than 10 international conference and symposia proceedings or scientific journal special issues. His industrial involvement at CSS led to the development of various commercial deployed products for the embedded electronics market while at QSemi he was responsible for the design and implementation of several circuit-level designs resulting in 5 patens, all granted in the US, and pending elsewhere. Over the years, he has been heavily involved in the scientific community having participated as part of the technical program committee of over 25 international conferences and workshops in the scientific area of high-performance computing and reconfigurable computing being invited as keynote speaker and guest lecturer at various of these events. He is regularly a reviewer for scientific journals in his areas of research and has participated as a panelist in a large number of international scientific review meetings both in the US and in Europe. As faculty in the US and in Portugal he was responsible and teaching many semester-level courses in Computer Science and Engineering, as well as various short courses and seminars in Germany and Brazil. He was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1965 and has exclusively held the Portuguese citizenship.