who


Pereira, Francisco Pereira. You can email me at [first].[last][at]gmail[dot]com . Sometimes I tweet.

where

I lead the Machine Learning Team at the National Institute of Mental Health(NIMH).
Please follow that link for more information about our research group.

Prior to this, I was a researcher at Medical Imaging Technologies, Siemens Healthcare, where I managed the Computational Neuroscience program. I was also the PI of a team in the IARPA Knowledge Representation in Neural Systems program. I was a postdoc in the Botvinick Lab (and a frequent lurker in the Computational Memory Lab) at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. I got my Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at CMU, working with Tom Mitchell and Geoff Gordon. I was also a student in the graduate training program of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, working in collaboration with the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. I got my undergraduate degree at the Computer Science Department of the University of Porto, in Portugal.

what

My primary role as a researcher is leading the NIMH Machine Learning Team. The mission of the Machine Learning Team is to support researchers in the NIMH and NIDA intramural research programs who want to address research problems in clinical and cognitive neuroscience using machine learning approaches. We do this by consulting with individual researchers and guiding them in the use of the appropriate tools and methods, or by taking on the analysis process ourselves, if this is more expedient. In parallel, we develop new machine learning methods and analysis approaches, motivated by the needs of researchers or by the practical possibilities arising from advances in the field. I also have a personal interest in the question of how semantic knowledge is represented in the brain. I have worked on methods to extract semantic information from text corpora and combine it with structured knowledge databases, in order to build models of human performance on various semantic tasks. I also worked on methods to relate models of semantic mental processes to brain imaging data, validating those models through brain decoding tasks.

publications of our research group

(my Google Scholar page, should you want to cite any :)

preprints under review
methods and tools applications

past publications