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About

About

I am Full Professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Minho, and senior researcher at the High Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab INESC TEC). Since October 2016, I am also serving as Deputy Head of UNU-EGOV, the United Nations University Operational Unit on Policy-driven Electronic Governance (egov.unu.edu).

My research interests are focused on program semantics and calculi applied to systems understanding and rigorous software construction. I am particularly interested in coalgebra theory and conductive reasoning, as well as on modal and hybrid logics.

In recent years I coordinated four research projects at the national level, bilateral partnerships with Brazil and China, and served as the Portuguese coordinator for the Language Engineering and Rigorous Software Development ALFA EU-Latin America network, a PhD training network funded by the European Union. I have published five book chapters, 25 journal papers and more than 60 international conference papers. Having served as invited lecturer in MSc and PhD programmes at the Universities of Bristol (United Kingdom), Tartu (Estonia), and Peking (China), I have supervised several PhD projects (six concluded; four on-going). One of my students, Alexandre Madeira, received the 2013 IBM Scientific Prize, the biggest award in Informatics in Portugal.

I integrated the founding team of the Joint Doctoral Programme in Computer Science of the Universities of Minho, Aveiro, and Porto (MAP-i), and served as its Director. I am a member of IFIP WG1.3 (Foundations of System Specification), and, since January 2019, chair of IFIP Tecnhical Committee TC1 on Foundations of Computer Science.

Currently, I am leading the Quantum Software Engineering Research Group at INL, the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory.

Interest
Topics
Details

Details

  • Name

    Luís Soares Barbosa
  • Role

    Research Coordinator
  • Since

    01st November 2011
003
Publications

2024

On Quantum Natural Policy Gradients

Authors
Sequeira, A; Santos, LP; Barbosa, LS;

Publication
CoRR

Abstract

2023

Paraconsistent Transition Systems

Authors
Cruz, A; Madeira, A; Barbosa, LS;

Publication
ELECTRONIC PROCEEDINGS IN THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE

Abstract
Often in Software Engineering a modelling formalism has to support scenarios of inconsistency in which several requirements either reinforce or contradict each other. Paraconsistent transition systems are proposed in this paper as one such formalism: states evolve through two accessibility relations capturing weighted evidence of a transition or its absence, respectively. Their weights come from a specific residuated lattice. A category of these systems, and the corresponding algebra, is defined providing a formal setting to model different application scenarios. One of them, dealing with the effect of quantum decoherence in quantum programs, is used for illustration purposes.

2023

Policy gradients using variational quantum circuits

Authors
Sequeira, A; Santos, LP; Barbosa, LS;

Publication
QUANTUM MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

Abstract
Variational quantum circuits are being used as versatile quantum machine learning models. Some empirical results exhibit an advantage in supervised and generative learning tasks. However, when applied to reinforcement learning, less is known. In this work, we considered a variational quantum circuit composed of a low-depth hardware-efficient ansatz as the parameterized policy of a reinforcement learning agent. We show that an epsilon-approximation of the policy gradient can be obtained using a logarithmic number of samples concerning the total number of parameters. We empirically verify that such quantum models behave similarly to typical classical neural networks used in standard benchmarking environments and quantum control, using only a fraction of the parameters. Moreover, we study the barren plateau phenomenon in quantum policy gradients using the Fisher information matrix spectrum.

2023

Stepwise Development of Paraconsistent Processes

Authors
Cunha, J; Madeira, A; Barbosa, LS;

Publication
Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering - 17th International Symposium, TASE 2023, Bristol, UK, July 4-6, 2023, Proceedings

Abstract

2023

Weighted synchronous automata

Authors
Gomes, L; Madeira, A; Barbosa, LS;

Publication
MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

Abstract
This paper introduces a class of automata and associated languages, suitable to model a computational paradigm of fuzzy systems, in which both vagueness and simultaneity are taken as first-class citizens. This requires a weighted semantics for transitions and a precise notion of a synchronous product to enforce the simultaneous occurrence of actions. The usual relationships between automata and languages are revisited in this setting, including a specific Kleene theorem.

Supervised
thesis

2022

Weighted Computations: semantics and program logics

Author
Leandro Rafael Moreira Gomes

Institution
UP-FCUP

2022

Timing Constraints in Quantum Programming Languages

Author
Vítor Emanuel Gonçalves Fernandes

Institution
UM

2022

Continuous-time Quantum Walks

Author
Jaime Pereira Santos

Institution
UM

2022

Quantum Reinforcement Learning: Foundations, algorithms, applications

Author
André Manuel Resende Sequeira

Institution
UM

2022

Quantum Bayesian Reinforcement Learning

Author
Gilberto Rui Nogueira Cunha

Institution
UM