António Branco is a scientist whose research is dedicated to AI and its sub-area of Natural Language Processing. He is the leader of the research team that is pioneering the first chatbot for the Portuguese language that is based on open AI models, Evaristo.ai; and that is also pioneering Generative AI Large Language Models for the Portuguese language that are open source, open licence and open access, including the Albertina (encoders), Gervásio (decoders) and Serafim (sentence embedders) model families.

He is the Director General of PORTULAN CLARIN Research Infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language, which belongs to the Portuguese National Network of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Interest and it is the national node of the European Infrastructure CLARIN ERIC, with over 20 member countries.

He is an Honorary President of ELRA Language Resources Association, after having been its President (2018-20, 2020-22). ELRA is the international scientific association for language science and technology, with headquarters in Paris, responsible for its flagship event LREC, devoted to language resources and technology for multilingualism.

He was the founder of the Mind-Brain Doctoral College at the University of Lisbon, and of the inter-faculty PhD course in Cognitive Science, of which he was its Coordinator (2020-2024).

António Branco is a professor at the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Computer Science, and he is the Head of its NLX – Natural Language and Speech Group.

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