Synthetic data generation has gained relevance recently, particularly to provide more data for learning models (e.g. with GANs). However, (semi-)synthetic data is also important for an even more important task, which is to improve our understanding of the behavior of ML models and algorithms. In this talk, Carlos Soares will discuss some of the work under development in this direction at the Center for Responsible AI in Porto.

Bio: Carlos Soares is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of U. Porto, where he served in several management roles, including Subdirector of the Department of Informatics Engineering and Director of the Ph.D. Programme in Informatics Engineering. Carlos is also an External Advisor for Intelligent Systems at Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, a researcher at LIACC and a collaborator at LIAAD-INESC TEC. He is a lecturer at the Porto Business School. The focus of his research is on metalearning/autoML but he has a general interest in Data Science. He has participated in 20+ national and international R&ID as well as consulting projects. Carlos regularly collaborates with companies, including recent projects with Feedzai, Accenture and InovRetail. He has published/edited several books and 150+ papers in journals and conferences, (90+/125+ indexed by ISI/Scopus) and supervised 10+/50+ Ph.D./M.Sc. thesis. Recent participation in the organization of events, includes ECML PKDD 2015, IDA 2016 and Discovery Science 2021 as programme co-chair. In 2009, he was awarded the Scientific Merit and Excellence Award of the Portuguese AI Association.