Ana Paiva

National Correspondent

Class
Sciences

Section
8th Section | Information Sciences and Technologies

Election

26.06.2026 (Corresponding Member)

Contact

ana.s.paiva [at] tecnico.ulisboa.pt

Areas of Interest

Artificial Intelligence; Autonomous Agents; Social Robots; AI for Science

Hyperlinks
https://scholar.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/authors/ist12371/bio?lang=en

Profile



Ana Paiva is Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, and a senior researcher at INESC-ID. She is a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, and earned her PhD in Artificial Intelligence in Education from Lancaster University, United Kingdom (1992–1996).
With more than three decades dedicated to research in Artificial Intelligence, her work focuses on creating autonomous agents and robots capable of interacting and collaborating with humans. In 2000 she founded GAIPS (Group on AI for People and Society), an internationally recognised research group in Social Artificial Intelligence, which she led for twenty years.

She has published more than 300 articles in prestigious conferences and journals and has received numerous scientific awards, including the AAAI Blue Sky Paper Award in 2018 for her pioneering work in Prosocial computing. She is a Fellow of the AAAI, EurAI and ELLIS. She has delivered more than a hundred invited talks, notably at IJCAI 2022 on “Engineering sociality and collaboration in AI systems”. In 2022 she was recognised by the “Women in Robotics” organisation as one of the 50 “Women to Know about in Robotics”. Between 2023 and 2024 she was a WASP Guest Professor in Sweden, under the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program. Throughout her career she has served on several scientific and advisory boards, including the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, the EurAI board, and the Advisory Board of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre in the Netherlands.

In 2024 she took office as Secretary of State for Science in the XXIV Portuguese Government. She returned to academia in June 2025 and currently works in the area of Responsible Artificial Intelligence, with applications in science, health and education.