Biography
Luísa Coheur was born in Lisbon, is married and has three children. She holds a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and a Ph.D. from IST and Université Blaise-Pascal in the field of Natural Language Processing. In 2023, she completed a one-year postgraduate program in "Higher Education Pedagogy," offered by the Institute of Education at the University of Lisbon. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and a Researcher at INESC-ID, in the "Human Language Technologies" group. Her preferred research topics focus on Dialogue Systems, Question/Answer, and Machine Translation (including for Portuguese Sign Language). She has supervised over 80 master's theses and 10 doctoral students (some of whom named their daughters Luísa). She was a member of the Management Committee of IST-Taguspark (20-23), being responsible for the beautiful library and pedagogical organization. She has participated in 17 projects, both national and international, has more than 120 peer-reviewed articles published, and has been recognized as an Excellent Professor more than 20 times according to the IST QUC classification. In 2023, she was recognized with the IST Outstanding Teaching Award from IST's Pedagogic Council. Luísa Coheur loves teaching and is passionate about good stories. She has few certainties in life, but there are three things she firmly believes in: 1) a motivated student can work wonders; 2) with hard work, we can overcome our limitations (not that she has any); 3) we can do very serious and rigorous work and still be extremely fun. Therefore, she tries to make each class and each article good stories and introduces playful elements and narratives in teaching whenever they make sense (which is often). Virtual escape games and characters like Inspector Morcela and Karen help her convey knowledge in her classes. She won a pedagogical innovation project in 2019 with a physical "Escape Game" on the Taguspark campus, which ran that year for the Logic for Programming course and later, with the help of her colleague Ana Moura Santos, for Linear Algebra (students had to solve challenges related to these subjects to "escape").When she has time (unfortunately almost never), she writes. She has three books and two (non-scientific) short stories published, with two of them receiving awards. She is restoring what she considers to be a true palace in Ferreira do Zêzere, proudly embracing roles as a bricklayer, carpenter, etc., on weekends. She considers herself an expert in plasterboard, OSB boards, and hydraulic lime.
Main Interests
Dialogue systems, Machine Translation, Question/Answer