Felipe M. G. França

Electronics Engineer from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (1982), M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (1987) and Ph.D. in Neural Systems Engineering from Imperial College of Science Technology And Medicine (1994). He is a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google and a retired Full Professor at the Systems Engineering and Computer Science Program, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. From June 2022 to June 2024 he was a Researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações, Universidade do Porto, Portugal. He has published over 300 scientific papers and 2 granted patents. He has successfully supervised 33 PhD students and 67 MSc students, which are all in industry, govern and academic positions, in Brazil, China, Canada, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Sweden, USA and the UK. He has experience in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, acting on the following subjects: artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, weightless neural networks, computer architecture, dataflow computing, distributed algorithms, collective robotics, intelligent transportation systems. As a System Analyst/Research Assistant at PESC, COPPE, UFRJ, from 1984 to 1996, he participated in the NCP I - Design and Implementation of High-performance Parallel Computer, FINEP project, when he introduced the idea of a "communication virtual processor" in 1988. This concept was further rediscovered with the name of "active messages". As Assistant Professor, he proposed a new approach in asynchronous digital design such that any existing circuit designed under the perspective of synchronous timing is a candidate to conversion to asynchronous operation at a very low cost in terms of circuit design and generally with the reward of performance gains. This pioneering work marks the beginning of GALS - Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous Circuits, resulting in the first ever patent granted to a Brazilian university in the Computer Science area.