Álvaro Figueira graduated in Mathematics Applied to Computer Science from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto in 1995 and took his MSc in Foundations of Advanced Information Technology from Imperial College, London, in 1997. In 2004, he concluded his PhD in Computer Science in concurrent and distributed programming. He is currently an Assistant Professor with tenure at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Porto. He is also a researcher in the CRACS Research Unit, where he has been leading international projects involving the University of Porto, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Coimbra, and the University of Aveiro regarding the automatic detection of relevance in social networks. His main research interests are in the areas of machine learning, NLP, text and web mining, and synthetic data generation and analysis.