Ruben Branco

About Me

Hi👋! I am a PhD student at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL), conducting research at LASIGE. I am supervised by Professor Sara Madeira from FCUL and Professor Piero Fariselli from the Department of Medical Sciences of the University of Turin.

I am interested in Deep Learning as a field overall and its applicability to many problems. My current research focuses on improving neurodegenerative disease prognosis, with particular attention to ALS and MS, using Deep Learning. More specifically, I am developing Generative Modeling methods for longitudinal medical datasets to enhance the available resources for low-resource chronic diseases.

I have previously conducted research in Natural Language Processing, at the NLX-Group. My Msc Dissertation, supervised by Professor António Branco to obtain a Masters in Data Science, focused on a particular problem named Shortcut Learning, specifically when learning commonsense reasoning.

For a more thorough and structured description of my work, you may check my CV.

Links: ⚭ ⚭ ⚭

Research Interests

I am interested in many topics beyond these (like Physics, Psychology, etc.) and am always looking forward to collaborations (given the time). If you have a problem you would like to collaborate on, feel free to contact me.

Teaching

2021/2022

Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon

Teaching Theoretical-Pratical classes, offered to different bachelor degrees within the Faculty, in the 2nd Semester.

Class covers Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals, such as search algorithms, going all the way to Machine Learning Fundamentals.

Advanced Machine Learning, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon

Teaching Theoretical-Practical classes, offered to all Department of Informatics Masters’ Programs in the 2nd Semester.

Class focuses on more advanced topics such as Ensemble Learning, Markov Models, Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning.

Machine Learning, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon

Taught Theoretical-Practical classes, offered to 8 Masters Programs and 1 PhD Program in the 1st Semester.

Class focuses on Supervised & Unsupervised Learning fundamentals.

Science Communication

LITHME Whole Action Conference @ Jyväskylä, Finland

This invited talk focused on my Masters’ Dissertation and EMNLP 2021 Paper, regarding Shortcut Learning and Commonsense Reasoning. Additionally, potential future research paths in the effort to solve this issue and create more cognitively capable machines are discussed.

Deep Learning Sessions Portugal

This invited talk focused on my Masters’ Dissertation and EMNLP 2021 Paper: Shortcut Learning and Commonsense Reasoning. If you want to learn a bit more about Shortcut Learning, its presence in Commonsense Reasoning and what it could mean for NLP and cognitive AI, might be worth a watch.

Publications

  1. Ruben Branco, Diogo Soares, Andreia Martins, Joana Valente, Eduardo Castanho, Sara C. Madeira and Helena Aidos, 2023, “Investigating the impact of environmental data on ALS prognosis with survival analysis”, In Working Notes of CLEF 2023 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
  2. Ruben Branco, Joana Valente, Andreia Martins, Diogo Soares, Eduardo Castanho, Sara C. Madeira and Helena Aidos, 2023, “Survival analysis for multiple sclerosis: predicting risk of disease worsening”, In Working Notes of CLEF 2023 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
  3. Erica Tavazzi, Enrico Longato, [and 23 others, including Ruben Branco], 2023, “Artificial intelligence and statistical methods for stratification and prediction of progression in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A systematic review”, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 102588.
  4. João Rodrigues, Ruben Branco, António Branco, 2022, “Transfer Learning of Lexical Semantic Families for Argumentative Discourse Units Identification”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.02495.
  5. Luís Gomes, Ruben Branco, João Silva and António Branco, “Open and Inclusive Language Processing”, in D. Fišer & A. Witt (Ed.), CLARIN: The Infrastructure for Language Resources (pp. 107-132) (book). doi: 10.1515/9783110767377-005
  6. Ruben Branco, Diogo F. Soares, Andreia S. Martins, Eleonora Auletta, Eduardo N. Castanho, Susana Nunes, Filipa Serrano, Rita T. Sousa, Catia Pesquita, Sara C. Madeira and Helena Aidos, “Hierarchical Modelling for ALS Prognosis: Predicting the Progression Towards Critical Events”, In Working Notes of CLEF 2022 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
  7. Susana Nunes, Rita T. Sousa, Filipa Serrano, Ruben Branco, Diogo F. Soares, Andreia S. Martins, Eleonora Auletta, Eduardo N. Castanho, Sara C. Madeira, Helena Aidos and Catia Pesquita, “Explaining Artificial Intelligence Predictions of Disease Progression with Semantic Similarity”, In Working Notes of CLEF 2022 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
  8. Ruben Branco, António Branco, João Silva and António Rodrigues, 2021, “Shortcutted Commonsense: Data Spuriousness in Deep Learning of Commonsense Reasoning”, In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
  9. Ruben Branco, António Branco, João Silva and António Rodrigues, 2021, “Commonsense Reasoning: how do Neuro-only and hybrid Neuro-Symbolic approaches compare?”, In Proceedings of the CIKM 2021 Workshops.
  10. António Branco, João Rodrigues, Malgorzata Salawa, Ruben Branco and Chakaveh Saedi, 2020, “Comparative Probing of Lexical Semantics Theories for Cognitive Plausibility and Technological Usefulness”, In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. doi: 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.354
  11. Beatriz Lima, Ruben Branco, João Castanheira, Gustavo Fonseca and Catia Pesquita, 2020, “Learning reference alignments for ontology matching within and across domains”, In OM@ISWC. 2020.
  12. João Rodrigues, Ruben Branco, João Silva and António Branco, 2020, “Reproduction and Revival of the Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task”, In Proceedings, 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2020), European Language Resources Association, Marseílle, France, 13-15 May 2020.
  13. António Branco, Sara Grilo, Márcia Bolrinha, Chakaveh Saedi, Ruben Branco, João Silva, Andreia Querido, Rita de Carvalho, Rosa Gaudio, Mariana Avelãs and Clara Pinto, 2020, “The MWN.PT WordNet for Portuguese: Projection, Validation, Cross-lingual Alignment and Distribution”, In Proceedings, 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2020), European Language Resources Association, Marseílle, France, 13-15 May 2020.
  14. Thierry Etchegoyhen, Borja Porras, [and 20 others, including Ruben Branco], 2020, “ELRI: A Decentralised Network of National Relay Stations to Collect, Prepare and Share Language Resources”, in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms, European Language Resources Association, Maseílle, France, May 2020.
  15. Małgorzata Salawa, António Branco, Ruben Branco, João Rodrigues and Chakaveh Saedi, 2019, “Whom to Learn From? Graph- vs. Text-based Word Embeddings”, In Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2019. doi: 10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_120
  16. Ruben Branco, João Rodrigues, Chakaveh Saedi and António Branco, 2019, “Assessing Wordnets with WordNet Embeddings”, In Proceedings, 10th Global WordNet Conference (GWC2019), Poland, 23-27 July 2019.
  17. Luís Gomes, Frederico Apolónia, Ruben Branco, João Ricardo Silva, António Branco, 2018, “Setting up the PORTULAN / CLARIN repository”, In Proceedings, CLARIN Annual Conference (CLARIN2018), Pisa, 9 October 2018, pp.108-111.
  18. João Rodrigues, Ruben Branco, João Silva, Chakaveh Saedi, António Branco, 2018, “Predicting Brain Activation with WordNet Embeddings”, In Proceedings, 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2018), Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing (CogACLL), Melbourne, 19 July 2018. doi: 10.18653/v1/W18-2801
  19. Thierry Etchegoyhen, Borja Porras, [and 18 others, including Ruben Branco], 2018, “ELRI. European Language Resource Infrastructure”, In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, Alicante, Spain, 28-30 May 2018.
  20. António Branco, Ruben Branco, Chakaveh Saedi and João Silva 2018, “Browsing and Supporting Pluricentric Global Wordnet, or just your Wordnet of Interest”, In Proceedings, 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2018), European Language Resources Association, Myazaki, Japan, 9-11 May 2018, pp. 4562-4569.

Contact

You can contact me at: rmbranco [at] ciencias.ulisboa.pt