Luis Lamb

Luis Lamb is Director of Fellowships and Global Initiatives at the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. Luis has held appointements as Professor of Foundations of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and was Secretary of Innovation, Science and Technology of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (01/2019-01/2022).

Over his career, Luis worked as a researcher, professor, consultant, mentor, and innovation and technology senior executive. Luis serviced the computer science, technology, and AI communities extensively, speaking at leading conferences, universities, and corporations. In addition, he had several senior executive roles in the space of innovation and technology. 

He was Vice President for Research (2016-2018) and Dean of the Institute of Informatics (2011-2016) at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. 

He holds both the PhD (computer science) from Imperial College London (2000) and the Diploma of the Imperial College (DIC.) (2000), MSc by research (1995), and BSc in computer science (1992) from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. In 2023, he graduated with an MBA from the MIT Sloan Fellows MBA Program. In 2010, he received the MIT Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation and in 2014 he received the Executive Certificate in Management and Leadership.

Luis has been an Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Department of Computing at City, University London and a Visiting Research Fellow, Abductive Systems Group in the Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Canada.

As a researcher and academic, he has supervised 20 graduate students PhD/MSc on several topics in neurosymbolic AI, machine learning, social computing, and knowledge representation and reasoning. His research led to original contributions in neurosymbolic AI, which has been a topic of greater attention and interest by a number of companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Intel, in addition to a growing interest in flagship conferences like AAAI, IJCAI, NeurIPS, and IJCNN. Luis has been invited to panels organized at AAAI in 2021, with panelists from leading universities and tech companies. He was also an invited panelist at a NeurIPS workshop alongside Nobel Award Winner Daniel Kahnemann, Deep Learning Pioneer Yoshua Bengio, IBM Global Ethics Leader Francesca Rossi, and bestselling AI author Gary Marcus. He has also been an invited speaker at a number of workshops and panels on the current state and future of AI and innovation in recent years.

As secretary of state for innovation, science, and technology, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, he led the planning and management the 11 million people state’s innovation, technological, and scientific strategy for the period 2019-2022. Luis was head of the state’s 50+ strong Advisory Scientific and Data committees on the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 to Jan 2022, which  advised the government on the pandemic strategy and policies. 

Luis has been the ambassador of the Brazilian Network of Artificial Intelligence, created by the Brazilian Company of Research and Industrial Innovation (EMBRAPII) of the ministry of science, technology, and innovations and a member of the governance committee of the Brazilian National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence. He is the cochair of the Cities and Towns Committee of the IEEE Standards Association Planet Positive Initiave 2030, which is composed of thought leaders from academia, industry, civil society, policy, and government in the related technical and humanistic disciplines working together to identify issued and pragmatic recommendations regarding sustainability and climate change to achieve “Planet Positivity” by 2030.