I am a data scientist and business intelligence consultant specializing in computation, data wrangling, analysis and visualization. I also have practical knowledge in embedded systems development and programming, and electronics in general. I also have hundreds of hours of training in public speaking, and I have experience skills in team coordination. When I work, I want to add value to others and to myself. My name is Rui, and this web page tells a little bit of my story.
Deloitte• Since 2022
Development and maintenance of a BI structure with an Azure + Databricks stack.
Freelance work • Since February 2022
Speaking in public can be a challenge.
It doesn't even have to be a keynote speech or presenting you Masters Dissertation. Managing a meeting, reporting on quarterly numbers or even interview, all of these are opportunities to show the best of ourselves.
In STEM we have an added challenge. How can we talk about technical concepts with an audience that does not have the necessary background? What is the best way to communicate information that is both extensive and detailed?
All of these are skills that can be learned and practiced, and I can help you with that development process.
Check out Level Up Speech.
Centro Hospitalar Psiquiátrico de Lisboa • 2018 to 2023
CHPL is the result of the merger between the Júlio de Matos (founded in 1942) and Miguel Bombarda (the first psychiatric hospital in Portugal, founded in 1848). Colloquially known as the former, it is the main mental hospital in Lisbon and is one of the biggest in Portugal. The current volunteering program has existed since August 2018 with me being part of the pioneer group.
Work here has ranged from keeping company to patients with more severe disabilities and taking small trips with them to the city to help them become more self-reliant to helping a few young patients with their high-school and university level lectures.
Closer consulting • 2018 to 2022
Developed in-house solutions for Industry 4.0 areas including process optimization and demand forecasting. Included ancillary work such as using Flask to develop a webservice to serve said projects.
Skills developed: Data wrangling and visualization, optimization, forecasting, SARIMAX, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Tabu search, genetic algorithm.
Packages used: pandas, numpy, scikit, fb prophet, tensorflow, catboost, matplotlib, seaborn, sqlalchemy, optuna, flask.
Closer consulting • 2018 to 2022
Deployed multiple instances of relational databases to mirror the client's already existing process. Usually in a star schema with fact and dimension tables and done in a SQL flavor chosen by the client. Purposes included inventory management and RH roster. Worked in teams of two to five, with occasional reporting to client.
Skills developed: Requirement definition, proposal writing, database deployment, documentation.
SQL flavors used: PL/SQL, T-SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SSIS.
Closer consulting • 2018 to 2022
Data processing and reporting in Financial Services. Developing new ETL and self-service processes using SQL and other tools, all passing technical audits. Number of monthly records in the tens of millions. Worked in areas such as impairment losses and credit scoring. Client-facing role, with occasional check in with my team manager.
Skills developed: Database performance and scripting, code auditing, client interface.
Lisbon Toastmasters Club (LTC) • 2016 to 2021
During my time at LTC, I have fulfilled several roles, including Vice President of Education (VPE) and Vice President of Membership (VPM).
My current role is that of mentoring director. It was the best way I could help the club with my expertise while allowing the next generation of officers to take charge. In this position, my goal is to connect new members with experienced ones who can guide them through their first steps in the club.
The role of the VPE was to plan and prepare each weekly meeting while helping members advance through their curriculum. This means that I had to encourage each member to set goals for themselves within the club, understand these goals, and create a schedule that will help them achieve their targets. In this position, I developed my capabilities as a coordinator and a motivator, conversing directly with all members who have vastly different backgrounds. The most important skill I developed here was how to manage expectations within a work group.
A year later, I was invited to present my experiences at the Toastmasters Leadership Institute (TLI).
As VPM, my main role was to meet and greet guests visiting club sessions for the first time, briefing them on what they could expect and, when appropriate, explaining the benefits of and the processes involved in joining the club. In this position, I learned not only to apply persuasion skills, but I also improved my skills in planning and delegating work, especially on occasions where we had an unexpectedly high attendance.
Toastmasters International • July 2019 to June 2020
After being a Toastmasters club officer, I decided to take the next step and become a district officer. The challenges are a step up from my previous positions: whereas before I was coordinating and motivating a group of people who met and worked together, now I have to do the same to several distinct groups who themselves have to motivate and manage members. I have received training on how to mobilize clubs and motivate club officers.
My day to day work involved a lot of communication: from relaying information from upper echelons to the clubs and vice versa, facilitating meetings between clubs, coordinating events, discussing difficulties and celebrating victories, big or small.
Course developer • 2014 to 2016
With the success of websites like Coursera
and edX, Tecnico wants to provide the quality teaching it already has in person to Portuguese-speaking users around the world through its own MOOC platform.
The soft skills that I had been learning in the e-lab project were greatly improved because this project involved a multidisciplinary team that included educators, graphic designers, and video filmmakers and editors. Specifically, I developed content for an Experimental Physics course.
To document and share this work and its results, a paper was published and presented.
Web designer and team coordinator • 2012 to 2013
My initial task was to install and maintain a Wordpress Blog and Mediawiki platform, but eventually my responsibilities grew to include coordinating the efforts of my colleagues. This helped my soft skills improve substantially. During this time, I also published and presented three articles/posters.
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal• Class of 2021
This degree combines physics, mathematics (algebra, calculus), electronics, and computation along with a few physics laboratories. The variety of subjects approached in this degree is not only a solid technical base; it also gives a strong problem-solving sense and systematic way of tackling objectives. Personal focus on embedded systems development (microcontroller and fpga).
Toastmasters International • Since 2020 (Toastmaster since November 2013)
The Toastmasters International mission statement is: We empower individuals to become more effective communicators and leaders. A career in a Toastmasters Club has two paths: one in public speaking, the other in leadership skills such as giving feedback, time management, delegating and facilitating tasks, among others.
During the time that I have been a part of the Lisbon Toastmasters Club, I have presented prepared speeches, delivered impromptu speeches, taken several leadership and organization roles, participated in contests, and mentored less experienced members.
Transformação de geometrias de redes complexas para espaços lineares usando observadores comóveis • Master's thesis in Engineering Physics • Class of 2021
Active and passive are two fundamental concepts in economics. What is owned and what is owed are ideias that, even in common sense, relate to an entity's economic health for both people and company alike. Thus, many have attempted to extract information and predictions from these two numbers.
In the recent past, Machine Learning (ML) has gained substantial interest in this field of study because computers can learn for themselves what we cannot teach them. Yet, an often overlooked necessity is that the population be learnable, with one of the requirements for this being that the distribution that models the population distribution has finite statistical moments.
In this work I analyzed heavy tail distributions (e.g. Pareto distributions, usually found in Econometrics) to transform them into Gaussian ones. Using Graph Theory to model an economic system along with a combing observer I developed an algorithm that results in a near Gaussian distribution with variance and excess kurtosis both near zero.
This work can be consulted at the Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa.
Skills developed: Python, R • Data wrangling, analysis, and visualization • Statistical analysis • Basic financial background
R. Figueiredo, H. Fernandes, P. Ribeiro, A. Moura Santos, J. Viana• September 2016
Original title: feX: um curso massivo de física experimental
Abstract: In this communication we report the development of content (study texts, videos, exercises, etc.) for the experimental physics course at the Mooc Técnico platform (mooc.tecnico.ulisboa.pt) for IST. The use of remote experiments is a crucial part of the course and will be made available through the e-lab platform, in development since 1999. The first wave of testing allows us to conclude in particular that the
Poster at the FISICA2016 conference in Braga, Portugal.
R. Figueiredo, H. Fernandes, T. Pereira, S. Balula, R. Neto, G. Amarante-Segundo,I. Borges • September 2013
Abstract: World Pendulum is a project with the main purpose of studying the behavior of standard gravity with latitude. Several automated simple pendulums are distributed across different latitudes. Each of these pendulums can be remotely operated over the Internet, communicating in real time the measured period of the oscillations, which may then be used to calculate the value of g. This article describes the World Pendulum project and it's implementation integrated into e-lab, a software framework that allows remote control of real experiments over the Internet. Preliminary results show that a good agreement with the established spherical harmonics model is obtained, with the absolute overall error being under 0.0002 m/s2.
Presented in the parallel sessions at the Exp'at 2013 conference in Coimbra, Portugal and published in the IEEE Xplore digital library.
R. Figueiredo, H. Fernandes • September 2012
Original title Ferramentas de de Apoio a Laboratórios Remotos: O Portal e-labAbstract: To support a remote laboratory such as e-lab several digital tools such as (i) Java to develop the user interface (ii) Mediawiki and Wordpress platforms to make content available (iii) MathJax to display mathematical equations with MathML and LaTeX support (iv) CAS authentication to manage all the collaborators involved (v) Apache Subversion versioning software to catalog the experiments being developed (vi) online video streaming (vii) numerical fitting of data to equations with Fitteia software (viii) video conferencing tool, all of this added to the fact that e-lab is a multi language tool. In this paper e describe how to use these elements to create a unified environment for the user to access multimedia content in e-lab.
Poster at the FISICA2012 conference in Aveiro, Portugal and published in the conference proceedings.