Hi, I'm Pedro Santos!
(soon to be) Software Engineer - Problem Solver
(soon to be) Software Engineer - Problem Solver
My name is Pedro Santos, I'm 22 years old and I'm almost getting my Masters in Informatics and Computer Engineering - currently in my 5th year - so that's been quite my full time occupation in the last times. But you can catch up on what I've been doing below!
Besides being almost an Engineer, I'm a very cheerfull guy with a refined sense of humour who doesn't like to be quiet and who's permanently looking for some new challenges, may them be academic, professional, personal or whatever!
I love learning new things because sometimes knowledge is as good as money! And I face learning as a challenge and, as I hate to loose, I commit myself to overcome that challenge and becoming a better person!
In my free time I love playing sports - football and badminton mostly -, have some fun in the kitchen trying new things, spend some time with my family and friends and play (a lot) with my dogs.
Go to the next sections to get to know me better ;)
Internship under the scope of my Masters thesis, where I'm integrated in the company as a full-time employee while developing my Masters Thesis. To get more details, please click mailcube's icon!
Feb. '15 - Jul. '15
Since I entered college one of my goals was to grow as a person and enjoy every opportunities that my Faculty had to offer me. And that's one of the main reasons that lead me to enter the adventure of the Erasmus experience. And to my Erasmus destiny I wanted a country, a city and a University that could give me something interesting and important technically and professionally besides the personal experience. And that's why I chose the Technische Universität Wien where I'll study for a semester. I attended the courses of Beyond the Desktop (A), Building Interaction Interfaces (A), Building reliable Distributed Systems (A) , Problems in Distributed Computing (C) and Introduction to security (B).
Sep. '14 - Jan. '15
Head of the Student Affairs Council of my Faculty course.Main activities and responsabilities:
. Connect the course director to the students and help improve the quality of the course offer;
. Organize extra-curricular activities (like talks and workshops, visits to real companies) to the students comunity;
. Lead and coordinate the remaining elements in the activities we are responsible for;
One example of a week of extra-curricular activities organized to the student community can be found here
I wanted to start gaining some experience and grow as a professional and therefore i got this summer intership to work in the Movercado project. You can find more about this project and my contribution buy clicking movercado's logo.
Jul. '14 - Sep. '14
Member of the Student Affairs Council of my Faculty course.Main activities and responsabilities:
. Connect the course director to the students and help improve the quality of the course offer;
. Organize extra-curricular activities (like talks and workshops) to the students comunity;
This is where I'm currently attending to my degree. It's a highly ranked faculty (the best at national level and one of the best europeanly talking). Please check more details by clicking FEUP's logo. Sep. '10 - Present
In my last year at Colégio de Gaia I had the opportunity to take a 100 hour long internship at MPInformática where I was able to put my theoretical knowledge to proof and gain some other skills too, like customer service, more hardware-related details for example. My main responsabilities where to take care of clients orders (both in the store and in the clients location), hardware repairs, and software services (like formatting computers and other more specific problems). In the end I had a classification of 19 ou of 20 values.
Oct. '09 - Nov. '09
My IT related education started when I had to choose my high school. Like I sair before, I've always felt atracted for tech-related stuff, so I chose one of the best schools in the city to start my path - Colégio de Gaia - where I took a 3-year technological program in the area of Informatics. I had courses related to web programming , computer architectures , multimedia , but also had a strong cientific component such as Mathematics or Physics. My final classification was 17 out of 20 values.
Sep. '07 - Jul. '10How many times has the phrase "An image’s worth a thousand words" been used in the daily life? Indeed, a graphical representation of anything that surrounds us is much better assimilated by the human brain rather than a textual representation, because the vision is the sense that carries more information and faster to the brain. Therefore, this principle may be applied to anything, namely, in a scientific area where scientists have to deal with large sets of data. These datasets were visualized in a less capable way until a few years ago when the area of Information Visualization started to emerge and alerting the specialists to the fact that, with a set of techniques and principles, the cognitive process of acquiring information can be facilitated in such a way that the user can acquire more information and get a better insight over the data he’s visualizing, at the same time, that the effort to perform this task is reduced.
The aforementioned science, Information Visualization, can be applied to any field of study. And a particular field that can be tremendously improved with this relation is the email environment. As it is widely known, the email use is massified and it’s one of the most used means of communication within several contexts. Still, besides this massification, the structure of email is almost the same as it was 40 years ago. This points to a need of improving this system, analyzing first what are the actions that users execute, what are the user’s needs and then adapting the email to the modern user.
This dissertation has three distinct parts. First, a description of this still not mainstream science that is Information Visualization. Next presents the results of a research over the email environment, pointing to its main gaps and the new features that users associate to it. Finally, it discusses the two previous topics - using information visualization techniques to solve a subset, suited for this dissertation’s timeframe, of email’s problems - trying to achieve a solution that pushes the email system forward in the direction of making the use of the email, once again, a more pleasant and effective experience to the user. The work is applied to a real email client - currently under development - as a case study so that all the work here developed can be validated in a real life scenario, with real users, having feedback and with that to improve the prototypes thus finding a better fit with the real users’ needs.
