I received BSc (1997), MSc (2001), and PhD (2005) in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil.

I joined the Centro de Informática (CIn) – UFPE as a Professor of Computer Science in 2005.  I am also an associated member of the Laboratory of Imaging, Vision and Artificial Intelligence (LIVIA) at the École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS), Montreal, Canada. Since 2011, I have been a CNPq researcher fellow (level 1D). 

I was the head of the Undergraduate Program in Computer Science from 2008-2011, and the vice head from 2006-2008. I am currently the research coordinator of CIn-UFPE and, since 2017, I am a member of the Câmara de Exatas e da Terra at the Fundação de Amparo à Ciência e Tecnologia de Pernambuco (FACEPE).

In 2018, I was the technical chair of the International Joint Conference on Neural Network. I have collaborated as a program committee member and reviewer for several conferences (IJCNN, IEEE SMC, ICDAR, IEEE WCCI, ACM-SAC, ICPR) and journals such as Pattern Recognition, Information Fusion, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

In 2019, I was Visiting Professor at the École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS), Montreal, Canada.

I have published over 200 scientific publications, including journals and conferences on machine learning, computer vision, pattern recognition, multiple classifier systems, imbalanced learning, instance reduction, meta-learning, natural language processing, neural networks, handwriting recognition, document understanding, image processing.