Last lesson of José Manuel Valença with a full house

Last lesson of José Manuel Valença with a full house

José Manuel Valença, researcher of INESC TEC’s High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) and Full Professor at the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, lectured his last lesson on 18 October at the University of Minho in Braga.

13th November 2019

With the motto “Uma viagem com a matemática” (in English: “A Journey with Mathematics”), the ceremony of his jubilation was attended by family, friends, colleagues, students and alumni, among other individuals who insisted on being present in this tribute to the who is considered to be the co-author of the first connection to the internet in Portugal.

Pedro Guedes de Oliveira, Manuela Sobral, José Pina de Miranda, Alberto José Proença and José Nuno Oliveira seized the opportunity to praise José Manuel Valença and to tell a little about their experience with the Professor.

In an almost full audience, the jubilation ceremony of José Manuel Valença ended with an approach to several aspects of his academic career, and also with reflection on his past and future teaching activity at the University of Minho.

José Manuel Valença’s contributions included the coordination of the “1st World Wide Web Conference”, which was organised at the University of Minho in July 1995. In addition to this, the scholar was involved in the creation of the Mathematics and Computer Science degree of the University of Minho and was a Principal Advisor in the creation of the Citizen Card. He also founded the Association for the Promotion and Development of Information Society (APDSI) and was involved in security projects for several government ministries, such as the electronic voting, the law on digital certification, the reliability of the financial system and the elections to the European Parliament.

José Manuel Esgalhado Valença was born 70 years ago in Lisbon. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Lourenço Marques in Mozambique and a PhD in Engineering from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He has been teaching since 1980 at the University of Minho, having been the Head of several degrees at the Centre and Department of Informatics, Centro Algoritmi, founder of INESC TEC’s High-Assurance Software Laboratory and the University of Minho and mentor of the research groups in Logics and Formal Methods, Cryptography and Information Security. He was also an evaluator for the European Commission, the Portuguese University Foundation and the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, among others. He is the author of several scientific and didactic publications of reference in the area. He gave his last lesson at the age of 70.

The jubilation ceremony of José Valença took place on 18 October at 3:00 PM, at the A1 auditorium of the Gualtar Campus in Braga.

The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with UMinho.