João Freitas is the CTO of DefinedCrowd, an international start-up headquartered in Seattle, WA, with an R&D center in Lisbon, Portugal, that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to provide big data to speech technology and natural language processing applications. He is responsible for the product and services development, engineering processes, and management of the Portuguese subsidiary. With more than 10 years of experience in industry, João has also worked at Microsoft, where he has taken on several roles as a Lead Software Engineer, Project Coordinator and as a Researcher.
Here, he has participated in several R&D projects in the areas of Speech Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction, Ambient Assisted Living and Crowdsourcing. João has published over 30 articles in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. He is also the author and co-author of several book chapters and one book.