Maria Isabel Ferreira

aldinhasferreira AT gmail.com
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Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira is a Portuguese semiotician and linguist. She is a member and researcher of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal and a scientific advisor at the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics of Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, where she does research in the field of artificial cognition.

The fundamental questions of meaning and cognition have been at the core of her work since she was a member of the team of researchers that at the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon was responsible for making the Dictionary of Contemporary Portuguese "Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea" (2001).

In 2011 she published "On Meaning: Individuation and Identity" where she defined the epistemological framework for her theoretical approach. Assuming that semiosis is a dialectic relationship involving the cognitive entity and its environment, a process inherent to cognition and to life itself, she proposed in 2012 (Ferreira, MIA and Caldas, M. 2012) the mathematical modelling of what she called "the semiosis of cognition".

Her present research work comprehends the analysis of semiotic phenomena either in natural or artificial systems, within the developed theoretical framework and the problems inherent to human robot interaction.

Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira has a Masters in Anglo-American Studies, a Masters in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Linguistics (University of Lisbon). She has also attended a course in Lexicology, Lexicography and Computational Linguistics at the University of Pisa, Italy and an Advanced Course in Artificial Intelligence by the University of Stanford.

She is a member of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies and a member of the Associação Portuguesa de Linguística.