João Miguel Barradas Luzio is an Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student, at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), and researcher at the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR), which is associated with the Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS) in Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal. Simultaneously, he holds a contract as an Invited Teaching Assistant at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) in IST. 

João Luzio holds a bachelor’s degree (17/20) and a master’s degree (18/20) in Electrical and Computer Engineering, awarded by Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in July 2021 and November 2023, respectively. His master's dissertation entitled "Semantic-Based Active Perception for Humanoid Visual Tasks: Scene Exploration and Visual Search in Foveal Scenes using Deep Object Detection Models" was supervised by Prof. Alexandre Bernardino and Dr. Plinio Moreno allowed him to specialize in Control, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, while his secondary area of specialization is Networks and Communication Systems.

During his bachelor's degree, in 2020, João Luzio was awarded a scientific initiation research grant from the Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS), within a project (UIDB/50009/2020) funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT/MCTES). During the period of the grant, he was supervised/mentored by Dr. Plinio Moreno and Prof. José Santos-Victor, both affiliated with the Computer and Robot Vision Laboratory (VisLab) at ISR. The work developed during the timespan of the grant consisted of applying and developing methods for modeling and simulating humanoid robotic systems. More specifically, the work consisted of programming a robotic manipulator/arm (Kinova Gen3), together with a camera (Intel RealSense), in a simulation environment, to perform grasping pose estimation (NVlabs GraspNet) in the context of the 'object grasping' task.   

In the academic year 2022/2023, João Luzio was contracted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC), in Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), as a Teaching Assistant, for a variety of bachelor’s program curricular units, namely the Digital Systems, Computer Architecture, and Programming courses, being responsible for guiding and evaluating over 200 aerospace and electrical engineering students in both laboratory (practical) and problem-solving shifts, under the coordination of Prof. António Grilo, Prof. Nuno Horta, and Prof. Pedro Tomás, respectively. Currently, as an Invited Teaching Assistant, he is also responsible for laboratory (practical) shifts, evaluating and supporting students in the development of their course projects, in four master's program curricular units, namely Modelling and Simulation, Distributed Real-Time Control Systems, Autonomous Systems, and Machine Learning under the coordination of Prof. Alexandre Bernardino and Prof. Pedro Lima.   

In 2020, he received a MOOC certificate for successfully completing the Drone Control and Simulation course, signed by the president of Instituto Superior Técnico Prof. Rogério Colaço. In recognition of his academic prowess, João Luzio received four Academic Merit Diplomas in the academic years 2018/19, 2020/21, 2021/22, and 2022/23 and one Academic Excellence Diploma in 2019/20, awarded by Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), concerning the results achieved during his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.