Paulo Costa

Associate Professor, CYSE and SEOR Departments
Associate Chair For Graduate Programs and Research, CYSE Department
Director, Center of Excellence in C4I & CYber

Paulo Cesar G. da Costa graduated with honors in the Brazilian Air Force Academy. Dr. Paulo Costa retired from the Brazilian Air Force in 2008 and continued his academic career at GMU. As a lecturer, Prof. Costa teaches courses on decision theory, dynamic systems modeling, decision support systems design, and probabilistic reasoning. As a researcher, he became an expert in integrating semantic technologies and uncertainty management, and is a pioneer in the field of probabilistic ontologies. Dr. Costa developed PR-OWL, a probabilistic ontology language for the Semantic Web, and is a key contributor to UnBBayes-MEBN, a Java-based, open source implementation of Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks and the PR-OWL language. His research path also includes work as a W3C invited expert in the area of uncertainty reasoning, and as a leading organizer of the Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web workshop series, which is now in its eight edition. Prof. Costa’s academic service includes participation in technical program in several academic conferences and journals, as well as members of review boards in NSF, National Academies of Engineering, and others. He also has been actively involved as PI, co-PI, or technical lead in research projects related to his areas of expertise, such as the ARO-funded project on Mathematical Foundations of High-Level Information Fusion and the ISIF’s ETUR Working Group (eturwg.c4i.gmu.edu). Dr. Costa is recipient of the GMU’s Academic Excellence in Systems Engineering Award, and is one of the few people to date to have graduated with honors in all the BAF’s three major career courses.