Inês Lynce, the AI researcher who wants Portuguese science to run as a team

Forty-five minutes into the interview, Inês Lynce asks for a break, and is gone less than a minute. “Sorry, these are the wonders of country life. We are making fig jam, from figs picked this morning. All of a sudden I could hear the machine working and a cinnamon stick had to come out,” says the full professor, a specialist in artificial intelligence (AI). The interruption comes just as she is explaining what sets her field, “automated reasoning”, apart from the language models behind Claude and ChatGPT. In fig jam, too, human supervision turns out to be essential.

The first woman to chair INESC-ID — Portugal’s leading institute in computer science and electrical and computer engineering — agreed to talk to ECO even while on holiday. That is no small thing, with only a few months to go before the start of SAIL, short for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a €27.2 million project that may well be the largest of her career: “It will be hard to have another one like this,” she admits.