Alexandre S. Pires

Alexandre S. Pires

Researcher on pro-social AI

Ph.D. student, SIAS Group, University of Amsterdam

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Alexandre Pires

About

Hey! I'm Alex, a Ph.D. student at the Prosocial Dynamics Lab, part of the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems (SIAS) Group, University of Amsterdam. My work focuses on understanding how human indirect reciprocity (reputation-based cooperation) can be affected by artificial agents (chatbots, robots, etc.). I'm supervised by Fernando P. Santos (SIAS) and Ana Paiva (GAIPS). My formal education is on artificial intelligence and complex systems. However, I always strive to bring perspectives from various fields, such as music, art, history, economics, ecology, and more. Before my Ph.D., I did my Computer Science and Engineering master's degree at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal, supervised by Francisco C. Santos and Jorge M. Pacheco.

The Prosocial Dynamics Lab

News

Sep. 29th, 2026
Apr. 1st, 2026
AAMAS 2026 - I'll be going to AAMAS 2026 to present my work on the workshops for Adaptive and Learning Agents, and Citizen-Centric Multiagent Systems!
Oct. 29th, 2025
ELLIS Unit Amsterdam's Research Retreat - Happy to be one of the speakers of the ELLIS Unit Amsterdam's Research Retreat!
Jun. 30th, 2025
ICAI Summer School 2025 - I got to present my newest work at the ICAI Summer School at the University of Amsterdam!
May 23rd, 2025
AAMAS 2025 - Had a wonderful time in AAMAS 2025, where I got to present my newest work in the main track, the doctoral consortium, and the workshop on Citizen-Centric Multiagent Systems!
Older news
Mar. 5th, 2025
2nd Joint CCSS-UvA Workshop - Another year another lovely workshop! I presented my recent work on indirect reciprocity in hybrid populations to researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the Center for Computational Social Science of the Kobe University.
Dec. 18th, 2024
AAMAS 2025 - My full paper on cooperation in hybrid populations via indirect reciprocity under private information was accepted for AAMAS 2025, so I'll be presenting it in Detroit, happening May 19-23 2025.
Aug. 18th, 2024
EDAI 2024 - I will be at EDAI 2024, a workshop happening at ECAI 2024, where I will present my work-in-progress paper regarding the dynamics of human cooperation via indirect reciprocity in human-AI hybrid populations, happening at Santiago De Compostela in 19th of October.
Jul. 4th, 2024
ECAI 2024 - I'll be presenting my main-track paper regarding the dynamics of human cooperation via indirect reciprocity in human-AI hybrid populations at ECAI 2024, happening at Santiago De Compostela in 19-24th of October.
Apr. 5th, 2024
Zalencentrum van Limmikhof - I gave a small talk about human cooperation and indirect reciprocity to bachelor's students in Computational Social Science from the University of Amsterdam.
Mar. 6th, 2024
Joint CCSS-UvA Workshop - Together with prof. Fernando Santos, I gave a talk about my work in indirect reciprocity in hybrid populations to researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the Center for Computational Social Science, Kobe University.

Publications

2026
  • How large language models judge and influence human cooperation.Alexandre S. Pires, Laurens Samson, Sennay Ghebreab, Fernando P. Santos.
    In PNAS Nexus. September 2026.    Paper
  • Learning social norms of cooperation under limited observability.Alexandre S. Pires*, Roman Chiva Gil*, Fernando P. Santos.
    Working paper accepted to the Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop at AAMAS 2026.    PDF
2025
  • Cooperation Through Indirect Reciprocity in Child-Robot Interactions.Isabel Neto*, Alexandre S. Pires*, Filipa Correia, Fernando P. Santos.
    Pre-print in ArXiv. July 2025.    arXiv
  • Artificial Agents Mitigate The Punishment Dilemma of Indirect Reciprocity.Alexandre S. Pires, Fernando P. Santos.
    In 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025). May 2025.    PDF
  • The Impact of Artificial Agents in Human Cooperation Through Indirect Reciprocity.Alexandre S. Pires.
    Doctoral Consortium in 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025). May 2025.    PDF
  • Indirect Reciprocity in Hybrid Human-AI Populations.Alexandre S. Pires, Fernando P. Santos.
    Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Citizen-Centric Multiagent Systems 2025 (C-MAS 2025). May 2025.    Proceedings
2024
  • Artificial Agents Facilitate Human Cooperation through Indirect Reciprocity.Alexandre S. Pires, Fernando P. Santos.
    In 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2024). October 2024.    Paper
2023
  • Master's Dissertation: Evolutionary Multi-Sector Analysis of Open-Access Adoption In Scientific Communication.Alexandre S. Pires. Supervised by prof. Francisco C. Santos and prof. Jorge M. Pacheco.Thesis
2022 (early research)
  • A web-based superabsorbent polymer solver (in simple science): PHP, Python, Fortran, and Gnuplot together.Miguel Casquilho, Alexandre S. Pires, et al.
    In 2022 17th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies(CISTI). June 2022.    Paper

Talks and invited lectures

October 29th, 2025
June 30th, 2025
March 5th, 2025
April 5th, 2024
Talk at Zalencentrum van Limmikhof to bachelor's students in Computational Social Science (University of Amsterdam) about human cooperation and indirect reciprocity
March 6th, 2024

Media

2026

Teaching and supervision

Dec. 2023 — Present

Teaching Assistant

Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam

Co-developer of the AI In Society elective course for ≈25 MSc AI students

Courses taught:
- Fundamentals of Data Science - Fall 2024/2025, Fall 2025/2026
- Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality and Transparency in AI - Winter 2023/2024, Winter 2024/2025, Winter 2025/2026
- Agentic AI - Winter 2026/2027

Sep. 2021 — Aug. 2023

Teaching Assistant

Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon

Courses taught:
- Compilers - Spring 2022/2023
- Software Engineering - Spring 2021/2022, 2022/2023
- Data Science - Fall 2022/2023
- Object-Oriented Programming - Fall 2021/2022

- IST Award for Excellence in Teaching - 2021/2022, 2022/2023

Supervision

2025-2026

Bárbara Rosa - "SocialDilemmas4HRI: Framework for Children's Social Dilemmas in HRI"

Co-supervised with Isabel Neto, Tiago Guerreiro and Hugo Simão
Masters in Informatics, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, 2025-2026

2025-2026

João Pereira - "RobotsVote: Do robots influence your vote?"

Co-supervised with Isabel Neto, Tiago Guerreiro and Hugo Simão
Masters in Informatics, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, 2025-2026

Reviewing

Journals: PLOS Computational Biology (2) · Proceedings of the Royal Society A (1)

Conferences: AAMAS 2027 (6) · NeurIPS 2026 (4) · ALA Workshop, AAMAS 2026 (2) · ICML 2026 (6) · EDAI Workshop, ECAI 2025 (1)

(Full list available at Web Of Science here.)

CV

Full CV (potentially outdated)

Education

Nov. 2023 — Present

ELLIS Amsterdam Unit Ph.D. Student

SIAS Group, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam
- Project title: "Dynamics of Cooperation and Reciprocity in Human-AI Hybrid Populations"
- In collaboration with the ELLIS Lisbon Unit
- Supervisors: Fernando P. Santos (SIAS, IvI), Ana Paiva (GAIPS, INESC-ID)

Sep. 2021 — Sep. 2023

Master's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering

Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
- Thesis: "Evolutionary Multi-Sector Analysis of Open-Access Adoption In Scientific Communication". Supervisors: Francisco C. Santos, Jorge M. Pacheco
- Final Grade: 18/20
- Academic Merit Diploma 2021/2022, 2022/2023
- Specialization in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics

Sep. 2018 — Jul. 2021

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering

Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
- Final Grade: 17/20
- Academic Merit Diploma 2019/2020, 2020/2021

Experience

Jun. 2021 — Feb. 2022

Early Stage Researcher

HLT Lab, INESC-ID
- Role: Researching Musicological Information Extraction from Soundtracks, using RL and GIS
- Supervisor: David M. Matos

Past activities

Master Degree projects

CPU/GPU Ray-Tracer and Unreal Engine Scene · Multi-agent path finding in Minizinc · Competitive and Cooperative Multi-Agent System to Play The Human-Knot Game · Image Caption Generator · Python Vulnerability Analyzer · Question Categorizer

Other Activities

Mar. 2023

Git Workshop Lecturer

Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
- Lectured a Git workshop organized by the computer science student group, NEIIST

Feb. 2023

MIRAI Program

Tokyo, Japan
- Participated in various cultural exchange activities offered by the Japanese government as a representative of Portugal in the science group