Dr João Vilas Boas
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
School of Mathematical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
| Funder: | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council |
| Project: | CFT and Gravity: Heavy States and Black Holes |
Research
Quantum Field Theory, Holography, Conformal Field Theory, Bootstrap
Interests
My research focuses on holography and the AdS/CFT correspondence to understand the
dynamics of strongly coupled quantum field theories and their gravitational duals. I am particularly
interested in conformal field theory (CFT) techniques, including the analytic conformal bootstrap, as a
non-perturbative approach to constrain and solve CFTs. My work aims to find new insights from both the
bulk and boundary perspectives to test and refine predictions from holography.
Research Group
News
April 2026
28 April 2026
On Wednesday 6 May, we will host the next Chemistry Seminar in the series, delivered by Dr Antonio Attanzio from Cambridge Display Technology Limited.
The seminar will take place in the People's Palace Lecture Theatre 1 (PP1) from 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm.
We hope to see you there!
Antonio, a former PhD student ... [more]
28 April 2026
Vasileios Klimis is part of a team that have a paper accepted for the 19th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation in Daejeon, Republic of Korea to be held 18-22 May
It concerns Noise Fingerprints for Cross-Platform Quantum Simulator Discrepancy Analysis
Abstract
Before running code on a ... [more]
27 April 2026
On Wednesday 29 April, we will host the next Chemistry Seminar in the series, delivered by Dr Robert Menzel from the University of Leeds.
The seminar will take place in G. O. Jones Lecture Theatre, from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm.
For more details about Dr Menzel's profile and research interests, please visit ... [more]
21 April 2026
Paul Curzon and Edmund Robinson were part of the expert panel at the Flip the Script participatory design workshop at the British Computer Society offices. The aim of the meeting was to co-develop a new practice model that can help Computing departments across the UK to support better progression and ... [more]
20 April 2026
On 4-8 May 2026, several CMAI researchers will participate at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026). ICASSP is the leading conference in the field of signal processing and the flagship event of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
As in previous years, the Centre for Multimodal AI ... [more]
17 April 2026
Vasileios Klimis has presented a paper on "Beyond Specification Conformance" at the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering in Rio de Janeiro
It introduces a new way, based on a mathematical logic, that complements specifications to take into account the needs of users to improve the quality of ... [more]
13 April 2026
The first QMUL AI: Brains and Bits symposium was held on 13 April 2026. It brought together researchers from across Science and Engineering to discuss the Fundamentals of AI including issues of how AI works and how it should work. It included talks from investigators from Biology, the Blizzard Institute, Physics, Maths, ... [more]
9 April 2026
On 23-27 April, CMAI researchers will participate at the Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ICLR is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning, but generally referred to as deep learning.
... [more]
March 2026
31 March 2026
Raymond Hu has been awarded a New Investigator research grant worth £646,000 by EPSRC. The project is called "DymSUM - Distributed Dynamic Software Updates using Multiparty Session Types" and investigates a theory-based approach to how distributed software can evolve while running. The project involves collaboration with industrial partners at Monzo Bank ... [more]
30 March 2026
CMAI PhD student Alexander Williams recently completed a 3 month research fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) following a successful application to the UKRI Policy Internship Scheme.
POST is an impartial research and knowledge exchange service based in the UK Parliament. They work to ensure cutting-edge research ... [more]
26 March 2026
Shalom Lappin is part of a team centred at the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP) at the University of Gothenburg that have published new work on a comparison of Humans vs Vision-Language Models
It proposes a unified way to measure narrative coherence in writing about about ... [more]
25 March 2026
A team including Ekaterina Ivanova from the Centre for Human-Centred Computing have a paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Haptics. It shows that physically linking a child with a more experienced writer through a haptic interface when practicing handwriting leads to improvement in their handwriting skill.
Abstract:
The ... [more]
21 March 2026
QMUL has joined the Einstein Telescope (ET) collaboration with a new ET Research Unit supported by School of Mathematical Sciences and the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences. ET is a European project, driven by an international collaboration, for an innovative gravitational-wave observatory. It will be part of a third-generation ... [more]
20 March 2026
Søren Riis and Marc Roth are both joint winners of the SafeAI Benchmark Competition "Humanity's Last Exam".
The linked paper "A benchmark of expert-level academic questions to assess AI capabilities", co-authored by FACT researchers Søren Riis and Marc Roth, has been published in Nature. This paper accompanies the ... [more]
19 March 2026
A new paper, "Predicting Sentence Acceptability Judgments in Multimodal Contexts", by a team including Shalom Lappin from the Centre for Fundamental AI and Computational Theory, explores the effect of images on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict the ratings humans give to sentences over how acceptable they ... [more]
17 March 2026
The Centre for Networks, Communications, and Systems successfully hosted its first Industry Exhibition, marking a significant milestone for the centre. The event welcomed over 30 attendees, and we had the pleasure of showcasing our research to industry partners and guests.
It was a proud moment to see the quality of work ... [more]
13 March 2026
New research published in Machine Learning shows pattern learning is not enough to train AI to tackle games – and abstract representations or hybrid approaches may help.
See full story at: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2026/science-and-engineering/se/ais-game-playing-still-has-flaws-research-shows.html
11 March 2026
Dr H. Hietala, Senior Lecturer in Space Plasma Physics at QMUL, has been appointed a Guest Investigator on the BepiColombo mission. BepiColombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to the planet Mercury consisting of two spacecraft. Launched on 20 October 2018, ... [more]
11 March 2026
A team of researchers including Oliver Jenkinson, Professor of Mathematics in the Centre for Complex Systems, has recently published a breakthrough study in the highly renowned journal Inventiones Mathematicae. The paper, entitled Typical periodic optimization for dynamical systems: symbolic dynamics by Wen Huang, Oliver Jenkinson, Leiye Xu and Yiwei Zhang, ... [more]
10 March 2026
How can bacteria that forage on organic particles survive in vast ocean regions where such particles are extremely sparse? A new study by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and ETH Zurich shows that variability at the level of individual bacteria plays a central role. Using a probabilistic population ... [more]
