João Freitas is the CTO of DefinedCrowd, an international start-up headquartered in Seattle, WA, and with an R&D center in Lisbon, Portugal, that offers high-quality training data for AI systems. He is responsible for the product and services development, engineering processes, and for the management of the EMEA operations. With more than 10 years of experience in industry, João has also worked at the Microsoft, where he has taken on several roles as a Lead Software Engineer, Project Coordinator and as a Researcher. Here, he has participated in several R&D projects in the areas of Speech Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction, Ambient Assisted Living and Crowd-Sourcing. João has published over 30 articles in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. He is also the author and co-author of several patents, book chapters and one book.