---

layout: team

nav-class: dark

member-name: Alan de Freitas

id: alan

title: Alan de Freitas | The C++ Alliance

position: Staff Engineer

email: [email protected]

github: https://github.com/alandefreitas

site: https://alandefreitas.github.io/alandefreitas/

image: /images/people/alan.jpg

---

<p>Alan de Freitas is one of the C++ Alliance’s earliest members and leads work that improves everyday tooling for C++ developers. He served as project team lead for <a href="https://www.mrdocs.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MrDocs</a>, helped bring <a href="https://github.com/boostorg/url" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Boost.URL</a> into the library collection, and created the widely used <a href="https://github.com/alandefreitas/cpp-actions" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cpp-actions</a> GitHub workflow suite. He is also the author of <a href="https://github.com/alandefreitas/matplotplusplus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matplot++</a>, a popular plotting library that continues to support scientific computing teams.</p>

<p>He has built deep expertise in multi-objective optimization, data structures for Pareto fronts, and symbolic evolutionary algorithms—skills that now support modern <em>Machine Learning</em> (ML) and <em>Artificial Intelligence</em> (AI) projects. Alan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering focused on Computational Intelligence (also an early pillar of ML and AI) and both M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science. His doctoral work led to the peer-reviewed <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0020025514011347" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Aggregation Trees</a> study in Elsevier’s <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/information-sciences" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Information Sciences</em></a>. Later, as a professor, he published a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2210650221000766?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pareto-front data structures</a> paper in <a href="https://www.journals.elsevier.com/swarm-and-evolutionary-computation" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Swarm and Evolutionary Computation</em></a>. Both journals sit among the very top titles in computer science and mathematics.</p>

<p>Before joining the Alliance he worked on aircraft engine design at the <a href="https://www.rolls-royce.com/about/our-research/research-and-university.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rolls-Royce Control & Systems UTC</a> and as a <a href="https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Marie Curie researcher</a> within the European Union’s (EU) <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7/index_en.cfm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Seventh Framework Programme</a>, delivering applied optimization methods that moved from research to production engineering. During his faculty years he published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, supervised M.S. and Ph.D. work on the same optimization themes, led graduate research groups, taught C++ from introductory through doctoral programs, and promoted reproducible science in every project.</p>

<p>Alan enjoys applying his optimization expertise to the arts by experimenting with AI-supported, multi-objective techniques for music composition—a line of inquiry that also shaped his Ph.D. thesis—and he brings the same curiosity to cooking and playing the guitar when he steps away from the keyboard.</p>