Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) has announced the preliminary results of the Exploratory Research Projects. Seven new CMU Portugal exploratory projects were selected for funding.
The 2025 call for proposals received 36 submissions, 7 of which were recommended for funding under the scope of the CMU Portugal Program by FCT’s independent panel of evaluators. The research spans five broad areas: two Neuroscience & brain interfaces projects (Safe RL for neural control and SoftBCI) explore cutting-edge brain-computer interface technologies, while a third examines how neural vision models align with human cognition; Robotics at lunar teleoperation and children’s group engagement; and one AI & software project targets LLM code quality through program analysis and another addresses multimodal alignment in AI-generated medical reports.
The awarded projects will be led by 7 Portuguese academic and research Institutions: FCiências.ID, i3S, INESC-ID, ISR, IST-ID, Universidade de Coimbra, and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL).
The projects will collaborate with 5 different departments at Carnegie Mellon University: Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Robotics with two projects, and Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, and Computational Biology, each with one project.
CMU Portugal is providing through FCT €389,834.05 in support to the Portuguese teams. These projects are scheduled to last 12 months, giving the scientific community an opportunity to identify and explore novel ideas.
The CMU Portugal Program regularly supports the launch of Exploratory Research Projects (ERPs), with the main objective of promoting Portugal’s international competitiveness and innovation capacity in Science and Technology (S&T) in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Since 2017, the Program has launched 6 Calls for Exploratory Projects and funded 42 projects.
In 2026, seven (7) new projects were recommended for funding by the FCT under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, including:
- Safe Reinforcement Learning for Closed-Loop Neural Control Using Brain-on-Chip Platforms
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Paulo de Castro Aguiar
Principal Investigator at CMU: Yorie Nakahira
Partner Institutions: i3S, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (CMU)
- Assessing learning and internal geometry of neural vision models through human data
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Jorge Manuel Almeida
Principal Investigator at CMU: Michael Tarr
Partner Institutions: UCoimbra, Psychology Department (CMU)
- New Space meets Moon Robots: novel multimodal teleoperation interfaces for semi-autonomous lunar exploration rovers
Principal Investigator in Portugal: José Luís Silva
Principal Investigator at CMU: David Wettergreen
Partner Institutions: IST-ID, Robotics Department (CMU)
- ChildrEngage: Measuring Real-Time Children Group Engagement
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Ana Isabel Caniço Neto
Principal Investigator at CMU: Reid Simmons
Partner Institutions: FCiências.ID, IST-ID, Robotics Department (CMU);
- SoftBCI: Ultra-Soft Neural Probes for long-term Brain Computer-Interface
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Mahmoud Tavakoli
Principal Investigator at CMU: Carmel Majidi
Partner Institutions: ISR-UC, Mechanical Engineering Department (CMU);
- Quantitative Program Analysis for Improving LLM Code Generation
Principal Investigator in Portugal: José Fragoso Santos
Principal Investigator at CMU: Limin Jia
Partner Institutions: INESC-ID, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (CMU)
- MED-CONGRUENT: Enhancing Multimodal Alignment and Physician Perception in Generative Medical Reports
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Qiwei Han
Principal Investigator at CMU: Jian Ma
Partner Institutions: UNL, Computational Biology Department (CMU)
More information on FCT website.