Academy

Event type: Lectures

User Experience Design Talks: “Designing Systems that Blend Human and Machine Intelligence” by John Zimmerman (CMU)

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program will organize between April and June a series of webinars entitled “User Experience Design Talks @CMU Portugal”. This initiative is conducted under the Advanced Training Programs in User Experience Design of the CMU Portugal Program, which is planned to start in 2021.

The first talk will take place on April 27th, 3 pm (Lisbon)/ 10 am (Pittsburgh) , by John Zimmerman, Tang Family Professor of HCI and AI at Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute.

Abstract

Lots of AI innovation focuses on creating intelligent tools for professionals. For example, clinicians increasingly interact with intelligent tools that aid diagnosis or that predict prognosis. Unfortunately, many of these systems fail when they move from the lab to the real world, often for problems with human-AI interaction. This talk will explore how innovation teams can better situate AI system such that professionals experience intelligent tools as valuable and meaningful.

John Zimmerman is the Tang Family Professor of HCI and AI at Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute. He has 20 years of experience designing and researching human-AI interaction. His current areas of research includes intelligent systems for professionals, interaction with social robots that function as proxy people, and how designers can better engage with AI as a design material. He teaches courses in UX design, service design, and design of AI products and services.

Registration is free but mandatory: online form. All participants will receive the login credentials the day before the event.

Next Talks:

Session 2: May 18 at 3 pm.(Lisbon)/ 10 am (Pittsburgh)
“Making Active Materials Green: Morphing Matter for Sustainability”
Lining Yao is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, directing the Morphing Matter Lab.

Session 3: June 1st at 3 pm.(Lisbon)/ 10 am (Pittsburgh)
TBA
Gierad Laput, Research and Engineering Manager at Apple and CMU HCI PhD Alumni

Data Science Talks @CMU Portugal: Social, Cultural and Political Biases through the Lens of NLP by Ashique Khudabukhsh (CMU)

In the framework of the Advanced Training Program in Data Science and Machine Learning of the CMU Portugal Program which is planned to start in 2021, the CMU Portugal Program is organizing a series of webinars entitled “Data Science Talks @ CMU Portugal”.

The third talk will take place on February 23rd, from 2-3 p. m. (Lisbon) / 9-10 a.m. (Pittsburgh)  with Ashique Khudabukhsh, Project Scientist at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under the theme “Social, Cultural and Political Biases through the Lens of NLP”

is free but mandatory.

Abstract

In this talk,  Ashique KhudaBukhsh will summarize three broad lines of NLP research focusing on firstly cultural and social biases in popular Bollywood and Hollywood movies, secondly the long-standing international conflict between the two nuclear adversaries India and Pakistan, and moreover the current US political crisis. 

  1. The first part of the talk applies a broad range of NLP techniques to uncover subtle social and cultural biases present in popular entertainment. Beyond occupational stereotypes and gender representation, our study looks at subtler social signals such as son’s preference, retrograde social practices, and bias towards lighter skin color. We consider a substantial corpus of popular Bollywood movies spanning seven decades and contrast our findings with similar corpora of Hollywood and world movies.
  2. The second part of the talk seeks to examine what we term as hostility-diffusing, peace-seeking hope speech in the context of the 2019 India-Pakistan conflict. In doing so, we tackle several practical challenges that arise from multilingual texts and demonstrate how novel methods can effectively extend linguistic resources (e.g., content classifier, labeled examples) from a world language (e.g., English) to a low-resource language (e.g., Hindi).
  3. The final part of the talk presents a new methodology that offers a fresh perspective on interpreting and understanding political and ideological biases through machine translation. Our data set consists of more than 85 million comments on over 200K news videos uploaded by the official YouTube channels of four major US cable news networks. Focusing on a year that saw a raging pandemic, sustained worldwide protests demanding racial justice, an election of global consequence, and a far-from-peaceful transfer of power, we show how our method can shed light on the deepening political divide in the US.

Ashique KhudaBukhsh


Ashique KhudaBukhsh is currently a Project Scientist at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) mentored by Prof. Tom Mitchell. Prior to this role, he was a postdoc mentored by Prof. Jaime Carbonell at CMU. His PhD thesis (Computer Science Department, CMU, also advised by Prof. Jaime Carbonell) focused on distributed active learning. His current research lies at the intersection of NLP and AI for Social Impact. In this field, he is interested in analyzing globally important events in South East Asia and developing methods for noisy social media texts generated in this linguistically diverse region. His other broad research focus is US politics; in this area, his research involves devising novel methods to quantify, interpret and understand political polarization.

Should you have any doubts regarding registration please contact info@cmuportugal.org

Previous Data Science Talks @CMU Portugal

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Online info session: How to apply for a CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs Scholarship

On February 25th at 2pm, we will walk you through the application process to an FCT-CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs Scholarship which is open from February 15th 2021 to March 31st 2021 (12:00 GMT).

The CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs Initiative, launched for the first time in the 2021/2022 Academic year, offers Ph.D. scholarships in selected cutting-edge areas of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), related to the scope of the CMU Portugal Program.

The Affiliated Ph.D. Program will be entirely hosted by a Portuguese University, with a research period at Carnegie Mellon up to 1 year. Upon the Ph.D. conclusion, candidates will be awarded a degree by the Portuguese host University.

To participate in this Session please fill in this online form.

Should you have any doubts regarding registration please contact info@cmuportugal.org.

More about the Affiliated Ph.D. Programs here.

Data Science Talks @CMU Portugal: “AI Learns to Race: Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving” by Eric Nyberg (CMU)

In the framework of the Advanced Training Program in Data Science and Machine Learning of the CMU Portugal Program which is planned to start in 2021, the CMU Portugal Program is organizing a series of webinars entitled “Data Science Talks @ CMU Portugal”.

The second talk will take place on February 11th, from 2-3 p. m. (Lisbon) / 9-10 a.m. (Pittsburgh) by Eric Nyberg (Professor at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University) on “AI Learns to Race: Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving”.

The first talk took place on January 28th and was given by Jamie Callan ( Professor at Carnegie Mellon University) on “Conversational Assistants for Complex Search Tasks” on January 28th, video available here.

Registration is free but mandatory. 

Abstract
This talk will present the Roborace challenge, the first global event for autonomous Formula-1 race cars. The Roborace organization provides full-size autonomous vehicles, as well as simulation software for training and testing autonomous driving agents; the competing research teams are responsible for improving the driving capabilities of the vehicle to navigate increasingly difficult autonomous racing challenges. In 2020, a team of students from CMU’s Master of Computational Data Science (MCDS) program became the first U.S. team to participate in Roborace. In this talk, we present our experiences so far, and outline our efforts to move beyond classic approaches with a completely general, reinforcement learning approach for training autonomous driving agents.

Eric Nyberg
Noted for his contributions to the fields of automatic text translation, information retrieval, and automatic question answering, Eric Nyberg holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (1992) and a B.A. from Boston University (1983). He is a recipient of the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence (for his contributions to the field of question answering and his work as an original developer on the Watson project) and the BU Computer Science Distinguished Alumna/Alumnus Award. Eric currently directs the Master of Computational Data Science (MCDS) program at Carnegie Mellon. He is also co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at Cognistx, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for Fairhair.ai

Should you have any doubts regarding registration please contact info@cmuportugal.org.

Download Flyer

Data Science Talks @CMU Portugal: “Conversational Assistants for Complex Search Tasks” with Jamie Callan (CMU)

In the framework of the Advanced Training Program in Data Science and Machine Learning of the CMU Portugal Program  which is planned to start in 2021, the CMU Portugal Program is organizing a series of webinars entitled “Data Science Talks @ CMU Portugal”. The first talk will be given by Jamie Callan (Professor and Interim Director of the CMU Language Technologies Institute) under the topic “Conversational Assistants for Complex Search Tasks”.

Date: January 28th at 2 p.m. (Lisbon)/ 9 a.m. (Pittsburgh).
Online session: the day before the event, you will receive the login credentials
Registration: free but mandatory. Register here.


Abstract

Conversational assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have become common, but they are limited to simple interactions.  This talk describes the TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT), an international forum for research on next generation conversational assistants that support complex information seeking.  CAsT conversations are 8-12 questions that model a person learning about a topic, for example, the World Economy Events and Statistics, Legal and Legislation Topics, the US electoral college, or the Bronze Age collapse.  The talk also discusses the characteristics of successful CAsT systems.

 

Jamie Callan 

Professor and Interim Director at the Language Technologies Institute, a graduate department in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.  His recent research develops advanced search engine architectures, neural search algorithms, use of semi-structured knowledge for open domain search, conversational information seeking, and large-scale distributed search. Jamie is a co-organizer of the TREC CAsT evaluations.

CMU Portugal Webinar at Técnico Job Shop

CMU Portugal will host on October 8th a Webinar to all those interested in knowing more about the Program’s opportunities.

This year due to the current situation, the Job Shop organized by Instituto Superior Técnico Students’ Association (AEIST) and one of the largest University fairs for Engineering and Technology in Portugal, will be entirely online.

Our Webinar will take place on Wednesday between 7:10pm-7:55pm with a 45-minute presentation giving participants the opportunity to interact with the Program’s Education Officer, João Fumega, to ask and clarify all doubts related to the Program’s opportunities.

 

CMU Portugal will be part of two FLAD Sessions in Porto and Minho to promote training initiatives in the USA

The Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD) will host two sessions – February 18th in Porto and 19th at Universidade do Minho – for all those interested in undertaking a period of academic training at a University or Research Center in the United States.

For these sessions, FLAD invited representatives from different Programs that promote initiatives addressed to Portuguese who want to go to the USA, including the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program that will be represented in Porto and Minho by the Program’s Executive director, Sílvia Castro, and in Porto also by the Program’s Education officer, João Fumega. All questions related to funding available, application process or the stay in the United States, will be clarified by those entities and through testimonies shared by previous participants.

In Porto the session will take place at i3S on February 18th between 15h00-17h00, at Auditorium Mariano Gago.
Registrations at: https://forms.gle/tjSG1wmhhu84cnt78 by  14/02.

At  Universidade do Minho the session will take place on February 19th between  14h30-16h30, at Auditorium B1, Building 2.
Registrations at: https://forms.gle/2diuYBHaqeYBkizp9, by 14/02.

IST Distinguished Lecture “Beyond User Centered Design”

December, 18th, 2019 I 17:00  (1h30m)

Powered by LARSyS, INESC ID and CMU Portugal with Yvonne Rogers from the University College London and Jodi Forlizzi from Carnegie Mellon University.

Entrance is free. In case of doubt please contact: info@cmuportugal.org

Abstract

User-centered design served the digital industry well. UCD is the process of designing digital products and services focusing on the users and their needs in each phase of the iterative design process. However, in the experience economy we are no longer designing user experiences (UX) with one digital artifact for one person, we are designing complex socio-technical interactions which form ecologies of stakeholders, products, services and platforms. We need to move beyond UCD and UX to respond to the new economic and social challenges and continue to design digital ecosystems that benefit the world. This requires integrating other discipliner and perspectives which are clearly reflected in this IST Distinguished Lecture: “Beyond User Centered Design”. We bring together two leaders in the field of HCI which represent a new generation of interdisciplinary research and education. A designer (Jodi Forlizi) and a Psychologist (Yvonne Rogers), two brilliant women that lead the top HCI departments in the world of Computer Science.

Agenda

17:00 I “Beyond GUIs: The Next Generation of Voice-Assisted Interactions”
Yvonne Rogers, University College London

17:30 I “Beyond User Centered Design AND Design Thinking”
Jodi Forlizzi, Carnegie Mellon University

18:00 I Discussion (30m)
Moderator: Ana Paiva, INESC ID

Yvonne Rogers I Brief Biography

Yvonne Rogers is the director of the Interaction Centre at UCL (UCLIC), and a deputy head of the Computer Science department. She is interested in how technology transforms what it means to be human. Much of her work is situated in the wild – concerned with informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through creating and assembling a diversity of technologies (e.g. tangibles, AR, IoT) that augment everyday, learning, community engagement and collaborative work activities. She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., “Being Human: HCI in 2020” manifesto), and has pioneered an approach to innovation and ubiquitous learning. She has also published over 300 articles, including two monographs “HCI Theory: Classical, Modern and Contemporary” and “Research in the Wild”. She is a fellow of the ACM, BCS and the ACM CHI Academy. The 5th edition of her co-authored textbook (with Helen Sharp and Jenny Preece) on Interaction Design has just been published.

Jodi Forlizzi  I Brief Biography

Jodi Forlizzi is the Geschke Director and a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is responsible for establishing design research as a legitimate form of research in HCI that is different from, but equally as important as, scientific and human science research. For the past 20 years, Jodi has advocated for design research in all forms, mentoring peers, colleagues, and students in its structure and execution, and today it is an important part of the CHI community.

Jodi’s current research interests include: designing educational games that are engaging and effective, designing robots, AVs, and other technology services that use AI and ML to adapt to people’s needs, and designing for healthcare. Jodi is a member of the ACM CHI Academy and has been honored by the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for excellence in HRI design research. Jodi has consulted with Disney and General Motors to create innovative product-service systems.

“Raising awareness for Gender Balance” Invited Talk by Lenore Blum, Carnegie Mellon University

Promoted by: Gender Balance Group of INESC TEC, with the support of CMU Portugal Program

Entrance is free but registration is mandatory HERE until October, 23

In case of doubt please contact: gtig@inesctec.pt

Preliminary Agenda

10:30 am – Welcome words
10:40 am – Invited Talk, Lenore Blum, Carnegie Mellon University
1:30 am – Open discussion
12:30 pm – End of session

Abstract

Working towards gender balance in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is becoming critical for many organizations since it helps to foster diversity and attract and develop talent. This talk aims to raise awareness for gender balance, especially in the context of R&D and Higher Education Institutions. Gender balance may be fostered in several stages of the career and within several organizational processes, such as recruitment, career development, or career progression. Understanding the causes of existing issues and building on experience of other organizations will allow structuring a better roadmap towards gender balance.

Short bio

Lenore Blum (Ph.D., MIT) is Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, at Carnegie Mellon, where she was founding director of Project Olympus, faculty director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, and held the inaugural Deans’ Chair in Technology Entrepreneurship. Project Olympus is a good example of her determination to make a real difference in the academic community and the world beyond. Olympus has two main aims: to bridge the gap between cutting-edge university research/innovation and economy-promoting commercialization for the benefit of our communities and creating a climate, culture and community to enable talent and ideas to grow in the region.  Lenore is internationally recognized for her work in increasing the participation of girls and women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. She was a founder of the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Expanding Your Horizons Network for middle and high school girls. At Carnegie Mellon she founded the Women@SCS program. In 2004 she received the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. In 2009 she received the Carnegie Science Catalyst Award recognizing her work with Project Olympus targeting high-tech talent to promote economic growth in the Pittsburgh region and for increasing the participation of women in computer science. Currently, women comprise 50% of the undergraduate computer science majors at Carnegie Mellon, more than twice the national average. Her research, founding a theory of computation and complexity over continuous domains, forms a theoretical basis for scientific computation. On the eve of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday in June 2012, she was plenary speaker at the Turing Centenary Celebration at the University of Cambridge, England. Her current research, on developing a computer architecture for a conscious AI inspired both by Alan Turing and recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, is joint with her husband Manuel Blum and son Avrim Blum.

For more information please contact

Sandra Pinto
Communication Service (INESC TEC)
T +351 222094214
eventos@inesctec.pt

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