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Event type: Other

Research Unplugged @CMU Portugal – Paulo Dimas

Between April and May 2026, the CMU Portugal Program will launch a brand-new series of talks: “Research Unplugged @CMUPortugal.”

The second session will feature Paulo Dimas (Center for Responsible AI) on Wednesday, May 13, at 5 p.m. (Lisbon) / noon (Pittsburgh).

Hosted by National Co-Director João Magalhães, these 30-minute talks feature conversations with faculty and researchers from both sides of the Atlantic. Each session will showcase CMU Portugal’s collaborative initiatives, exploring how cutting-edge research addresses emerging challenges and delivers real-world impact.

Paulo Dimas is the CEO of the Center for Responsible AI, one of the world’s leading consortia dedicated to ethical artificial intelligence. This center brings together top startups, research centers, and global partners to develop the next generation of AI products rooted in transparency and accountability. With a career defined by technological entrepreneurship, Paulo previously served as VP of Product Innovation at Unbabel, where he played a key role in building the world’s first Language Operations platform. Today, he is a leading voice in the debate on AI’s impact on society and the economy.

 

 

 

The session will be livestreamed on YouTube.

Upcoming session:

Research Unplugged @CMU Portugal – Alexandre Ferreira da Silva

Between April and May 2026, the CMU Portugal Program will launch a brand-new series of talks: “Research Unplugged @CMUPortugal.”

The inaugural session features Alexandre Ferreira da Silva (Universidade do Minho | CMU Portugal project PROMETHEUS) on Wednesday, April 29th, at 5 p.m. (Lisbon) / noon (Pittsburgh) via Zoom.

In early 2025, Alexandre Ferreira da Silva was part of the team that launched the “PROMETHEUS-1” nanosatellite into space. The 5cm cubic satellite – roughly the size of a Rubik’s Cube – was developed under a CMUPortugal Exploratory Research project involving Universidade do Minho, Instituto Superior Técnico, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Hosted by National Co-Director Inês Lynce (INESC ID I TÉCNICO), the inaugural session will share expert insights on key topics such as:

  • The use of nanosatellites and the Prometheus success story.
  • The legal framework and barriers to launching satellites into space.
  • Collaboration with Carnegie Mellon
  • The future of space research.

To register, please fill in this form. The Zoom link of each session will be sent to the participants the day before.

Short Bio:

Alexandre Ferreira da Silva is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Electronics at the University of Minho and currently serves as the National Co-Director of the MIT Portugal Program. Under the CMU Portugal Program, he served as the Principal Investigator for the 2022 exploratory research project “PROMETHEUS“. This initiative led to the development of Prometheus-1, a Rubik’s Cube-sized satellite launched to space in January 2025. The satellite was built at the University of Minho in collaboration with Instituto Superior Técnico and Carnegie Mellon University.

Upcoming Sessions: 

CMU Portugal Workshops & Networking event

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program will once again bring together its Affiliated and Dual Degree Ph.D. students, as well as Visiting Scholars, for simultaneous events. The skills workshops and networking events will be held on December 3rd, 2025, both in Lisbon and Pittsburgh.

Lisbon event:

In Lisbon, CMU Portugal will host two simultaneous workshops in collaboration with Chaperone: 

– “Communicating Data to Non-Experts” (how to present technical data to non-expert audiences, teaching principles for creating graphs and tables that non-experts can understand)
– “Scientific Writing Skills for Researchers” (guiding students through the key sections of a scientific manuscript: from crafting a compelling introduction to presenting solid conclusions).

Event agenda:

  • 10:00 – Coffee & Breakfast 
  • 10:30 – 13:00 –  Training Sessions 
  • 13:00 – 15:00 – Networking Lunch  

Pittsburgh event:

CMU Portugal is partnering with CMU’s Student Academic Success Center to offer the seminar “Communicating Data to Non-Experts”.

Event agenda:

  • 10:00 – Coffee & Breakfast
  • 10:30 – 11:30 – Seminar 
  • 12:00 – 2:00 – Holiday luncheon 

Both meetings will be an opportunity for students to gather and share insights about their experiences under the program, celebrating the end of another year.

Info Session “How to apply for a CMU Portugal Dual Degree Ph.D. Scholarship” – 2026/2027 academic year

On October 14th at 4:00 p.m. (Lisbon) / 11:00 a.m. (Pittsburgh), the CMU Portugal Program will host an Online Info Session to guide prospective candidates in applying to the 2026/2027 Dual Degree Ph.D. Scholarships Call.

The session is designed for doctoral scholarship candidates and potential supervisors who wish to know more about the application process and requirements. It will be an excellent opportunity to learn how to prepare a strong application for a CMU Portugal scholarship, which enables students to spend 3 years in Portugal and 2 years at Carnegie Mellon University.

The current call, which has opened on October 1st, offers opportunities in 11 dual-degree doctoral programs: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy, Human-Computer Interaction, Language Technologies, Machine Learning, Neural Computation, Robotics, Societal Computing, and Software Engineering.

More information about the Call is available here.

Registration Form
Participation in the Info Session is free, but registration is required. Registered participants will receive the Zoom login details by email one day before the event.


Agenda:

Session Moderator – Sílvia Castro I CMU Portugal Executive Director

5′ – João Magalhães | CMU Portugal National Co-Director
Welcome to the Session

20′ – João Fumega, Megan Berty | CMU Portugal Coordination Office
Overview of the CMU Portugal Dual Degree Ph.D. Programs and scholarship funding

10′ – Latifah Almaghrabi (Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universidade de Aveiro/CMU) | Ph.D. Student
CMU Portugal Ph.D. candidate – Experience and advice

25′ – Q&A

CMU Portugal Info Session: “How to apply to the 2025 Call for Mobility Initiatives”

📅 June 4th | 3:00 PM Lisbon | 10:00 AM Pittsburgh
🌐 CMU Portugal Online Info Session: “How to Apply to the 2025 Call for Mobility Initiatives”

In this Info Session,  we will walk you through the application process to apply to our CMU Portugal Mobility initiatives “Visiting Students” and “Visiting faculty & Researchers” (both calls will be open between May 30th and June 17th, 2025). 

The CMU Portugal Visiting Faculty & Researchers initiative will allow up to 5 grantees to spend between 2 weeks and 2 months working in research, education, and innovation in ICT with peers at Carnegie Mellon University to experience its culture and best practices.

The CMU Portugal Visiting Students initiative will allow up to 7 master’s students or masters who have been awarded a degree in the last five years in Portugal and in ICT-related areas to spend between 2 weeks and 2 months working in research in ICT at CMU.

Credentials to join us on Zoom will be sent by email the day before the event.

To register please fill in this online form. 

Info Session Agenda

2′–Mariana Carmo I CMU Portugal Coordination Office &Session Moderator
Welcome to the Session

10′– João Fumega | CMU Portugal Coordination Office
Overview of CMU Portugal Mobility Programs 

5′ – Megan Berty | CMU Portugal Coordination Office at CMU
Visiting period at CMU

5’ –Gabriel Santos (Universidade de Coimbra) | CMU Portugal Visiting student 2024
Experience as a Visiting student at CMU

5’ –Anna Bernard (Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics) | CMU Portugal Visiting Faculty & Researcher 2024
Experience as a Visiting researcher at CMU

15′ – Q&A

CMU Portugal at Técnico’s International Day 2025 (I-Day)

The CMU Portugal Program will be part of this year’s edition of Instituto Superior Técnico’s International Day (I-Day).  The event will take place on May 30th, from 10:30 am to 3 pm., in the institution’s main building atrium, in Alameda campus (Lisbon).

The CMU Portugal Program will join other academic organizations and international higher education institutions from several countries in an event aimed at Técnico’s community to broaden horizons and strengthen ties among students, staff, and professors in a global network.

Meet us there to know more about our OPEN CALLS!

More information about the event here.

Info Session: “How to apply to CMU Portugal 2025 Affiliated Programs”

On May 22nd (3 pm Lisbon / 10 am Pittsburgh), we will walk you through the application process for FCT-CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs Scholarships, in an online info session.

The fifth edition of the CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs Initiative 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 application period will be open from May 12 until June 15th, 2025.

To register please fill in this online form.  Credentials to join us on Zoom will be sent by email the day before the event.

Info Session Agenda

Session Moderator – Mariana Carmo I CMU Portugal Communications and Events Officer

5′ – João Magalhães | CMU Portugal National Co-Director
Welcome to the Session

10′ – João Fumega | CMU Portugal Coordination Office
Overview of the CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Programs and scholarship funding

5′ – Megan Berty | CMU Portugal Coordination Office at CMU
Research period at CMU

20′ – Diogo Silva,  NOVA FCT | CMU Portugal Ph.D. candidate
Experience and advice

20′ – Q&A

 

LxMLS 2025 – 15th Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School

The Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS) is an annual event hosted at Instituto Superior Técnico. The 2025 edition will be a six-day in-person event, taking place from July 19th to 25th.

The Summer School is addressed to researchers and graduate students in the fields of NLP and Computational Linguistics, computer scientists (interested in statistics and machine learning), industry practitioners who desire a more in-depth understanding of these subjects.

The school covers a range of machine learning topics, from theory to practice, that are important in solving natural language processing problems arising in different application areas. No deep previous knowledge of ML or NLP is required, but the attendants are assumed to have some basic background on mathematics and programming.

The event is organized jointly by Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Instituto de Telecomunicações, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa (INESC-ID), the Lisbon ELLIS Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS), Unbabel, Zendesk, and IBM Research.

This year’s edition of LxMLS features several CMU Portugal faculty members and alumni.

André Martins a CMU Portugal alumnus, is currently VP of AI Research at Unbabel, a CMU Portugal Industrial Affiliated company; Zita Marinho, a Research Scientist at DeepMind, is a Dual Degree Ph.D. alumna in Computer Science and Robotics (Técnico | CMU Robotics Institute). Isabel Trancoso, a CMU Portugal faculty member and researcher (Técnico | INESC-ID), will serve on the Steering Committee. She will be joined by Fernando Pereira, a member of the CMU Portugal External Review Committee and Google (USA) Vice President and Engineering Fellow.

The event will also count with Carnegie Mellon University faculty Bhiksha Raj, from the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, who was already part of  LxMLS two previous editions, and participating for the first time, Beidi Chen, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU.

The deadline for registrations is April 28th and the application form is available here.

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Important Dates:

  • Application Deadline: April 28th
  • Notification of Admission: May 13th
  • Early registration: June 27th
  • Late registration: July 12th
  • Summer School: July 19th-25th

More information is available on the LxMLS 2025 website.

Launch of the “PROMETHEUS-1” satellite

The launch of the 5 cm PocketQube satellite “PROMETHEUS-1” will take place on January 14th, set to start at 6 p.m., at the School of Engineering of Universidade do Minho (EEUM), in Guimarães, Portugal.

The satellite was built at Universidade do Minho in collaboration with Instituto Superior Técnico  and Carnegie Mellon University, under the CMU Portugal’s Exploratory Research Project “PROMETHEUS – PocketQube Framework Designed for Research and Educational Access to Space“. The Principal Investigators of this project are Alexandre Ferreira da Silva, Universidade do Minho, and Zachary Manchester, from Carnegie Mellon University. 

João Magalhães, the National co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, will attend the event and represent the program.

The agenda of the event is:

6:00 pm: Opening Session

6:20 pm: PROMETHEUS-1 – Presentation

6:45 pm: SpaceX – Falcon 9, Launch (preview)*

7:00 pm: Portuguese Space Agency

7:15 pm: Universidade do Minho and Portuguese Air Force Protocol Signing

7:30 pm: Future Portuguese Satellites, N3O

7:45 pm: PROMETHEUS-1,  deployment*
Closing
*due to the nature of the event, the times indicated (*) may be subject to some deviation.

More information here.  The event will be streamed via YouTube.