Manuela Veloso (CMU Portugal Faculty), Nuno Sebastião (CEO at Feedzai), Vasco Pedro (CEO at Unbabel), and Paulo Dimas (CEO at Center for Responsible AI) were among the 11 academic and industry decision-makers participating guests in a meeting with Portuguese Prime-Minister, Luís Montenegro, to talk about innovation and Artificial Intelligence.
They were joined by the Minister in the Cabinet of the Prime Minister and for Territorial Cohesion of Portugal, Manuel Castro Almeida; the Minister of Youth and Modernization, Margarida Balseiro Lopes, and the Secretary of State for Science, Ana Paiva, to prepare a national digital strategy, to be announced later this year, including in this roadmap the National Artificial Intelligence Agenda until 2030.
The Government aims to invest in three core areas : expanding the scientific ecosystem, enhancing talent development , and building an accessible digital infrastructure to support academia , industry and public institutions.
Among the invited attendees was Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University faculty and researcher of the CMU Portugal, who has led multiple collaborative projects between the American university and the Program. Veloso, who was ranked among the 10 most Influential Women in Engineering in 2021, has also been an advisor to CMU Portugal Ph.D. students in the areas of Computer Science, Robotics and Machine Learning.
Feedzai and Unbabel are both industry affiliated partners of CMU Portugal. Feedzai was the first start-up launched under the Program, becoming the 4th Portuguese company to obtain the title of Unicorn after raising a $200 million growth investment. The company led the program’s large-scale collaborative Project CAMELOT and its founders have been involved in the educational initiatives, first as Visiting Students and then as Faculty of the program. Paulo Marques, CTO of Feedzai, is one of the CMU Portugal’s Scientific Directors.
Unbabel was founded by Vasco Pedro, a graduate from CMU’s Language Technology Institute (LTI) and CMU Portugal project post-doctoral fellow. The company led the CMU Portugal’s large-scale collaborative project MAIA, in which Paulo Dimas, Vice-President of Innovation at Unbabel, was the project’s principal investigator. Dimas is CEO of the Center for Responsible AI, a consortium project that received a 78 million euros funding from the Programa de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR).
Read the article here (in Portuguese) .
