Between July 8th and 10th, the CMU Portugal Program participated at the Ciência 2019 Summit to promote its latest initiatives to the general public and present some of the research projects developed under the Program. Ciência 2019 is a major Science Conference organized by the Portuguese Government through the Ministry of Science Technology and Higher Education (MCTES) and FCT, which is held annually in Lisbon to highlight the main achievements in science and technology in Portugal.
In order to discuss some future challenges in the broad area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), CMU Portugal hosted the session “CMU Portugal – Exploring New Research Frontiers in ICT” in which stakeholders from different areas of ICT, including representatives from Academia and Industry, shared their vision for the future.
The session started with a brief presentation from Isabel Trancoso – CMU Portugal Faculty member, Full Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico and senior researcher at INESC ID Lisbon. Since the founding of CMU Portugal in 2006, Trancoso has been one of the main supporters of the Language Technologies area, supervising students and creating a network of Alumni and researchers that actively contribute to the Portuguese R&D system.
- Rodrigo Rodrigues, CMU Portugal National Co-Director, launched the debate by briefly introducing the Program’s currently open initiatives, Call for Exploratory projects (link) and Demonstration of Interest for Visiting Master students (link). The discussion panel also included the participation of:
- Joana Mendonça, CMU Portugal Scientific Director and researcher at Instituto Superior Técnico/IN+ center in the field of Public Policy, highlighted the importance of the relationships established through the CMU Portugal international partnership, fostering collaborations not only between Portugal and CMU, but also among PhD students, researchers and other stakeholders from the Industry.
- João Graça, CEO at Unbabel, one of CMU Portugal Affiliated partners, shared with the audience his experience as founder of a successful startup and his vision for the future. Unbabel provides translation services that combine neural Machine Translation with professional human editing and has participated in previous CMU Portugal projects. According to João Graça, the best outcomes of these collaborations are the relationships that are kept even when projects are over.
- Hugo Gamboa, Founder and CEO from PLUX – Wireless Biosignals, presented the company’s work and goals for the future. Established in 2007, PLUX offers innovative products for researchers and physical therapists and has developed an advanced biosignal-monitoring platform. Gamboa explained how the company was able to established itself by producing low cost Biosensors and how the projects in which PLUX has had a partner under the Program helped them to carry the company further into developing new lines of research in wearable body sensors. The company was one of the CMU Portugal project INSIDE key partners.
- João Paulo Cunha, is a CMU Portugal Scientific Director and researcher at INESC TEC (Universidade do Porto). He was the principal investigator of the CMU Portugal VR2Market project that recently concluded. J.P. Cunha has been involved in several areas of the CMU Portugal program since its foundation, leading research projects, supervising PhD students, participating in the CMU Portugal business acceleration program for entrepreneurial teams in the area of ICT (inRES ) and also by visiting CMU under the Visiting Faculty Mobility Program.
The session was a great platform to share ideas and launch new objectives for the future of the Program, but also to understand the importance of having a network of stakeholders both from Academia and Industry, interested in supporting the Program’s initiatives.
During the event, the CMU Portugal Program held a stand to promote its initiatives to the general public and show some demonstrations of its ERIs and Exploratory projects:
Day 1: INSIDE project with robot ASTRO.
Astro was developed within the framework of the CMU Portugal financed project INSIDE. During the first day, x, y, x (nomes) from Francisco Melo research team at INESC ID/IST assisted the conference’s participants in interacting with Astro’s activities. The INSIDE project has developed an autonomous mobile robot to engage children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during therapy sessions.
More at: http://www.project-inside.pt/ ; https://cmuportugal.org/inside/
Day 2: Feedbot and its robotic arm
The robotic arm developed under the CMU Portugal Exploratory project, Feedbot, enables people with motor disabilities to eat independently. Professor Manuel Marques, the project PI at ISR-Lisboa and researcher Alexandre Candeias were at the stand explaining and showing to the public how the arm works.
More at: http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~manuel/FeedBot/; https://cmuportugal.org/entrepreneurial-research-initiatives/
Day 3: BioVisualSpeech develops games that support children during speech therapy sessions
Interactive games are a great way to motivate children during speech therapy sessions. At the event, researcher Ivo Anjos and xxx (confirm name) , both member sof Sofia Cavaco team at FCT NOVA, showed to the public how these games work. Children have to repeat some specific sounds such as “sssssssss” and if reproduced correctly, the game is successful. Watch the video!
More at: https://cmuportugal.org/biovisualspeech/
Finally, during the whole event the SCREEN DR Project Exhibition was at the Access Hall to Pavilion 4 with synthesized images, portraits of the retinas of INESC TEC researchers and self-portraits of photographer Renato Roque.
The “Look and See. Sense and Live” and “Other Portraits and Self-portraits” exhibit was developed under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program project SCREEN DR, led by Professor Aurélio Campilho from INESC TEC’s C-BER Center in collaboration with photographer Renato Roque. The main objective of the project was to develop a computational platform for screening diabetic retinopathy.
More information is provided in the booklet of the exhibit.
Additionally, Alex Gaudio, a CMU Portugal Program supported PhD Student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at FEUP and Carnegie Mellon, submitted the Poster “OMedAL: Online Active Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis” that was exhibited at Ciência 2019 digital screens.
