CMU Portugal Program at the European Researchers’ Night
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On September 27, 2013, 300 European Cities celebrated the European Researchers’ Night. This year, the main topic of the event was “The Future in 2020,” a theme that is closely linked to the mission of the CMU Portugal Program, which combines world-class graduate education, cutting-edge research, and innovation in Information and Communication Technologies. Robots for intelligent surveillance networks, speech-to-speech machine translation, and a tutoring system that enables students to learn another language, were some of the results from CMU Portugal projects shown at the event that took place in Pavilhão do Conhecimento, in Lisbon. |
Manuela Veloso, from CMU, and Francisco Melo, from IST/INESC ID, presented a demo from their MAIS-S project (http://goo.gl/b6JpAo), which seeks to contribute to improving surveillance systems, as a specific real-world application of multi-agent planning. Manuela Veloso also introduced CoBot/ISR, a services robot that is able to perform multiple tasks inside buildings.
Isabel Trancoso and Luísa Coheur, from IST/INESC ID, were also at the event to present two projects carried in the CMU Portugal Program in the Language Technologies area: PT-STAR (http://goo.gl/IRnzkG), and REAP.PT (http://goo.gl/t5bV7B). They gave a sprintalk on new ideas for the future of this research area, and with their research group they provided opportunities for the participants in this event to test the different instruments developed within these two projects: a new system that automatically translates speech-to-speech for Portuguese, trying to keep the characteristics of the original voice; educational games aimed at teaching a second language to foreign students (related with the Ph.D thesis of Wang Ling, a dual degree doctoral student – link to https://cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=3880); and multiple other interfaces.
The agenda for the European Researchers’ Night began at 6pm, and it included workshops, interactive games, debates and exhibitions. The main goal of the European Researchers’ Night, which is celebrated annually since 2005, is to bring researchers closer to the public, allowing for direct exchanges, meetings and interactive activities. It serves as an opportunity for the most curious to get to know what is being developed in several scientific areas in different institutions.
October 2013
