The 11th edition of Técnico’s PhD Open Days held on October 27 and 28 at the Técnico Innovation Center, featured over 100 posters showcasing research by doctoral students.
At the event, two CMU Portugal students had their posters exhibited: Diana Fernandes (Dual Ph.D. EPP) and José Senart (Affiliated Ph.D. in ECE).
The agenda of this 2-day event included a talk on the importance of Ph.D. in society; debates on “Life and Health” and “Clean Energies and Sustainability”; round tables on “fundamental vs applied sciences”, and on navigating the PhD journey; talks with alumni of the school, a pitch competition, and a live broadcast session on the history of doctorates.
At the event, André Martins, faculty at Técnico and a CMU Portugal alum, participated in the session titled “From a PhD to an ERC Grant”, sharing his journey from completing a CMU Portugal Ph.D. back in 2012 to leading major AI research projects, such as DeepSpin and EuroLLM, funded by the European Research Council.
In 2015, he joined Unbabel as Head of Research and became an invited professor at Técnico. In 2018, he launched the DeepSpin project, focused on deep learning for natural language processing and founded the research group SARDINE Lab, based at Instituto Superior Técnico and Instituto de Telecomunicações.
André Martins also highlighted the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS), an annual week-long event that counts on CMU Portugal support, created in 2011. The School covers machine learning topics to solve natural language processing (NLP) problems, and ELLIS, an European initiative to build a leading AI and machine learning scientific community.