Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) has announced the provisional results of the Exploratory Projects of the national programs at CMU, MIT and UT Austin. Eight new CMU Portugal exploratory projects were selected for funding.
The 2024 call for proposals received 40 submissions, 8 of which were recommended for funding under the scope of the CMU Portugal Program by FCT’s independent panel of evaluators.
The winning projects will be led by four Portuguese research Institutions: IST-ID with three projects; INESC-ID and Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) both with two; and INESC-TEC with one.
The projects will collaborate with 5 different departments at Carnegie Mellon University: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Language Technologies, and Robotics.
The projects are planned for 12 months, allowing the scientific community to identify and explore new ideas in a bottom-up way. Overall, CMU Portugal is supporting the Portuguese teams with €397.597,06.
The CMU Portugal Program regularly supports the launch of Exploratory Research Projects (ERPs), with the main objective of promoting Portugal’s international competitiveness and innovation capacity in Science and Technology (S&T) in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Since 2017, the Program has launched five Calls for Exploratory Projects for 35 funded projects.
In 2025, eight (8) new projects were recommended for funding by the FCT under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, including:
- Adaptive Query Optimization Architectures to Support Heterogeneous Data Intensive Applications
Principal Investigator in Portugal: José Orlando Roque Nascimento Pereira
Principal Investigator at CMU: Andy Pavlo
Partner Institutions: INESC-TEC; Computer Science Department (CMU)
- Fully-Homomorphic Encryption from Post-Quantum Code Based Assumptions
Principal Investigator in Portugal: João Miguel Lourenço Ribeiro
Principal Investigator at CMU: Aayush Jain
Partner Institutions: IT; Computer Science Department (CMU)
- Minimally-invasive deep-brain stimulation for treating treatment-resistant depression
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Patrícia Figueiredo
Principal Investigator at CMU:Pulkit Grover
Partner Institutions: IST-ID; Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (CMU)
- Body Motion Foundation Model for Human Activity Analysis
Principal Investigator in Portugal: José Santos-Victor
Principal Investigator at CMU:Artur Dubrawski
Partner Institutions: IST-ID; Robotics Institute (CMU)
- DIME-FS A Decentralized File System
Principal Investigator in Portugal: David Rogério Póvoa de Matos
Principal Investigator at CMU:Seth Goldstein
Partner Institutions: INESC-ID; Computer Science Department (CMU)
- Exploring Robotlike RObot behavioRs in users’ Mental Models
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Filipa Isabel Nogueira Correia
Principal Investigator at CMU: Nikolas Martelaro
Partner Institutions: IST-ID; Human-Computer Interaction Institute (CMU)
- Machine Unlearning in Speech Foundation Models: Learning to Forget
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Francisco Saraiva Sepúlveda Teixeira
Principal Investigator at CMU: Bhiksha Raj Ramakrishnan
Partner Institutions: INESC-ID; Language Technologies Institute (CMU)
- Neuromorphic quantum-inspired computing
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Emmanuel Zambrini Cruzeiro
Principal Investigator at CMU: Elias Towe
Partner Institutions: IT; Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (CMU)
More information on FCT website.
