Nine Faculty from Portugal are at Carnegie Mellon during the Spring
Nine faculty from six different Portuguese universities are spending the 2011 Spring Semester at Carnegie Mellon University, under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Faculty Exchange program. Since its inception, this program has had over 26 members who have sought to accomplish their goals in research and teaching.
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Ana Aguiar and Pedro Quelhas, from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), have different goals. Aguiar will focus her research activities on communication aspects for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET), and on the preparation of future joint work. She will work closely with Peter Steenkiste, and will also collaborate in the undergraduate course “Introduction to Telecommunication Networks.” |
| Quelhas, on the other hand, will teach the class 42-540: Introductions to Biomedical Signal Processing in collaboration with Jelena Kovačević. In terms of research, Quelhas expects to explore redundant image transforms for texture characterization through the design of new feature extraction methods and subsequent texture classification using machine learning approaches. |  |
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The Universidade da Madeira (UMa) sent three faculty members to Carnegie Mellon this semester: Barbara Pizzileo, Monchu Chen, and Sergi Bermúdez i Badia. Pizzileo will take part as a member of several research activities in conjunction between Carnegie Mellon and UMa to explore the application of data mining and modeling tools for the development of an intelligent framework in the civil engineering field.
Monchu Chen wants to gain experience as part of training at Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), at Carnegie Mellon University, in order to replicate some of the courses at UMa. Sergi Bermúdez i Badia will reinforce his collaboration with Daniel Siewiorek’s team to develop serious games and to use entertainment technologies in the context of motor rehabilitation. Badia expects that the exchange will also be used to visit other faculty members of diverse background, especially at the psychology department and robotics institute, to foster future multidisciplinary collaborations and possible project proposals for future calls. |
| Bruno Cabral, from the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC), intends to undergo training and obtain the core competences necessary to integrate the faculty body of the dual degree Professional Master in Software Engineering. As co-PI of the AEminium project, that seeks to create a platform which builds in concurrency by default, Cabral thinks that this stay at Carnegie Mellon will also provide the opportunity to follow and contribute to the research work conducted at Carnegie Mellon in respect to this project. |
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Rodrigo Ventura, from Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST/UTL), is collaborating on cognition and learning for humanoids robots areas, building upon his previous and ongoing research at ISR in these topics. During the semester he will integrate the faculty team of the graduate course on Artificial Intelligence (15780), coordinated by Manuela Veloso, professor in the computer science department, at Carnegie Mellon. |
| Carla Ferreira, from Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCTUNL), and Susana Sargento, from Universidade de Aveiro, will stay at Carnegie Mellon for short periods. Ferreira will stay at Carnegie Mellon for two periods: from February 15 to May 30, and from July 1 to July 31. During these periods, Ferreira will attend the “Programming Language Semantics” course with Steve Brooks, from Carnegie Mellon, and will work as a teacher assistant on some of the classes. This course is related to one offered by FCTUNL, in the context of the dual degree Ph.D. program in Computer Science. |
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During the exchange period, Sargento will work in both departments of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. She will be engaged in the “Computer Networks” course that is to be taught by Peter Steenkiste, from Carnegie Mellon. She looks also to evolve her collaboration with Steenkiste and Ozan Tonguz, both in the framework of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program and in the co-advisory of the Ph.D. students André Cardote and André Reis. |
January 2011
