News: Event News

Portugal Ventures – Call for Entrepreneurship
Date: September 3, 2015
Location: Portugal
url: http://www.portugalventures.pt/en/content/call-entrepreneurship-7

Portugal Ventures has launched a new initiative to promote investment for market-oriented scientific and technological projects in the Seed Capital phase, the Ignition Programme.

The Ignition Programme’s main goals are to reinforce the Portuguese entrepreneurship ecosystem by improving the link between entrepreneurs, R&D centres, incubators, industry experts and Venture Capital; and help highlight the value of scientific and technological knowledge and use of its potential to change the structure of the Portuguese economy and to increase its competitiveness.

By participating in the Programme, the selected projects will have access to the following:

• Contact with the Ignition Partners Network – preparation of application to be investment ready, coaching and incubation;
• Assignment of a significant majority of the start-up share capital to its founders;
• Expert mentoring of the projects funded by Portugal Ventures, by both national and international experts;
• The opportunity to be accelerated or incubated in international hubs of innovation;
• Periodic Calls/Cycles of investment (see the calendar).

Submission Calendar:

Until 14th September 2015 – Pre-Screening of the projects submitted to the Twelfth Call For Entrepreneurship

17th or 28th or 29th or 30th September 2015 – Pitches to the Assessment Panel

12th October to 14th October 2015 – Assessment by and Pitches to the Board of Directors of Portugal Ventures

Until 14th January 2016 – Conclusion and Investment

Find more information on the Ignition Programme here.

The Ignition Programme is an initiative included in the +e+i Programme.

The Venture Capital funds managed by Portugal Ventures are backed by the European Union through FINOVA, COMPETE and POR LISBOA.

EMNLP 2015 – Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Date: September 17 – 21, 2015
Location: Culturgest, Lisbon
url: http://www.emnlp2015.org/
Online registration is open until September 11, 2015
Students may apply for attendance grants until August 26 th 2015 here.

The 20 th edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015) is organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL – SIGDAT), a special interest group on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. It is one of the main forums in which the scientists in the language technologies area disseminate their cutting-edge research work.

The local organization team includes not only staff from Instituto Superior Técnico, but also representatives from its spin-off community (Priberam and Unbabel), and its research institutes (INESC-ID and IT). In fact, one of the two local Chairs is André Martins, who was the first dual degree student of the Portugal Carnegie Mellon program in Language Technologies.

This event is part of a series of conferences on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, established as one of the main forums in which the scientists in the language technologies area disseminate their cutting-edge research work.

The program schedule includes invited talks by some of the world’s best known researchers in the area: Yoshua Bengio, who will talk about neural language models, and the recent impressive results on machine translation and on mapping an image to a sentence, and Justin Grimmer, who will discuss how elected officials and constituents communicate, and show how representation style affects American politics.

The first two days of the conference will be devoted to 7 parallel workshops and 8 tutorials. The list of tutorials also highlights the growing impact of this type of data driven approaches on topics such as personality analytics, semantic similarity, information extraction, knowledge acquisition from the web, social media text analysis, learning semantics from text, multiword expressions, and affect and emotion.

ICT 2015 – Innovate, Connect, Transform
Date: October 20 – 22, 2015
Location: Lisbon, Portugal.
url: http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/ICT2015

The European Commission, together with the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, will host the ICT 2015 – Innovate, Connect, Transform event.

The ICT 2015 event will comprise a number of parallel activities:

• A policy conference presenting the new Commission’s policies and initiatives on Research & Innovation in ICT (Horizon 2020 Programme);
• An interactive exhibition showcasing the best results and impact of most recent EU ICT Research & Innovation;
• Many networking opportunities to enhance quality partnerships, helping participants find partners, connect Research and Innovation and trigger collaboration;
• Funding opportunities: ICT 2015 will also be the place to gather information on the 2016 Work Programme of Horizon 2020.

Registrations will open by May 2015.

Innovation Evenings by ANI
Date: July 2 and July 9, 2015
Location: Porto and Lisbon, respectivelly
url: http://aninov.pt/fins-de-tarde-da-inovacao/

The Portuguese Agência Nacional de Inovação – ANI (National Agency for Innovation) will organize two late afternoon networking events for the innovation agents in Portugal, gathering all in an environment of sharing and informal discussion. This innitiative comes in the conclusion of the QREN program and the beginning of the new Portugal 2020 main topic will be the technological innovation in collaboration and its internationalization, as a driver of national competitiveness.

The events will take place in July 2 nd in Porto, at the Hotel Fénix Ipanema and in July 9 th in Lisbon, at Teatro Thalia. To register, please visit: http://aninov.pt/fins-de-tarde-da-inovacao/registo-fins-de-tarde-inovacao/

UTEN Portugal
2015 Global Startup: Call for Applications is now Open!
Deadline: July 5, 2015
url: http://utenportugal.org/global-startup-program/

The 2015 Global Startup Program, an initiative carried out in the scope of the UTEN Portugal, has as a call open until July 5, 2015. Since 2013, its purpose is to assist the success of Portuguese entrepreneurial endeavors in different phases of development:

1. Early stage startup ventures: typically based on a technology that is under development, no sales, and ambitions to move to the United States to obtain funding, development, and commercialization roadmaps.

2. More mature ventures , typically with sales in domestic markets, that desires to initiate the internationalization process in the United States and other international markets. In such cases, the IC² Institute team will work with company leaders to develop a commercialization plan and conduct business development activities with the goal of closing deals in the United States.

This program builds on the experience from the past edition of US Connect in 2011 and 2013 that has produced excellent results for Portuguese startups such as Bioalvo, Feedzai, Technophage, Innovapotek, Tecla Colorida, Tuizzi, Omniflow, Auditmark, Abyssal, and Celfinet, both in terms of business development, incubation, and closure of deals.

Companies selected to “Go Global” will receive executive coaching, mentoring and direct business development, sales and marketing assistance from a dedicated team of seasoned veterans who also leverage the Institute’s network of experts committed to assist Portuguese entrepreneurs and innovators in their commercial expansion overseas.

For more information on the application details, Terms of Reference and Model Pitch please visit the 2015 call page and the Global Startup Program flyer.

1 st Patient Innovation Awards
Date: July 13, 2015
Venue: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
url: http://us3.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7ed42017b5a721b88e1910afb&id=2d6c3fee79

The Patient Innovation platform has announced the winners of the 1st Innovation Awards competition. The platform’s Advisory Board, composed of six experts in the areas of technology and medicine, has chosen among 200 eligible candidacies, six winners in individual categories:

• In the category “ patients ”: Lisa Crites (USA) with the Shower Shirt, Louis Plante (Canada) with the Frequencer and Tal Golesworthy (UK) with the Exovasc;
• In the category “ caregivers ”: Debby Elnatan (Israel) with Upsee and Joaquina Teixeira (Portugal) with the helium balloons;
• In the category “ collaborators ”: Ivan Owen (USA) who has helped many patients get 3D-printed prosthetic hands;

Please register to attend the event: https://www.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/patient-innovation-awards-ceremony

Patient Innovation is an international online platform and social network, launched in 2014, where patients and caregivers can share their innovative and user-generated health solutions. It is an outcome of the “The Role of ‘User Innovators’ in the Development of Telecom Products and Services” project and it is currently developed by the “TEIPL:Technology, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy Lab” ERI, offered by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

Conference: IP Issues in ICT

Date: 18 June 2015 Venue: Room B032, at FEUP, Porto, Portugal Organized by: INESC TEC url: http://ipict2015.inesctec.pt Registration: http://ipict2015.inesctec.pt/registration

Intellectual Property (IP) is one of the foundations for building an innovative and competitive economy, and fundamental for any country investing in innovation, technology and research. Due to their nature, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) present specific challenges regarding intellectual property. The interplay between open and proprietary codes, as well as the diverse views on copyrights and software patents, requires both awareness and expertise in order to fully exploit the advantages of the IP rights system.

This is specifically designed for Academia, where renowned international IP experts will be discussing the importance of IP and patents in the area of ICT. This is one of the initiatives organised as part of INESC TEC’s 30th anniversary celebrations.

PROGRAM

9:00 am – Registration

9:30 am – Opening session
INESC TEC President

10:00 am – Computer implemented inventions – the current view of the European Patent Office
EPO patent examiner for Computer Implemented Inventions, Munich, Germany

11:00 am – Coffee break

11:30 am – IP strategy in IMEC: applied research in ICT and microelectronics
Kathleen De Belder, IP Business and Intelligence officer, IMEC, Leuven, Belgium

12:30 pm – Lunch break

02:00 pm – Open source software issues: licenses, patents and defensive publications
Malcolm Bain, Partner, id law partners, Barcelona, Spain

03:00 pm – Industry trends in open innovation communities
Mirko Boehm, Director for Linux System Definition, Open Innovation Network, Berlin, Germany

04:00 pm – Closing session

Fostering Science & Innovation Ecosystems: Portugal – USA Partnerships

Date: May 28 – 29, 2015 Venue: Palácio Foz, Lisbon Streaming: http://live.fccn.pt/fct/fsie/ Transportation will be provided (partnerships members): form Email: ipartnerships.conference@utenportugal.org Invitation: https://cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=5910

On May 28-29, 2015, the International Partnerships – CMU Portugal, MIT Portugal and UT Austin Portugal -, funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, will hold the 1st Joint Conference and Exhibition. The purpose of these events is to showcase the quality of the activities and outcomes of the partnerships to Portugal, the commitment and the high regard that the partnerships have in the US universities, and the strength and quality of the relationships that have been created.

Exhibition
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Highlighting the collaboration between Portuguese institutions and American universities.

8:30pm – 11:00pm Science Dinner and Poster Exhibition

Conference
Friday, May 29, 2015

8:30am – 9:00am Participants Registration

9:00am – 10:15am Opening Session

Chair: José M. Mendonça, Scientific Director, UTEN Portugal

CMU Portugal Program
João Claro, National Director
José M.F. Moura, Director at CMU

MIT Portugal Program
Paulo Ferrão, National Director
Bruce Tidor, Acting Director at MIT

UT Austin Portugal Program
Fernando Santana, National Director
Marco Bravo, Director at UT Austin

Fostering Science & Innovation Ecosystems: Portugal-USA Partnerships
Jimmy Hsia, Vice Provost for International Programs and Strategy, CMU
Bernd Widdig, Director of International Affairs, MIT
Juan Sanchez, Vice President for Research, UT Austin

António Cruz Serra, Rector of the Universidade de Lisboa, CRUP Representative
Maria Arménia Carrondo, President, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
Leonor Parreira, Secretary of State for Science

10:15am – 10:50am Keynote

Full STEAM Ahead for Growth
The Seminal Role of ICT and the Knowledge Triangle of Research, Higher Education and Innovation
Sir John O’Reilly, FREng HonFIET, Chairman of NICC (Standards) Ltd., former Director-General for Knowledge and Innovation, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

10:50am – 11:10am Coffee break with Poster Session

11:10am – 1:00pm

Panel A – Transforming Graduate Education in Portugal

Chair: António Rendas, Rector of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CRUP Representative in the Board of Directors, UT Austin Portugal Program

Keynote: Jimmy Hsia, Vice Provost for International Programs and Strategy, CMU

Highlight talks
André Martins, Research Scientist, Priberam Labs
António Neves Silva, Project Manager – Innovation & Markets, Veolia
Paulo Vicente, Assistant Professor, Universidade Nova Lisboa; Founder/CEO Bagabaga Studios

Roundtable
Elsa Henriques, Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico
Isabel Rocha, Professor, Universidade do Minho
Nuno Correia, Professor, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Nuno Nunes, President, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI)

1:00pm – 2:10pm Networking Lunch with Poster Session

2:10pm – 4:00pm

Panel B – Investing in World-class Research

Chair: Sebastião Feyo de Azevedo, Rector of the Universidade do Porto, CRUP Representative in the Board of Directors, CMU Portugal Program

Keynote: Bruce Tidor, Acting Director at MIT, MIT Portugal Program

Highlight talks
Brian Korgel, Emerging Technologies
Maria Pereira, Head of Adhesive Technologies, Gecko Biomedical
Susana Sargento, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, Veniam’Works

Roundtable
Adélia Sequeira, Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico
Afreen Siddiqi, Research Scientist, MIT
Paula Vilarinho, Professor, Universidade de Aveiro
Peter Steenkiste, Professor, CMU

4:00pm – 4:20pm Coffee break with Poster Session

4:20pm – 6:20pm

Panel C – Enhancing Innovation for Social and Economic Impact

Chair: José Carlos Caldeira, President, Agência Nacional de Inovação

Keynote: Gregory Pogue, IC2 Institute, UT Austin

Highlight talks
Aurora Teixeira, UTEN Portugal, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto
Gonçalo Amorim, Building Global Innovators
Pedro Oliveira, Project Leader and Principal Investigator, Patient Innovation
Pedro Pinto, Founder and CEO, Take the Wind

Roundtable
Diamantino Lopes, Co-founder and CEO, Metablue
Jorge Salles Gomes, CEO, Brisa Inovação
Paulo Marques, Co-founder and CTO, Feedzai
Priya Narasimhan, Professor, CMU

6:20pm – 7:00pm Closing Session

James H. Garrett, Dean, CMU’s College of Engineering
Bernd Widdig, Director of International Affairs, MIT
Robert Peterson, Associate Vice President for Research, UT Austin
Pedro Carneiro, Vice President, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Organizing Committee
João Claro, National Director, CMU Portugal Program
José M.F. Moura, Director at CMU, CMU Portugal Program
José M. Mendonça, Scientific Director, UTEN Portugal
Paulo Ferrão, National Director, MIT Portugal Program
Bruce Tidor, Acting Director at MIT, MIT Portugal Program
Fernando Santana, National Director, UT Austin Portugal Program
Marco Bravo, Director at UT Austin, UT Austin Portugal Program

Executive Directors of the International Partnerships
Luís Meneses Nazaré, UTEN Portugal
Miguel Carvalho, MIT Portugal Program
Pedro Madeira, UT Austin Portugal Program
Sara Brandão, CMU Portugal Program

Coordination of the Event
Alexandra Carvalho Vieira, Head of Communications and Events, CMU Portugal Program
Ana Lopes, Events Support, CMU Portugal Program
Silvia Castro, Communications Director, MIT Portugal Program

“Fostering Science & Innovation Ecosystems:
Portugal-USA Partnerships”
The agenda is online here!
Streaming: http://live.fccn.pt/fct/fsie/

Date: May 28-29, 2015
Venue: Palácio Foz, Lisboa, Portugal

Invitation

On May 28-29, 2015, the International Partnerships – CMU Portugal, MIT Portugal and UT Austin Portugal -, funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, will hold the 1st Joint Conference and Exhibition on “Fostering Science & Innovation Ecosystems: Portugal-USA Partnerships”.

The events will take place at Palácio Foz, in Lisbon. The purpose of these events is to showcase the activities and outcomes of the partnerships to Portugal, the commitment of the USA universities, and the strength of the relationships that have been created regarding Education, Research and Innovation. (a preliminary agenda and additional information will be provided in the coming weeks)

We would be very honored to count with your participation in helping to build this environment for discussion and collaborative growth. Yours Sincerely,

The Organizing Committee of the 1st Joint Conference of the International Partnerships

Dava Newman, MIT Portugal Program

Fernando Santana, UT Austin Portugal Program

João Claro, CMU Portugal Program

José M. F. Moura, CMU Portugal Program

José M. Mendonça, UTEN Portugal Program

Marco Bravo, UT Austin Portugal Program

Paulo Ferrão, MIT Portugal Program

R.S.V.P. thought the registration form available at: http://goo.gl/ns4MD9

Email: ipartnerships.conference@utenportugal.org / Invitation here