News: Event News

Brave New World: Did the Future Arrive Too Early?
Date: June 12 th 2015
Location: Casa da Música, Porto
url: http://ffms.pt/admiravelmundonovo

Some of the greatest international technology experts will be at Casa da Música to debate the new trends in the field and what the current increasing technological advancement will bring us. “Brave New World: Did the Future Arrive Too Early?”, organized by the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, is a day-long event, with discussion four panels under the themes “Digital Me”, “Intelligent Life”, “Economy 2.0” and “Digital Republic”.

The opening remarks will be delivered by Manuela Veloso , professor at Carnegie Mellon University and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. She is deeply involved in the CMU Portugal program, as a leader of an ERI project and advisor of several PhD students. Also among the long list of speakers are Evgeni Morozov , author and Slate columnist; Bruce Sterling , science-fiction author and Wired columnist; Ellen Jorgensen , Genspace director; Tyler Cohen , economist, professor and director of the Mercatus Center.

Agenda

8:00 Welcome Session

9:30 Opening Remarks

Manuela Veloso, Professor of Carnegie Mellon University

10:00 Coffee Break

10:30 Digital Me

David Brin, Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Evgeni Morozo, Columnist for Slate

11:45 Intelligent Life

Ellen Jorgensen, Director for Genspace

13:00 Lunch

14:30 Economy 2.0

Tyler Cohen, Director for Mercatus Center

15:45 Digital Republic

Andrew Chadwick, Professor of University of London

Francisca Bria, Senior Project Lead of Nesta

Mário Campolargo, Director for “Net Futures” in DG CONNECT

17:00 Coffee Break

17:30 Jake Bowers Interviews Bruce Sterling

Jake Bowers, Professor of University of Illinois

Bruce Sterling, Columnist for Wired

18:15 Meeting Summary

Ana Lehmann, Professor of Católica-Lisbon School of Bussiness & Economics

18:30 Closing Remarks

Alexandre Soares dos Santos, Founder of Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos

19:00 Special Feature from “Governo Sombra” TV show

Carlos Vaz Marques, João Miguel Tavares, Ricardo Araújo Pereira and Pedro Mexia

CMU Portugal PhD Student at the Priberam Labs Seminars
Date: April 28, 2015 (13h00 – 14h00)
Location: Anfiteatro do Complexo Interdisciplinar, IST – Alameda, Lisbon
url: http://labs.priberam.com/Academia-Partnerships/Seminars.aspx

Wang Ling is a student of the dual Ph.D. program in Language Technologies between Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico, where he also received his master degree in 2009. His Ph.D. work focuses on Machine Translation in noisy domains, such as Twitter, and Deep Learning for NLP.

Abstract:

We present a neural network model that computes embeddings of words using recurrent network based on long short-term memories to read in characters. As an alternative to word lookup tables that require a set of parameters for every word type in the vocabulary, our models only require a look up table for characters and a fixed number of parameters for the compositional model, independent of the vocabulary size. As a consequence, our model uses fewer parameters and is also sensitive to lexical content, such as morphology, making it more adequate for tasks where morphological information is required. In part-of-speech tagging, we can perform competitively with state-of-the-art systems, without explicitly engineering lexical features, and using a relatively small number of parameters.

Building Global Innovators: 4th Ed. Finalists celebration at Grand Finale

Date: February 27, 2014

Time: 17:00

Place: Auditorium, ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon

Registration: http://buildingglobalinnovators.com/events/GrandFinale.html

27th February is a must Save the Date event in the Entrepreneurship calendar. Building Global Innovators is inviting a great and unique team of partners, judges, mentors, startups and peers to celebrate the Grand Finale & Caixa Capital Awards of this 4th edition.
After the exciting Track Finals ceremony & e-Teams II bootcamp, Finalists restarted the hard work incorporating jurors’ and mentors’ feedback to refine their product offers, all of which will pitch live on the 27th Feb. “Make sure that your audience knows from the first or second slide what is the tremendous opportunity that you are offering them.” Jonathan Green, Common Angels, Boston and BGI keynote speaker.
The 4 candidates will pitch live and Caixa Capital is announcing the Grand Finalist. This startup will double the Track Finals award of 100k€, access to “unique smart” in-kind support and investment opportunities. The team can achieve 400k€ if milestones are accomplished. A major opportunity!

The first edition of the Building Global Innovators Venture Competition happened in 2010, and in the last 3 editions received a total of 287 applications and enrolled over 1100 participants from 27 countries, spread across the 4 categories under competition: Health Technologies, Smart Cities, Information Technology and the Web, Consumer Products & Services.

The BGI aims to:
– Identify and reward projects at an seed/early stage with a clear global value proposition
– Enable a 10x to 20x pre-money valuation for competition finalist projects in initial 2 to 3 years of venture phase
– Connect the competition finalists – the global Innovators – to global Investors

Date: July 2 to 9, 2015
Venue: Porto, Portugal
url: http://www.fe.up.pt/visum/

visum 2015 is the third VISion Understanding and Machine intelligence (visum) Summer School that targets to gather at Universidade do Porto, Portugal, Ph.D. candidates, Post-Doctoral scholars and researchers from academia and industry with research interests in computer vision and machine intelligence.

visum will comprise three main tracks: fundamental, industrial and application topics, each one with extensive practical `hands-on’ sessions. A poster session will be organized especially dedicated, but not exclusive, to Ph.D. candidates. With this, researchers can discuss their current research works, possibly leading to significant breakthroughs in the development of their theses. In the industrial track, national and international renowned institutions will present their case studies and knowingness to the attendees. visum will have a track dedicated to applications with the aim to bridge the gap between the fundamental and industrial topics, each year with a different subject.

Important Dates
Application Deadline – March 1, 2015 (Extended Deadline: March 9, 2015)
Decision – March 8, 2015
Early Registration – April 10, 2015
Late Registration – May 8, 2015
Summer School – July 2-9, 2015
visum will comprise three main tracks
1. Fundamental subjects
2. Examples of computer vision applications
3. Industrial session
Each one with extensive practical “hands-on” sessions

Topics

Machine Learning* – Tae-Kyun, Kim Imperial College London, UK
Local Features Extraction and Description – Jiri Matas, Czech Technical University, CZ
Document Image Analysis – Alicia Fornes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ES
Scene Understanding – Martial Hebert, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Automatic Facial Expression Recognition – Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham, UK
RGB-D Cameras – Thomas Whelan, Imperial College London, UK

Applications

Point Clouds 3D* – João P. Costeira IST-UL, PT

* Tentative titles

Industry Track

ASAP54 – Daniel Heesch
Enermeter – Manuel João Ferreira
Philips – Jacek Kustra

The CMU Portugal Program has the pleasure to be one of the partners of this event.

12th Edition of the Business and Technology Week (SET) at Instituto Superior Técnico
Date: March 2-6, 2015
Venue: Campus Taguspark, Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
url: http://set.ist.utl.pt/
Registration: Free entrance

The aim of the event is to promote the exchange of experiences and ideas related to the Information and Technology area, as well as its influence in the entrepreneurial tissue. The themes will be explored in a pragmatic way.

These event organized by Instituto Superior Técnico’s students has been getting more and more participants through the years. SET has lectures and workshops which main objective is to strength relations between the business and the academic world. The target of the event is not only the academic community but also anyone who is interested in technology, engineering and management.

SpeakersThe guest speakers are from different companies and the organization of the event promises the sessions will be of great interest. This year, several speakers have a relation with the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program or are even part of the CMU Portugal team.
	Rogério CarapuçaRogério Carapuça is the chairman of Novabase, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the CMU Portugal Program since 2012. http://set.ist.utl.pt/oradores/rogerio-carapuca.html
	Susana Sargento Susana Sargento is a faculty member at Universidade de Aveiro, and a researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, deeply involved in the CMU Portugal Program. She was a co-pi of the DRIVE-IN project, which led her to create with João Barros, former director of the CMU Portugal Program, the Veniam’Works startup. http://set.ist.utl.pt/oradores/susana-sargento.html
	Paulo RosadoPaulo Rosado is the founder and CEO of OutSystems, a company that provides an application platform (PaaS) that allows creating, deploying and managing enterprise mobile and web applications. OutSystems was the industrial partner of the INTERFACES project, carried out in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program. http://set.ist.utl.pt/oradores/paulo-rosado.html
	Vasco Calais PedroVasco is the co-founder and CEO of Unbabel, Inc, a startup company that combines machine translation and post-edition with the objective of eliminating linguistic barriers between companies and its clients. This company is involved in two Early Bird Projects, carried out in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, namely: MT4M – Machine Translation For Microblogs and TRATAHI – Bringing Down Language Barriers on the Internet through Human-in-the-Loop Joint Transcription and Translation. http://set.ist.utl.pt/oradores/vasco-pedro.html

 

Date : October 19-22, 2015

Location: Porto Alegre, Brazil

url: http://www.altec2015.org/conteudo/view?ID_CONTEUDO=229

“Innovation Beyond Technology” is the theme of the 16 th biannual congress, ALTEC 2015, organized by The Latin-Iberian American Association of Technology Management (ALTEC), together with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

Innovation is often considered in relation to the recent technological advances and their practical impact. Recent scientific discoveries rapidly generate new products and processes, proving that our focus is on their economical impact first. However, innovation, in its full extent, is also a concept that evolves our organizations, shapes our social interactions and impacts environmental and public policy. The XVI Latin Ibero-American Conference on Technology Management seeks to analyze the several facets of this recent phenomenon, based on different presentations and discussions.

ALTEC 2015 is expected to attract between 500 delegates worldwide, in addition to local participation making it the largest gathering of its kind. In addition to the technical sessions, the ALTEC 2015 local committee is organizing a program that includes several keynote speakers, panel discussions of technology related themes with prominent technology managers, economists, and policy makers.

ALTEC will comprise three main tracks:

– Context & Policies
– Systems & Sectors
– Specificity of Innovation Process

Upcoming deadlines:

Submission of Abstract (by or before):	March 9th, 2015
Notification of Acceptance (by or before):	April 17th, 2015
Submission of Full Paper:	June 15th, 2015
Notification of Paper Acceptance/Revision:	August 10th, 2015
Final Version:	September 11th, 2015
Doctoral Forum submission deadline:	June 15th, 2015

European Conference on Networks and Communications – EuCNC’2015

Date: June 29 / July 2, 2015
Venue: Paris, France
url: http://www.eucnc.eu./

EuCNC’2015 is the 24th edition of a successful series of a technical and scientific conference open to the world research community, sponsored by the European Commission, in the area of Telecommunications, focusing on communication networks and systems, and reaching services and applications. It aims at showcasing the results of the consecutive programmes on R&D and projects co-financed by European programmes, as well as presenting the latest developments in this area. The conference will have regular oral and poster sessions, and well as panels, tutorials, workshops and keynotes.
Call for Papers
Papers for regular sessions (to be uploaded to IEEE Xplore) are invited in the following Tracks (a full list of topics is available here):

PHY – Physical Layer and Fundamentals
WIN – Wireless Networks
OPN – Optical Networks
NET – Networking
APS – Applications and Services
TER – Testbeds & Experimental Research

Submission guidelines are available here.

The PDF of the call for papers can be found here.

Papers should follow a template, available in Word and LaTeX formats.

Paper submission is open to all researchers independently of being associated to European Framework projects.

Best paper awards will be given.
Key Dates
2015 Feb. 06 – Submission of papers
2015 Apr. 10 – Notification of acceptance
2015 Apr. 24 – Papers final versions

CMU Portugal Program at the 2 nd Edition of Portugal Mexe
Date: December 4, 2014
Venue: Microsoft Auditorium, Lisbon, Portugal
url: http://www.portugalmexe.ife.pt/homepage.aspx?menuid=1

João Claro, national director of the CMU Portugal Program, will participate on the panel about “The Potential of the Digital Economy for the Creation of Startups in Portugal,” moderated by João Abrantes, from the SME Digital Program. This panel has also the participation of Alexandre Santos, coordinator of the Blue Star Program from Portugal Telecom; Joana Mendonça, coordinator of the office for entrepreneurship of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; and Pedro Vilarinho, director of the Act Program by COTEC.

3 rd talk of the ECE Back to Basics Colloquium with the CMU Portugal Program Alum Sérgio Pequito

Date: Friday, November 21
Venue: I-025, FEUP
Time: 14:00

Title: “A Framework for Structural Input/Output and Control Configuration Selection of Large – Scale Systems”
Speaker: Sérgio Pequito

https://sites.google.com/site/eceback2basics/Home/program—-12th-edition

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Title:
A Framework for Structural Input/Output and Control Configuration Selection of Large – Scale Systems

Abstract:

The structure control system design consists mainly of two steps: input/output (I/O) selection and control configuration (CC) selection. The first one is devoted to the problem of computing how many actuators/sensors are needed and where should be placed in the plant to obtain some desired property. Control configuration is related to the decentralized control problem and is dedicated to the task of selecting which outputs (sensors) should be available for feedback and to which inputs (actuators) in order to achieve a predefined goal. The choice of inputs and outputs affects the performance, complexity and costs of the control system. Due to the combinatorial nature of the selection problem, an efficient and systematic method is required to

complement the designer intuition, experience and physical insight.

Motivated by the above, this presentation addresses the structure control system design taking explicitly into consideration the possible application to large – scale systems. We provide an efficient framework to solve the following major minimization problems: i) selection of the minimum number of manipulated/measured variables to achieve structural; controllability/observability of the system, and ii) selection of the minimum number of measured and manipulated variables, and feedback interconnections between them such that the system has no structural fixed modes. Contrary to what would be expected, we showed that it is possible to obtain the global solution of the aforementioned minimization problems in polynomial complexity in the number of the state variables of the system. To this effect, we propose a methodology that is efficient (polynomial complexity) and unified in the sense that it solves simultaneously the I/O and the CC selection problems. This is done by exploiting the implications of the I/O selection in the solution to the CC problem.

Short Biography

Sérgio Pequito is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico, through the CMU Portugal Program. Furthermore, he received his BSc and MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Instituto Superior Técnico. Pequito’s research consists in understanding the global qualitative behavior of large scale systems from their structural or parametric descriptions and provide a rigorous framework for the design, analysis, optimization and control of large scale (real-world) systems. Pequito was awarded with the best student paper finalist in the Conference on Decision and Control 2009, the ECE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Carnegie Mellon Graduate Teaching Award (university-wide) honorable mention, both in 2012.