News: Event News

XIV PAPS Forum: “PAPS: Bringing Portugal to New Heights”
Date: May 10-12, 2013
Place: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA

Url: http://www.papsonline.org/forum2013/
Registration: http://www.papsonline.org/forum2013/registration-forum/
The Portuguese-American Post-graduate Society (PAPS) will held an annual forum that aims at bringing together its members and top representatives of the worlds of Science and Academia, Entrepreneurship and Corporations, Culture and Arts. This year, the conference will discuss how PAPS and its members can promote the unique value of Portugal and its institutions, companies, academic programs and any Portuguese project that is or has the potential to be successful in North America.

The success of the PAPS meeting is inevitably linked to the quality of the speakers and networking opportunities between PAPS members and invited top professionals from Portugal and North America. In this year, the meeting will have noted Portuguese personalities such as the Portuguese ambassador in the U.S. Nuno Brito, Rui Albuquerque (Associate Professor of Finance and Dean’s Research Fellow, Boston University), Manuel Adelino (Assistant Professor of Finance, Duke University’s School of Business, George Perry (Professor and Dean at University of Texas at San Antonio, and PAPS Texas Chapter Leader), among others.

The forum is a space for sharing experiences and capitalizing on the value of its participants and guests.

PAPS award

PAPS Award will be given to a Member for an outstanding achievement and leadership in a project developed within the United States or Canada having great impact in Science, Entrepreneurship, Business and Economics.

Date: June 25-27, 2013
Place: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP)

url: http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~StudECE2013/index.html
Registration: http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~StudECE2013/registration.html

The 2nd PhD. Students Conference in Electrical and Computer Engineering (StudECE), is a forum for the presentation of technological advances, research results, work-in-progress research and state-of-the-art in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied Electrical and Computer Engineering. The scientific program will include invited speakers and fully refereed contributions that will be published in the conference proceedings. StudECE’s target are mainly PhD. students involved in research activities, but graduate students and researchers are welcome.

Invited Speaker:
– Erkki Oja, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Aalto University, School of Science and Technology, Finland

Steering Committee

Aurélio Campilho, INEB, FEUP, Portugal
Maria do Rosário Pinho, ISR, FEUP, Portugal
Pedro Guedes de Oliveira, INESC TEC, FEUP, Portugal

Organizing Committee
André Vidal, INESC TEC, FEUP, Portugal
José Melo, INESC TEC, FEUP, Portugal
Luís Oliveira, INESC TEC, FEUP, Portugal

Sérgio Pequito Gives a Talk on “A Framework for Structural Input/Output and Control Configuration Selection of Large-Scale Systems”

PRIBERAM Machine Learning Lunch Seminar Speaker: Sérgio Pequito (CMU/IST) Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação) Date: Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 Time: 13:00 Lunch will be provided

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. An example illustrate the main features of the proposed procedure.

Bio:
Sérgio Pequito is a dual degree doctoral student at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), within the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. He received his BSc and MSc in Applied Mathematics from the IST. Pequito’s research consists in understand the global qualitative behavior of large scale networked 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 of Decision and Control 2009, the ECE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at CMU and Carnegie Mellon Graduate Teaching Award (university-wide) [Honorable Mention], both in 2012.

PRIBERAM Machine Learning Lunch Seminar
Speaker: Zita Marinho (CMU/IST)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Date: Tuesday, March 26th, 2013
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
In this seminar I will talk about the work of Hsu and Kakade (2009) on spectral methods for leaning a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). I will introduce and exemplify this method and describe how we can estimate the best set of state transitions or how we can predict a sequence of future observations. Hidden Markov Models are one of the most fundamental tools for modeling a discrete time series, and in general learning from an HMM is computationally hard, the classical approach to this problem resorts to search heuristics, like expectation maximization that are prone to local optima. I will talk about a new approach that learns an HMM based on the spectral decomposition of its parameters.This method depends implicitly on the number of distinct observations, making the algorithm particularly applicable to settings with a large number of observations, such as those in natural language processing.

Bio:
Zita Marinho is a dual degree Ph.D. candidate in the CMU Portugal Program jointly advised by André Martins at Priberam/IST, Geoffrey Gordon at ML/CMU and Siddhartha Srinivasa at Robotics Institute/CMU. Her interests focus on learning methods from data observation and her PhD thesis is in spectral methods for learning in Natural Language and Robotics. She holds a Masters in science (CS) in Physics Engineering from IST, Portugal.

More information available at: http://labs.priberam.com/Academia-Partnerships/Seminars.aspx#.UUxAbanfbFL

Sven Stork Ph.D. Thesis Defense in Software Engineering

Date: Tuesday, March 19, 14:00 p.m. (10:00 a.m. at CMU) Place: Sala dos Capelos of the Universidade de Coimbra or 5324 Wean Hall (Via Video Conference from Portugal) Sven Stork is a dual degree doctoral student in Software Engineering, at Universidade de Coimbra and Carnegie Mellon University Advisors: Paulo Marques (Universidade de Coimbra) and Jonathan Aldrich (Carnegie Mellon University)

Abstract: AEminium: Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality

The aim of this doctoral thesis was to study the implications of having a concurrent-by- default programming language. This includes language design, runtime system, performance and software engineering considerations. We conduct our study through the design of the concurrent-by-default ÆMINIUM programming language. ÆMINIUM leverages the permission flow of object and group permissions through the program to validate the program’s correctness and to automatically infer a possible parallelization strategy via a dataflow graph. ÆMINIUM supports regular parallelism (such as fork-join parallelism) as well as irregular parallelism (e.g., as dataflow).

In this thesis we present a formal system, called μÆMINIUM , modeling the core concepts of ÆMINIUM. μÆMINIUM static type system is based on “Featherweight Java” with ÆMINIUM specific extensions. Besides checking for correctness ÆMINIUM’s type system it also uses the permission flow to compute a potential parallel execution strategy for the program.

We use various case studies to evaluate ÆMINIUM’s applicability and to demonstrate that ÆMINIUM parallelized code has some performance improvements compared to its sequential counterpart. We chose to use case studies of common domains or problems that are known to benefit from parallelization, to show that ÆMINIUM is powerful enough to encode them. We demonstrate through a webserver application, which evaluates ÆMINIUM’s impact on latency-bound applications, that ÆMINIUM can achieve a 70% performance improvement over the sequential counter part. In another case study we chose to implement a dictionary function to evaluate ÆMINIUM’s capabilities to express essential data structures. Our evaluation demonstrates that ÆMINIUM can be use to express parallelism in such data-structures and that the performance benefits scale with the amount of annotation effort which is put in to the implementation. We chose an integral computation example to evaluate pure functional programming and computational intensive use cases. Our experiments show that ÆMINIUM is capable of extracting parallelism from functional code and achieving performance improvements up to the limits of Plaid inherent performance bounds.

Thesis Committee
Carnegie Mellon
Jonathan Aldrich (Co-Chair)
William Scherlis
Todd Mowry

University of Coimbra
Paulo Marques (Co-Chair)
Ernesto Costa
Marco Vieira
More information available at: http://calendar.cs.cmu.edu/scsEvents/demo/8430.html

“Speech Translation: Modelling and Conversion of speaking style across languages” by Gopala Krishna Anumanchipalli
Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar
Speaker: (LTI, CMU and L2F, INESC-ID)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Date: Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
In this talk I will describe our recent efforts within the PT-STAR project for speech translation across languages. I will begin with brief descriptions about the component systems for speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis and talk in greater detail about modeling and conversion of prosodic aspects of speech across languages, a major part of speaking style. Illustrating with example demos for the case of English – Portuguese translation, I will comment on the bottlenecks in the current speech translation technology and list some challenges for the future that may be of interest to ML/Speech/NLP research community.

Bio:
Gopala is a PhD candidate in the CMU|Portugal program jointly advised by Prof. Alan Black at LTI/CMU and Prof. Luis Oliveira at INESC-ID/IST. His interests are in all aspects of speech and language processing and his PhD thesis is in prosody modeling for speech synthesis and voice conversion within and across languages. He holds a Bachelors in Engineering (CS/AI) and Masters in science (CS) both from IIIT-Hyderabad, India.

For detailed information about the Priberam Machine Learning Seminars, please visit: http://labs.priberam.com/Academia-Partnerships/Seminars.aspx#.UO384puv_3w

Fernando De la Torre Gives a Seminar on Component Analysis for Human Sensing
Date: February 14, 2013
Place: ISR’s meeting room, Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract:
Enabling computers to understand human behavior has the potential to revolutionize many areas that benefit society such as clinical diagnosis, human computer interaction, and social robotics. A critical element in the design of any behavioral sensing system is to find a good representation of the data for encoding, segmenting, classifying and predicting subtle human behavior. In this talk I will propose several extensions of Component Analysis (CA) techniques (e.g., kernel principal component analysis, support vector machines, spectral clustering) that are able to learn spatio-temporal representations or components useful in many human sensing tasks. In particular, I will show how several extensions of CA methods outperform state-of-the-art algorithms in problems such as facial feature detection and tracking, temporal clustering and labeling of human behavior, early detection of activities, and robust classification. The talk will be adaptive, and I will discuss the topics of major interest to the audience.

Biography:
Fernando De la Torre received his B.Sc. degree in Telecommunications (1994), M.Sc. (1996), and Ph. D. (2002) degrees in Electronic Engineering from La Salle School of Engineering in Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain. In 2003 he joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University , and since 2010 he has been a Research Associate Professor. Dr. De la Torre’s research interests include computer vision and machine learning, in particular face analysis, optimization and component analysis methods, and its applications to human sensing. He is Associated Editor at IEEE PAMI and he won the best student paper award in IEEE CVPR-2012. Currently he leads the Component Analysis Laboratory (http://ca.cs.cmu.edu) and the Human Sensing Laboratory (http://humansensing.cs.cmu.edu).

Ryan Turner Gives a Talk on “Effects of Wifi Internet Usage on Academic Performance in a University Setting”

Speaker: Ryan Turner (Dual Degree Ph.D. Student in Engineering and Public Policy, at IST/UTL & CMU) Venue: IST Alameda, Room PA1 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação) Date: Tuesday, February 5 th , 2013 Time: 13:00 [Lunch will be provided]

Abstract:
The Internet is an essential tool but can be disruptive distraction. Using wifi usage and student grade data from the Faculdade de Engeneharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP) in Portugal, we find a consistent, positive correlation between Internet usage and student performance. This result is robust for several models and and for different metrics. Models controlling for usage specific to major and curricular year, and for separate day and night usage, reveal that certain categories of students tend to use wifi more productively; in particular, Civil Engineering students, daytime users, and students closer to graduation. Further, we develop an instrumental variable approach that may lead to an assertion of causality. Our results are contrary to previous results in higher education, and also for secondary education in Portugal, thus raising further questions about how different implementation strategies and deployment contexts can yield different academic outcomes in the presence of technology such as wifi.

Bio:
Ryan Turner is a researcher in the Engineering and Public Policy Department as part of the Carnegie Mellon-Portugal program. He is interested in academic productivity in secondary and higher education, and in the effects of technology on performance in terms of focus and distraction. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Computer Engineering from the University of Virginia (B.S. 2010).

For detailed information about the Priberam Machine Learning Seminars, please visit: http://labs.priberam.com/Academia-Partnerships/Seminars.aspx#.UO384puv_3w

Dual Degree Professional Master Students Present their Capstone Projects
Date: December 17th, 2012
Place: Universidade da Madeira, Portugal
For more information please visit: http://www.m-iti.org/

Agenda

14:15 – 14:30	Official Opening
– Nuno Jardim Nunes, Presidente da Direcção do Madeira-ITI and Presidente do Conselho de Administração do Madeira Tecnopolo – José Castanheira da Costa, Reitor da Universidade da Madeira * – Jaime Freitas, Secretário da Educação e Recursos Humanos * [Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira, Floor -1]
14:30 – 14:55	“Five-Minute Madness”, MET and MHCI students
[Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira]
15:00 – 15:30	Project madeirAlive – MET
Team madeiraAlive is working with Madeira Living Labs‘s client wakes.uma.pt to create a tool to help tourists and locals plan their activities around the weather. Because of its mountainous terrain, Madeira is characterized by microclimates – small pockets of weather patterns. While it is raining on one part of the island, elsewhere may be entirely dry. Our aim is to build a mobile app that will rescue tourists from weather uncertainty, to empower them to make the most of their vacations, and to make “rainy day plans” a thing of the past! Website: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/madeiralive/ Students involved: Alexander Goldman (EUA), Duarte Teixeira (Portugal), Mara Dionísio (Portugal), Carlos Lucas (Portugal) [Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira]
15:30 – 16:00	Project Wayla – MET
Project WAYLA aims of innovate entertainment through the use of the Eye Tracker technology. The eye trackers has previously been used mostly for psychology and HCI studies, but we intend to create entertainment that uniquely make use of its capability to make something fun to play with the eyes; something that cannot be replicated with other devices, such as mouse and keyboard. Website: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/wayla/ Students involved: Wein Chang (Canadá), Kushal Ponnam (Índia), Po-an Shen (Taiwan), Helena Barbosa (Portugal) [Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira]
16:30 – 17:00	Project Uniecho – MHCI
Uniecho is working with Novabase and University of Madeira/M-ITI in order to help Portuguese Universities build an alumni culture. We conducted a massive amount of research to understand multiple stakeholders. This research has helped us unearth our insights and have them grounded. These insights will act as a guide to help us create design ideas to solve the needs of the users and guide our designs throughout the remainder of the capstone. Students involved: Inês Gonçalves (Portugal), Boram Han (Coreia do Sul), Harper LaFave (EUA), Miguel Pinto (Portugal) [Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira]
17:00 – 17:30	Project Promethean – MHCI
Assigned researchers in Team Promethean will uncover priorities, attitudes, and improvement opportunities at EDP dispatch centers. The objective is to assess tools and processes of energy distribution in EDP control rooms. Website: http://promethean.m-iti.org/ Students involved: Marwa Muhammad (Arábia Saudita), Aditya Gujaran (Índia), Ben Nimmons (EUA), Nelson Alves (Portugal) [Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira]
17:30 – 18:00	Project Euphorbia – MHCI
The Natural Park of Madeira has partnered with Team Euphorbia to research and discover new ways to reach those groups whose actions currently threaten species in the reserves, in the hopes of influencing them to alter their behavior in favor of environmental best practices. Currently, there are a number of threats to the flora and fauna in the natural reserves. The task for Team Euphorbia was to investigate these threats in order to develop ways of creating awareness in hopes of changing people’s behavior and combatting these issues. Students involved: Júlia Silva (Portugal), Ana Alves (Portugal), Kara Rennert (EUA), Salim Batlouni (Líbia) [Room Ursa Maior @ Madeira]
18:00 – 18:30	Madeira D’Honra, Poster & Demo session Room Ursa Menor @ Madeira

* To be confirmed