News: Event News

Workshop on Alumni Management and Fundraising: Higher Education Sector
Date: June 17 th , 2011
Place: Novabase, Parque das Nações, Lisboa
Co-Organized by Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and Novabase [presence by invitation only]

The aim of the workshop will be threefold:
. to present helpful set of cases and best practices based on Carnegie Mellon University experience on alumni management and fundraising, covering topics such as alumni’s directories and networking, mentorship programs, volunteering activities, fundraising practices, testimolials and customized marketing campaigns;
. to explore potential service design approaches to the more representative processes within alumni management and fundraising;
. and to present innovative and comprehensive IT solutions that can support these processes, adding an effective and automatized interaction with social networks as Linkedin and Facebook.

Speakers from CMU:
. Lori Spears – Associate Director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program. Prior to her current position, she was a major gift officer in individual giving with Carnegie Mellon’s University Advancement. Spears holds a Ph.D. in higher Education Management from the University of Pensylvania in Philadelphia, PA, a Master of Arts in Institutional Media Technology and a Bachelor of Arts in English from North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC.
. Christine Tebes – Is Associate Director of gift planning at Carnegie Mellon University. In this role she is responsible for identifying, visiting, qualifying, soliciting, closing and stewarding planned and major gifts from a prospect pool of aproximately 300 alumni in several USgeographic areas. She graduated “whith highest distinction” in May 2011 with a Master of Public Management degree from the H. John Heinz III College at Carnegie Mellon University.
. Michael Ransom – Is Associate Director for Corporate and Institutional Partnerships for Carnegie Mellon University and the Senior Advancement Officer for the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael manages a portfolio of corporations for both the College of Engineering and the university as a whole. In addition, he holds a strategic position within teh Engineering College on the Dean’s staff to direct corporate activities and carry a small portfolio of individual donors who have strong industry connections with the college.

Send your questions to news@cmuportugal.org .

UTEN Portugal Training Week #2 – Valuation of Intangibles: Valuation of Licensing Opportunities and Early Stage Companies
Date: May 10-11, 2011
Place: UATEC, Aveiro
Co-organized by the UTEN Portugal Network and the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

Summary
The overwhelming value of most early-stage companies resides in their intellectual assets. However, most senior managers (of TTOs or early-stage companies) usually have no idea how to value their inventions or companies. The inability to value intangible assets puts universities and start-ups at a severe disadvantage when trying to monetize their discoveries through capital raises, licensing, joint-ventures or sales. This Training Week will include a two-day training workshop at University of Aveiro, on the 10th and 11th of May. The training will focus on the valuation of intangible assets since the inability to do so puts universities and start-ups at a severe disadvantage when trying to monetize their discoveries through capital raises, licensing, joint-ventures or sales. The two training days will be composed by three sessions, each with a hands-on training based on case studies to consolidate the learning process, namely:
session I – Valuation of Technology in University Licensing,
session II – Valuation of Early-Stage Companies, and
session III – Should the University own Equity in Start-ups?

Speakers:

Tara Branstad Associate Director Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC), CMU

Barbara Carryer Adjunct Professor, Entrepreneurship Embedded Entrepreneur, Project Olympus Innovation Advisor, Institute for Social Innovation Carnegie Mellon University

Raymond F. Vennare President, CEO and Co-Founder of ThermalTherapeutic Systems

Agenda

Tuesday, 10 May
Session I – Valuation of Technology in University Licensing
• Evaluation of technologies – what’s important in determining value?
• License structures
• Traditional (and non-traditional) Valuation models
• Use of “Fixed Price” deals for licenses and start-ups

Coffee Break

Session I – Practice (hands-on training)
Trainers’ case studies
• Technology valuation for licensing
• “Fixed price” license agreements

Lunch

Session I – Practice (cont.)

Session II – Valuation of Early-Stage Companies
• Key components in determining company valuation
• Valuation models
• Funders, Funding models and funding stages
• Role of non-equity funding and Convertible debt

Wednesday, 11 May
Session II – Practice (hands-on training)
Trainers’ case studies
• Valuation for investment
• Convertible debt investment

Coffee Break

Session III – Should the University own Equity in Start-ups?
• Models of university equity ownership, pros and cons, licensing and investment
• Premiums, discounts, anti-dilution and warrants

Lunch

Session III (cont)
• Shareholder agreements and other things you’ll be asked to sign
• Exits – what’s it worth?

Session III – Practice (hands-on training)
Trainers’ case studies
• Company valuation at acquisition
• TTO value of shares at exit

More information available at www.utenportugal.org .

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: Structured Prediction, MAP Inference, and Dual Decomposition with Augmented Lagrangians
Speaker: André Martins (IST, CMU, Priberam)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Date: Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
Time: 13:00 [Lunch will be provided]

Abstract:
In the first half of the talk, I will give an overview on structured prediction, a general framework which encompasses many learning formalisms, such as those underlying hidden Markov models, conditional random fields, and structured support vector machines. Applications abound in natural language processing, computer vision, and computational biology. In the second half, I will focus on approximate MAP inference in discrete graphical models. I will describe a new consensus-based algorithm that solves an LP relaxation of the original problem, while exploiting the structure of the graphical model. It combines an augmented Lagrangian method (the “alternating directions method of multipliers,” or ADMM) with the dual decomposition method, hence we call it DD-ADMM. Our algorithm is provably convergent, parallelizable, and suitable for fine decompositions of the graph. We show how it can efficiently handle problems with (possibly global) structural constraints via simple sort operations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art. This is joint work with Mario Figueiredo, Pedro Aguiar, Noah Smith and Eric Xing.

Bio: André Martins is a dual degree Ph.D. student in Language Technologies, at Instituto Superior Técnico and Carnegie Mellon University, in the scope of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program. His main research interests are machine learning, natural language processing, and optimization.

Visual Processing and Understanding of Human Faces and Bodies, by Takeo Kanade
Date: April 20, 2011, 15:30
Place: Anfiteatro EA2-Torre Norte, Instituto Superior Tecnico

A human face and body convey important information to understand a person: identity, emotion, action, and intention of the person. Technologies to process video of human faces and bodies have many applications, ranging from biometrics to medical diagnosis and from surveillance to cognitive human-robot interaction. This talk will give highlights of the progress that the CMU Vision Group has made, in particular, to robust face (and object) alignment, real-time face tracking, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition for emotion analysis, 2D and 3D body tracking, and facial video cloning for understanding human dyadic communication. Also, I will cover the new vision scenario which we named First-Person Vision. Instead of viewing a person from the environment (third-person’s view), First-Person Vision analyzes the scene in which the person acts and her behaviors in it from the images taken from her view point by a wearable vision device.

Bio
Takeo Kanade is the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the director of Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. He was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001. He also founded the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo and served as the founding director from 2001 to 2010.

Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, multi-media, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics and sensors. He has written more than 350 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 20 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.

Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, a Founding Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the former and founding editor of International Journal of Computer Vision. Awards he received include the Franklin Institute Bower Prize, ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, Okawa Award, C&C Award, Tateishi Grand Prize, Joseph Engelberger Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and IEEE PAMI-TC Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Accomplishment Award.

Date: April 19, 2011 [4:30 – 5:30 p.m.]
Place: Singleton Room, 4th Floor, Roberts Engineering Hall, Carnegie Mellon University

On April 19, 2011, Rodrigo Costa, CEO of ZON Multimedia, will present his keynote at the Engineering Leadership Speaker Series – Innovate, Compete, Motivate. ZON is the largest Triple Play operator (TV, Broadband Internet and Fixed Telephony) in Portugal. This company has placed Portugal at the forefront of innovation with the launch of its 360 Mbps and 1 Gpbs ZON Fibra bundles, speeds which are unparalleled in Europe. A lively panel discussion with Rodrigo Costa, Pedro Ferreira, Assistant Research Professor of Economics of IT at the Heinz College and the Engineering and Public Policy Department at Carnegie Mellon University and an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal, and Rahul Telang, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, will be moderated by Pradeep Khosla, Dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Please also join us for a reception in the Roberts Hall Atrium immediately following the keynote and panel discussion.

For more information or to RSVP, please go to http://www.cit.cmu.edu/alumni/leadership_series/04_19_2011/index.html. Space is limited, so please RSVP by April 13 th .

The purpose of the Engineering Leadership Speaker Series is to raise the visibility of key issues through bringing industry leaders and government officials to campus for a distinguished talk and conversation with students, faculty, alumni, and community leaders.

Third Annual Welcome Reception for Graduates of the Novabase Academy
Date: Monday, April 11, 2011
Location: Singleton Room, Roberts Hall, Carnegie Mellon University
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm

Please RSVP on-line: http://doodle.com/fhrdiq3duk9if6g9 by, Friday, April 8, 2011.

Novabase Guest Include:
Luís Lobo, Executive Director
Sandra Botelho Simões, Graduate
Ana Amorim Duarte, Graduate
Telmo da Rocha Pereira, Graduate
Andreas Dieter Mendes Seufert, Graduate
Ricardo António Nunes Gorrão, Graduate
Paulo Alexandre Mareco de Sousa, Graduate

The purpose of their visit is to expose and explore Carnegie Mellon’s cutting edge research and technologies and to engage in the ICTI Master’s programs.

ICTI@CMU Student Research Presentation and Lunch
Date: March 31, 2011 (12:00p – 1:30p)
Place: Newell Simon 3305, Carnegie Mellon University
Agenda
12:30p – 12:50p Weakly Supervised Learning for Tagging Image and Video Collections

Presentation by: Ricardo Cabral (Ph.D. ECE) Ricardo Cabral is a second year Ph.D. student in the Electrical & Computer Engineering at CMU and IST. His research focuses on Computer Vision and Machine Learning, specifically in object localization and classification, as well as meta-data estimation for images and video. He is also a member of the Human Sensing Lab (http://humansensing.cs.cmu.edu/) and of the PrintART project (http://printart.isr.ist.utl.pt), which aims to provide Artists and Art Historians with Computer Vision tools. Ricardo received his Master’s degree in ECE at IST-Lisbon and a research grant from the Portuguese Science Foundation, in 2009, for work in correspondence methods for structure from motion.

Abstract: Visual recognition has numerous applications such as autonomous driving, augmented reality, manufacturing and security. Its difficulty essentially arises from large class variabilities of pose and appearances. Most successful approaches have relied on supervised methods, in which the location of the object or action is labeled. However, as we ultimately aim to scale up to a human’s recognition of tens of thousands of categories, this approach becomes problematic: relying solely on manual labeling is both time consuming and prone to subjectiveness. We lessen this burden by exploiting weak labels, denoting the presence of a class in data but not its particular location. While this topic has recently been explored in a mutually exclusive single class setting, several unaddressed issues surface when multiple classes co-occur. We propose a new model for simultaneously localizing different classes in the same media, casting it as an integer optimization problem. Our model’s advantage is twofold: first, we subsume into a single formulation previous single and multi-class localization methods, and get cues to problems not studied before; second, we prove optimal relaxations to the linear domain for some problems, while uncovering the inherent difficulties of others.

12:50p – 1:00p Q & A ICTI Student Research Presentation Luncheon – 31 March 2011 2 of 2

1:00p – 1:20p Architecture-Based Runtime Fault Diagnosis

Presentation by: Paulo Casanova (Ph.D. SE) Paulo Casanova is a first year Ph.D. student in Software Engineering at CMU and Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal. He has worked in the software IT industry since 2001 as an IT consultant first in Link Consulting and, since 2006, in Novabase. He’s main area of expertise is information system software architecture and design. Lately he has specialized in database and document processing and archival systems. His previous work includes software for telecommunication network organization, public administration workflow software, international organization middleware (in the tourism industry) and banking document archival. His current interest of focus are: heavily loaded, parallel, distributed information processing systems; high availability and reliable software-intensive systems; architectural structures for software information systems.

Abstract: An important step in achieving robustness to runtime faults is the ability to detect and repair problems when they arise in a running system. Effective fault detection and repair could be greatly enhanced by run-time fault diagnosis and localization. This work describes an approach to runtime fault diagnosis that combines architectural models with spectrum-based reasoning for fault localization (SFL). SFL is a lightweight technique that takes a form of trace abstraction and produces a list (ordered by probability) of likely fault candidates. This technique can be combined with architectural models to support runtime diagnosis that can (a) scale to the size and complexity of modern software systems; (b) accommodate the use of black-box components and proprietary infrastructure for which one has neither a specification nor source code; (c) handle inherent uncertainty about the probable cause of a problem even in the face of transient faults.

1:20p – 1:30p Q & A

1:30p Conclude

ICT Portugal Workshop: Research Talks by Faculty Exchange Members
Date: March 18, 2011 [11:00-16:30 GMT]
Place: Auditório B.032, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Live Stream: http://videos.fe.up.pt/

PROGRAM

The next ICT Portugal Workshop will be held in Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, on March 18, 2011 [11:00 to 16:30 GMT]. The goal of this thematic workshop is to present and discuss the outcomes of the research developed by the Faculty Exchange Members and the impact of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal experience.

This event will gather researchers from different areas, namely Computer Science, Software, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Knowledge Management and Innovation, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Interactive Technologies, and others.

Agenda

11:00 – 11:30 Morning Coffee

11:30 – 11:40 Welcome Address

11:40 – 12:00 Opening Remarks and General Information
João Barros, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

12:00 – 12:10 Optimizing Vehicles Communication
Susana Sargento, Universidade de Aveiro (UA/IT)

12:12 – 12:22 The Pittsburgh Chronicles
Mário Zenha-Rela, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC)

12:24 – 12:34 Applied Machine Learning: Enterprise Networks
Ricardo Morla, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP/INESC Porto)

12:36 – 12:46 Three Things CMU Reminded me Of
Alysson Bessani, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL)

12:48 – 12:58 Crowdsourcing and Organizational Memory: My Research Experience at CMU
Isabel Ramos, Universidade do Minho (UMinho)

13:00 – 14:00 Working Lunch

14:10 – 14:20 Robots Among us
Rodrigo Ventura, Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST/UTL)*

14:22 – 14:32 Software Engineering: from Teaching to Research: My Experience in Faculty Exchange
José Maria Fernandes, Universidade de Aveiro (UA/IEETA)

14:34 – 14:44 The role of Interactive Technologies for Rehabilitation
Sergi Bermúdez, Universidade da Madeira (UMa)*

14:46 – 14:56 Faculty Exchange: The Experience from a more “Hardware” Area Perspective
Vítor Grade Tavares, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP/INESC Porto)

14:58 – 15:08 Information Flow Security
Carla Ferreira, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCTUNL)*

15:10 – 15:20 Multiresolution Redundant Transforms for Critical Diagnosis
Pedro Quelhas, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP)*

15:22 – 15:32 Matelas: A Formal Framework for Social Networking
Nestor Catano, Universidade da Madeira (UMa)

15:34 – 15:44 Faculty Exchange: Lessons & Achievements for Software Quality Improvement
Rui Maranhão, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP)

15:46 – 15:56 Wireless Sensing and Context
Ana Aguiar, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP)*

15:58 – 16:18 Challenges and Outcomes (roundtable)
Moderator: João Barros, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

16:20 – 16:30 Closing Remarks

*by video conference from CMU

In order to take care of all the logistics for the event, we ask everyone to register until March 16, 2011, using the following link:
http://tinyurl.com/69ays9l.

ICT PORTUGAL WORKSHOP: New Projects in Networks, Software, Energy and Security [Launching Session of the 2nd Call for Research Projects]
Date: March 1, 2011 (10:45 to 16:45) PROGRAM
Place: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau (http://www.cccm.mctes.pt/), Lisbon, Portugal

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal program is organizing a public session to present the research projects selected for competitive funding by FCT under the second Call for proposals. The goal of this event is to get together all the research teams and the Carnegie Mellon Portugal community, creating the opportunity to promote the ongoing work, to find out more about other projects, and to set the stage for new collaborations.

The research projects funded under this second call converge on the strategic areas of the Program, including Software Engineering for Large Scale Systems, Cyber-physical Systems for Environmental Intelligence, New Generation Networks and Resilient Operations in a Network Environment, and other areas related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

Agenda

10:45 – 11:15 Morning Coffee

11:15 – 11:30 Welcome Address by the President of FCT
João Sentieiro

11:30 – 12:00 Opening Remarks and General Information
João Barros

12:00 – 12:10 ATTEST: AlgoriThms and Tools for reasoning about dEpendable SysTems
Inês Lynce (Project PI: João Marques Silva)

12:15 – 12:25 ADAAS: Assuring Dependability in Architecture-based Adaptive Systems
Antónia Lopes (Project PI: Rogério Lemos)

12:30 – 12:40 Affidavit – Automating the Proof of Quality Attributes for Large Scale Software Architectures
Mário Zenha-Rela, Project PI

12:45 – 12:55 NeTS: Next Generation Network Operations and Management
Ricardo Morla, Project PI

13:00 – 14:30 Working Lunch

14:30 – 14:40 TRONE – Trustworthy and Resilient Operations in a Network Environment
António Casimiro (Project PI: Paulo Veríssimo)

14:45 – 14:55 SELF-PVP: Self-organizing power management for photo-voltaic power plants
Vítor Grade Tavares, Project PI

15:00 – 15:10 MAIS-S: Multiagent Intelligent Surveillance System
Francisco Melo, Project PI

15:15 – 15:25 Novel information processing methodologies for intelligent sensor networks
João Xavier, Project PI

15:30 – 15:40 Toward Dynamic Monitoring and Decision (DYMONDS)–Based Smart Distribution Systems
Luis Marcelino Ferreira, Project PI

15:45 – 15:55 SENODs: Cyber-Physical Systems Technologies for Energy-Optimized Data Centers
Eduardo Tovar, Project PI

16:00 – 16:10 The Role of ‘User Innovators’ in the Development of Telecom Products and Services
Pedro Oliveira, Project PI

16:15 – 16:25 Innovation and the Global Economy: An investigation of critical challenges for Intellectual Property, Strategy and Policy in IT and beyond
Fernando Branco, Project PI

16:30 – 16:45 Closing Remarks

For more information about all the research projects carried out in the scope of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program go to https://cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=130 .