News: Event News

The CMU Portugal program hosted a lunch on the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh on February 7, 2024. This event brought together CMU Portugal students currently studying in Pittsburgh.

Attending students included Dual Degree Ph.D., Affiliated Ph.D., and visiting students from across disciplines, including Software and Societal Systems (S3D), Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Human Computer Interaction (HCII) and Engineering and Public Policy (EPP). This gathering  gave everyone an opportunity to catch-up while enjoying a meal together, sharing their experiences at CMU in Pittsburgh so far. 

CMU Portugal currently has an open call for new PhD students for 2024-2025. If you are interested, please visit our website for more information.

The Kickoff Meeting of CMU Portugal new Exploratory Research Project (ERP) Signo took place at Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS on January 10th, 2024. Funded under the 2022 CMU Portugal Call for ERPs,  this year-long initiative, led by Fraunhofer with collaboration from Instituto de Filosofia (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto) and the Software and Societal Systems Department at Carnegie Mellon, aims to integrate principles of Human-Centered Design.

The project titled “Signo: Value systems in digital health technologies Investigation” proposes to bring together design, human-computer interaction, and philosophy researchers with patients and healthcare professionals in the context of ophthalmology, with a special focus on the glaucoma condition. 

The goal is to explore, experiment, prototype, and test technology and data visualizations that are built on a shared set of values and understand how they are communicated. The project will focus on the design of more useful and effective technology in healthcare by applying methods of co-creation and participatory exploration to generate a set of recommendations and experimental prototypes, exploring the issue of values. 

According to the project PI, Ricardo Melo, Senior Scientist at Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, “Signo will employ a participatory approach, where different researchers and participants will co-create technology and data representations built on a shared set of values, and understand together how these values are communicated. Researchers from design and HCI will contribute with their knowledge on the design of technology while philosophers will contribute to the discourse and analysis of technological artifacts in a person’s relationship with the world and with oneself. Lastly, healthcare professionals as well as patients will contribute with their professional vision and lived experience, respectively.”

This should translate into more appropriate health technology design, support clinical decisions, better-informed patients, and, ultimately, better health for all. 

“We hope to achieve this by supporting the design of more appropriate, considerate, and inclusive health technologies, ones where the values of those designing technologies are aligned with those using it, be it healthcare professionals or patients.”, Ricardo Melo.

CMU will collaborate throughout the project, addressing glaucoma patients specifically, organizing, conducting, and analyzing fieldwork and co-design activities with patients. Results will be shared and analyzed conjunctly throughout the project.

In terms of results, the expectation is to have by the end of 12 months “exploratory prototypes, including speculative visual representations, future scenarios, and, if applicable, speculative technology archaeology, that seek to convey sets of values identified in participatory design workshops with professionals and patients. The experiments will be designed to understand which value systems can be inferred by users by comparing existing technology with technology created for the scenarios. These prototypes, in turn, will inform the reflection of the entire project, its results and implications, and enable the identification of actionable principles on conveying value systems to apply to the design of technology and health data presentation”, shares Ricardo Melo. 

The CMU Portugal Program supported under its 2022 call, 6 Exploratory Research Projects (ERPs) designed to assist teams of researchers from Portuguese institutions, Carnegie Mellon University and industry partners, to bootstrap high-impact potential research activities of strategic relevance for the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.

More about CMU Portugal Exploratory Research projects. 

The 2023 CMU Portugal Doctoral Symposium took place on December 6th and 7th at Culturgest, Lisbon, and Scott Hall, CMU, bringing together over 80 Ph.D. students, faculty members and researchers. 

The Symposium, a cornerstone of the CMU Portugal Program, provided a platform for students to engage in a collaborative exchange of ideas, building upon the success of the Program’s previous Orientation days and the 2021 Doctoral Symposium. The event is a hub for fostering collaboration and expanding the network of Ph.D. candidates. Throughout the day all students had the opportunity to present their research developed under the Program and to discuss the results with their peers.

The first day started in Lisbon with a Welcome Session with the presence of president of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Madalena Alves, and CMU Portugal National Co-Director Inês Lynce, who welcomed the new students and highlighted the Program’s commitment to fostering collaboration and innovation among its community. 

Following the Welcome session, “Roundtable: The CMU Portugal Ph.D. experience” took place with CMU Portugal Ph.D. students Maria Casimiro, Luís Gomes, Neeta Khanuja (remote) and Pedro Mendes in a session hosted by Inês Lynce. This discussion, organized by students Maria Casimiro and Diogo Pereira, featured insights, best practices, and personal narratives to share with other students an overall vision of what it’s like to study  at CMU.

The CMU Portugal Program 2023 Symposium counted on the submission of 16 posters by first and second-year students currently in Portugal or CMU, all exhibited at Culturgest. Students attending in Lisbon were able to present their posters onsite during the Poster Session, giving them a great opportunity to foster connections within the  CMU Portugal Community and showcase the research that they will further develop during their Ph.D. 

All posters are also available on the Symposium E-Poster Gallery. 

The afternoon in Lisbon and morning in Pittsburgh, was dedicated to students from third year onwards, who had the opportunity to present their research through 24 engaging oral presentations across four parallel sessions. CMU Portugal faculty members chaired these sessions across several fields of research. 

Session 1 was moderated by Cláudia Soares (FCT NOVA) and Paula Marques (UAveiro) and showcased  students from Electrical & Computer Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy: Diogo Cardoso, Manuel Reis Carneiro, Latifah Almaghrabi, Tamás Karácsony, Pedro Valdeira, Afonso Amaral and Afonso Tinoco.

Session 2 was led by Gabriel Falcão (UCoimbra) and Lia Patrício (FEUP) with students from Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy and Computer Science: Cláudio Gomes, Diana Vieira Fernandes, João Fonseca, Sofia Martins, António Brito, Miguel Ferreira and Margarida Ferreira.

Session 3 had João Magalhães (FCT NOVA) as moderator and included CMU Portugal students from 4 different áreas, Computer Science, Language Technologies, Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction: Luís Borges, Daniel Ramos,  Maria Casimiro, Pedro Mendes and Catarina Fidalgo.

Session 4 was moderated by Nuno Santos (Técnico | INESC ID) with presentations from students in Computer Science and Software Engineering: Luis Gomes, Ricardo Brancas, Eduard Pinconschi, Nuno Sabino and Paulo Canelas. 

Together, they provided evidence for a perspective on the diverse and multidisciplinary research developed under the scope of CMU Portugal Program. Throughout the day, all participants were invited to vote in the Best Poster and Best Presentation through a Web App created exclusively for the Symposium. At the Closing Session, CMU Portugal Director Inês Lynce awarded Cláudia Mamede (currently at CMU) for her Poster and António Brito for his oral Presentation!

The second day was exclusively dedicated to students attending in Lisbon who engaged in two tailored training sessions: “Entrepreneurial skills for scientists: the basics”, a capacity building workshop on generating and developing entrepreneurial ideas and “Making Great Presentations”, a workshop to explore how to present with power and to get your ideas heard and understood.

The 2023 CMU Portugal Doctoral Symposium celebrated the achievements of its students, fostered collaboration, while building valuable networks to support them throughout their Doctoral Pathway.

 2023 CMU Portugal Doctoral Symposium Symposium website.

 

On November 10th, 2023, the CMU Portugal Program hosted the Talk “Experiments with Social Coordination in Hybrid Systems of Humans and Bots” with Hirokazu Shirado, Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII Institute) in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This event took place at the CMU Portugal/ITI Premises at Factory (Hub Criativo do Beato) and drew an engaged audience of over 20 participants.

Shirado’s expertise lies in investigating the interplay between social interactions and technology, particularly in understanding how social order emerges and how communities collectively navigate social dilemmas. His thought-provoking presentation shed light on experimental studies exploring the dynamics of human coordination within the context of human-AI hybrid systems, offering valuable insights into the potential impact on human prosociality.

During the talk, Shirado delved into groundbreaking research, including a study published in Nature in 2017. This research involved introducing bots into experimental networks where individuals were engaged in a coordination game, revealing that the performance of human groups improved when bots exhibited seemingly irrational behaviors.

The second part of the presentation focused on a recent study investigating the social implications of intelligent assistance, such as emergency automatic steering assistance, in a novel cyber-physical experiment. The findings prompted a compelling discussion on how AI could potentially influence human prosociality by altering social foci.

Hirokazu Shirado was in Portugal for two months as a CMU Portugal Visiting Faculty and Researcher collaborating with Prof. Ana Paiva at INESC ID I Técnico GAIPS Lab (Research Group on AI for People and the Society”): “My two-month visit to Portugal has been an amazing opportunity for me to expand my research agenda and academic networks. I’ve had the chance to exchange ideas with various researchers at Portuguese institutions, including Ana Paiva and her lab members. Additionally, my stay in Portugal has allowed me to learn more about Portuguese culture, which has led me to reflect on my research interests in human cooperation across multiple cultures”, shares Shirado. 

During his stay in Portugal, he had the chance to discuss with Ana Paiva about the potential of machines to facilitate human collaboration and decision-making in groups. While machine intelligence has been developed for individual use, it may not always be effective in group settings due to social dynamics and network mechanisms. 

“To tackle this challenge, Ana and I have come up with a research idea that involves robot control to manage the attention dynamics in communication networks between humans and robots. This idea is a combination of Ana’s social robot studies and my social network experiments on resource allocation. We are currently discussing the details of the research project and plan to execute it once I return to Pittsburgh”, explains the researcher.”

Learn more about the speaker and his research here.  

 

The CMU Portugal Program hosted a Fall Lunch on campus in the Cohon University Center at CMU, on November 8, 2023. This event brought together Dual Degree Ph.D. and Affiliated Ph.D. students currently studying at CMU as well as visitors from the Visiting Students and Visiting Faculty and Researchers Programs. 

The welcome event was hosted by CMU Portugal Director José Moura and counted on members from seven different departments including Electrical Computer Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy, Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, Robotics, Language Technologies and Software & Societal Systems, providing an opportunity for all  those connected by the CMU Portugal to network and enjoy a meal together as the holiday season begins. 

The fall semester at CMU will be attended by a group of 41 CMU Portugal members, including 17 Dual Degree Ph.D. students, 4 Affiliated Ph.D. students, 11 Visiting Students and 9 visiting faculty and researchers at CMU this semester.

TAMI, a CMU Portugal Large Scale Collaborative Research Project, has been focused on using Artificial  Intelligence (AI) to help make medical diagnosis clearer and more reliable. The three-year initiative has been able to develop a decision-supporting platform based on AI algorithms for the diagnosis of health complications such as cervical cancer, lung diseases and eye diseases. 

In a final event hosted at UPTEC (Porto) on September 14th, the project’s consortia led by First Solutions, in collaboration with Fraunhofer Portugal, INESC TEC and Administração Regional de Saúde do Norte (ARS Norte), shared the project’s main achievements and outcomes. 

In the culmination of three years of dedicated research and development, the Transparent Artificial Medical Intelligence (TAMI) project, a CMU Portugal Large Scale Collaborative Research Project, is set to improve medical diagnosis through the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Led by First Solutions in collaboration with Fraunhofer Portugal, INESC TEC , and Administração Regional de Saúde do Norte (ARS Norte), the TAMI consortium has strived to create a decision-supporting platform that harnesses AI algorithms for diagnosing complex health conditions, including cervical cancer, lung diseases, and eye diseases.

Tiago Oliveira, project’s PI from First Solutions kicked off the meeting with an overall presentation of TAMI’s objectives and accomplishments. TAMI has been mainly focused on the development of tools rooted in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). These tools are designed to assist healthcare professionals in identifying “relevant findings” within images across various medical domains, including cervical cytology, colposcopy, glaucoma, and chest x-ray.

TAMI’s ultimate goal is to bring this groundbreaking application to market, making it accessible to the healthcare sector,such as hospitals and clinics. This would enable “consumers access to self-explanatory AI decisions for screening and diagnosis, , promising a transformation in medical care. However, despite remarkable progress, TAMI still faces the hurdle of navigating complex legal requirements and obtaining necessary certifications.

The project presentation was followed by a look into the four medical areas studied under TAMI: Colposcopy presented by Jaime Cardoso from INESC TEC, Cervical Cytology by Luís Rosado, Glaucoma by Filipe Soares from Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, RX Thorax by Ana Maria Mendonça from INESC TEC. 

Representing the research team from Carnegie Mellon University, Asim Smailagic from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, presented the Carnegie Mellon contribution to TAMI’s research outcomes.

“The CMU team contributes to TAMI activities 4 and 5: Next Generation of Explainable AI Methods; and Methods for Evaluating Interpretability. CMU contributed to three accepted journal papers and five accepted conference papers, in collaboration with FhP and INESC TEC. CMU fostered collaboration between participating institutions by hosting visiting scholars from our partner institutions, and both scholarly research periods resulting in published works. From our side, we consider that the TAMI project has been a great success. The unique structure of this CMU Portugal project bridges academia (CMU and INESC), with industry (First and FhP), and the hospital (ARSN). Our multi-faceted collaborations are showing long-term benefits that promise to extend beyond the TAMI project itself.”, explains Asim Smailagic. 

The event wrapped up with a demonstration of the TAMI platform’s capabilities. This platform is intended to support medical professionals by providing AI-driven explanations for specific disease diagnoses, alongside visual elements pinpointing relevant areas within images and textual elements that convey comprehensible insights to human users. The platform has two main features: analyzing images to identify areas that may have relevant information and, at the same time, classifying variables depending on the specialty. The application, thoughtfully developed by First Solutions, is set to usher in a new era of medical decision support. In the near future, as the platform advances towards maturity, it will reshape the landscape of healthcare, bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and medical practice.

The TAMI (NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-045905) project was selected by the ‘Go Portugal – Global Science and Technology Partnerships Portugal’ initiative in the context of the CMU Portugal program. It is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020) and by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the CMU Portugal Program.

In the Media: Sapo Tek

 

The CMU Portugal Program held a Welcome Back event on September 19th addressed to all students spending this next semester in Pittsburgh. From the 23 students currently attending the Fall semester at Carnegie Mellon, 10 attended the event and stopped by to grab coffee & donuts, while meeting other CMU Portugal colleagues.

On Campus  events are an excellent opportunity to network and foster a supportive community of Ph.D. candidates, providing participants the opportunity to connect and share experiences with their peers. 

The Program currently has 23 active students attending the Fall semester at Carnegie Mellon, and anticipates 22 visiting students and faculty later in the semester. 

This year 6 new Dual Degree students have joined the Program and will soon be able to spend two years at Carnegie Mellon.

The 2023 edition of the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS 2023) was held in July, bringing together more than 170 students for an intensive week focused on exploring the realms of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). Once again,  CMU Portugal Program has supported this event, continuing the strong connection with this annual event, which has now spanned over a decade.

The school encompasses a wide spectrum of machine learning topics, ranging from theoretical foundations to practical applications, all of which play a pivotal role in tackling the challenges presented by language processing problems arising in different application areas. The event is a collaborative effort involving Instituto Superior Técnico (Técnico), Instituto de Telecomunicações, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa (INESC-ID), the Lisbon ELLIS Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS), and Unbabel, Zendesk, and IBM Research, with the support of the CMU Portugal Program.

The 13th edition drew in a diverse group of participants, including experts in the field of ML and NLP, reaching out to students of various nationalities and academic backgrounds, such as Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Biomedical Engineering, Linguistics, and Economics. 

Among the speakers at the event was Bhiksha Raj, Carnegie Mellon University Professor at  Language Technologies Institute and  Fellow at IEEE. Bhiksha Raj works in four broad areas: Speech recognition, Audio processing, Neural networks, and Privacy/Security for voice processing.  His involvement in multiple LxMLS editions underscores his commitment to the program. Additionally, he has collaborated with Portuguese researchers on projects backed by the CMU Portugal initiative and has co-supervised dual-degree Ph.D. candidates.

The event also featured the active participation of CMU Portugal faculty and alums in the organization and speaking engagements. They were André Martins, Isabel Trancoso, Mário Figueiredo, and Zita Marinho, contributing to the event’s success. The steering committee also included Fernando Pereira, a member of CMU Portugal’s External Review Committee, who serves as a VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where hehe leads pioneering research and development efforts in the realms of natural language understanding and machine learning.