News: Event News

NET-SCIP Workshop on Security
Date: October 13, 2010
Place: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Registration Form: http://net-scip.cmuportugal.org/?page_id=116

The Innovation Network on Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection (NET-SCIP) is currently gathering the scientific community, the private sector and the main government agencies in Portugal with the goal of developing comparative advantages in new security technologies, services, and protection of critical infrastructures.

As part of this initiative, NET-SCIP is organising a one-day workshop on the 13th of October 2010 at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal. Researchers, professionals and practitioners interested in participating are invited to submit a 1-page position abstract outlining the topic of their ongoing work and interests. Selected submissions will be invited for presentation at the workshop.

The organisers wish to especially encourage industry professionals and junior researchers (Ph.D. students, post-docs) to consider participating in this workshop.

Theme & topics:
The convergence of telecommunication networks, information systems and control technologies has become a reality. The internet is more and more the platform of choice for the many information flows that support critical infrastructures and critical information and communication systems. Examples include energy and fuel networks, supply chains for materials, water and food, transportation networks and healthcare systems, as well as medium and large enterprises exploring business relationships in a open global market of inter-dependent services. At the same time sophisticated technologies based on sensor networks allow for the aggregation of physical data in real time with respect to spaces, equipment and people.

Given the growing inter-dependence of all these systems, the impact of cyber-attacks is no longer circumscribed to particular information systems and is now a real threat both to the infrastructures and basic services on which we all depend in our everyday life.

Centered on scientific and technological advancement, NET-SCIP shall promote an inter-disciplinary approach by which experts from engineering, basic sciences, economy, design and psychology come together to create new knowledge and develop security solutions for all kinds of users and companies.

Important dates:
30 September 2010: Submission of position papers
5 October 2010: Notification of acceptance
13 October 2010: Workshop is held

Submission: send position abstracts to:
nuno@di.fc.ul.pt
vassilis@cmu.edu
luis.caires@di.fct.unl.pt

For more information, please visit
http://net-scip.cmuportugal.org

Place: Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (GPS coordinates: 40°11’11″N 8°24’56″W)
Room: Anfiteatro B2

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program is organizing the Orientation day for the newly enrolled students who are starting their academic year 2010/2011 in Portugal, as well as for the students that are coming to Portugal for the first time. The Orientation day is going to be held in Coimbra on September 18 th and the chosen venue is University of Coimbra.

AGENDA

10:30 – 11:00 Registration and welcome coffee

11:00 – 11:10 Welcome to Coimbra

João Gabriel Silva, Head, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra

11:10 – 11:25 Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Overview

João Barros, National Director, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

11:25 – 11:40 New Students Introductions

11:40 – 11:55 Policy on Cheating

11:55 – 12:10 Students Matters (residence card, visa requirements, other issues)

Sanja Sontor, Information officer and Event Coordinator, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

12:10 – 12:30 Expectations & Experience

Rui Meireles (Ph.D. CS)
Filippo Cagnetti (Post Doc Math)

12:30 – 12:45 Alumni Chapter

Nuno Seixas and Filipa Jervis, Alumni, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

12:45 – 14:15 Lunch

14:15 – 14:45 How to Create a Company

Paulo Santos, Instituto Pedro Nunes

14:45 – 15:15 From Research to the Market

Pedro Bizarro, Feedzai

15:15 – 15:45 Coffee break

15:45 – 16:15 The Importance of Innovation

Marco Costa, Critical Software

16:15 – 16:45 Innovation in a Globalized Market

Pedro Falcão, Novabase Capital

16: 45 – 17:00 Closing Remarks

João Barros, National Director, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program

Registration Form for the Students (deadline: September 3, 2010):
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDlJNnVqQUZtaVJyVXBtWWo0b2NkRFE6MQ

Related Articles:
2009: Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Organizes Orientation Day in Aveiro
https://cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=1580

2010 Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Student Orientation at Carnegie Mellon
Singleton Room, Roberts Hall
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
5:00 – 6:30 p.m
Speakers:
Welcome and ICTI Program Overview
Professor José M.F. Moura, Director ICTI@CMU, and Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty member

Proper Attribution, Advisors role
Professor Peter Steenkiste, Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty member, and ICTI@CMU Area Coordinator for CS and ECE

Expectations & Experiences
Presentation by 3 continuing ICTI@CMU students:
· ECE: Luis Brandão
· EPP: Patrick Agyapong
· EPP: Alexandre Mateus

Post-Doctoral Academy in Mathematics
Date: September 23-24, 2010
Place: Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Campus da Caparica ( How to reach the campus? )
Organizers: Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and UT Austin Portugal Program

Main Speakers (4 x 1h mini courses):
Robert Pego (CMU) – Long-time nonlinear dynamics of waves and clusters
Gordan Zitkovic (UT Austin) – Financial Markets: Black-Scholes and Beyond

Talks by post-docs in the program Carnegie Mellon Portugal and UT Austin | Portugal programs

Confirmed names:
Filippo Cagnetti (Post Doc Training in Applied Mathematics, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program – Instituto Superior Técnico and Carnegie Mellon University)
Mohammad El Smaily (Post Doc Training in Applied Mathematics, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program – Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and at The University of British Columbia).
Rita Ferreira (Ph.D. Student in Applied Mathematics – Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Carolin Kreisbeck (Post Doc Training in Applied Mathematics, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program – Carnegie Mellon University)
Rafayel Teymurazyan (Universidade de Lisboa)

Click here for titles and abstracts (partial list)

Organizing Committee:

Fabio Chalub (chair, UNL)
Rita Ferreira (UNL & CMU)
Isabel Gomes (UNL)
José Maria Gomes (UNL)
Ana Margarida Ribeiro (UNL)

Further informations: Fabio Chalub ( chalub@fct.unl.pt )

Sponsors:

Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program at Ciência 2010 – Encontro com a Ciência e Tecnologia em Portugal
July 4-7 2010 – Centro de Congressos de Lisboa

The organization of Ciência 2010 – Encontro com a Ciência e Tecnologia (Science 2010 – Encounter with Science and Technology) in Portugal, invited Ph.D. students enrolled in the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program to present a scientific poster at this conference. The posters will be displayed between the 4 th and 7 th of July in the Lisbon Conference Center.

The Science 2010 – Encounter with Science and Technology Conference aims to be the point of encounter and exchange of knowledge among the Portuguese scientific community. It is a prime opportunity to get to know the work being done by Portuguese scientists in the most relevant areas of activity.

Ph.D. Students Posters:
Alexandre Mateus – P2P on Campus: Who, What and How Much
Ali Shams – A New Method for Investigating University-to-Industry Knowledge Spillovers
Ana Venâncio – Does Red Tape Hold Back Entrepreneurs? Evidence from Portugal
André Regateiro – Revisiting firm size and job creation
Augusto Santos – Subspace Segmentation Problem
Cristina Carias – Creation of New Firms, Worker Mobility, and effect of employee exit on parent firms
Filipe Militão – Aliasing control with view-based typestate
Hugo Conceição – Self-Organized Traffic Control
João Miranda – Acoustic model training with imperfect transcripts
José Jerónimo Rodrigues – Automatic Vision Recognition System
Luís Brandão – Defining Thresholds for Anomaly Detection in a Hadoop Distributed System with Map-Reduce Workloads
Luís Marujo – Reap.PT: Early Stage
Masoud Honarvar Nazari – Technical and Policy issues of Modern Electric Energy Systems with Large Penetration opf Distributed Generators
Mate Boban – VANET Multiplay Games: A New Application
Patrick Agyapong – Spillover Effects from Wiring Schools with Broadband
Rathapon Saruthirathanaworakun – Dynamic Primary-Secondary Spectrum Sharing with Cellular Systems
Ricardo Cabral – Nuclear norm techniques for parameterizing subspaces
Rita Ferreira – Waves in a thin and periodically oscillating medium
Rodrigo Belo – Broadband in Schools: Good or Bad for Students’ Performance?
Rui Meireles – Line of sight in Vehicular Networks: na experimental study
Sérgio Pequito – New Approach to Non-Linear Observers : The Entropy Penalized Minimum Energy Estimator
Sven Stork – Æminium: Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality
Vikram Gupta – Wireless Low Power Synchronization from AC Power Lines
Vinay Prabhu – Who is more intrusive? 1 eavesdropper with M ears or M eavesdroppers with 1 ear each? An analytical characterization of critical secrecy parameters in wireless environs.
Wang Ling – PT-STAR – Speech Translation Advanced Research to and from Portuguese
Ye Can – Quantifying Stress in First Responder Professionals using Signal Processing Methologies

More information about this event at: http://www.ciencia2010.pt

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: “Posterior Regularization Framework: Learning Tractable Models with Intractable Constraints”
Speaker: João Graça (L2F, INESC-ID)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Date: Tuesday, June 22th, 2010
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
Unsupervised Learning of probabilistic structured models presents a fundamental trade- off between richness of captured constraints and correlations versus efficiency and tractability of inference. In this thesis, we propose a new learning framework called Posterior Regulariza- tion that incorporates side-information into unsupervised estimation in the form of constraints on the model’s posteriors. The underlying model remains unchanged, but the learning method changes. During learning, our method is similar to the EM algorithm, but we solve a problem similar to Maximum Entropy inside the E-Step to enforce the constraints. We apply the PR framework to two different large scale tasks: Statistical Word Alignments and Unsupervised Part of Speech Induction. In the former, we incorporate two constraints: bijectivity and symme- try. Training using these constraints produces a significant boost in performance as measured by both precision and recall against manually annotated alignments for six language pairs. In the latter we enforce sparsity on the word tag distribution which is overestimated using the default training method. Experiments on six languages achieve dramatic improvements over state-of-the-art results.

Bio:
I am currently a 4th year PhD student (with MSc degree) in Computer Science Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon and a visiting student at University of Pennsylvania. My advisors are Luisa Coheur, Fernando Pereira and Ben Taskar. My main research interests are Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. My current focus in on unsupervised learning with high level supervision in the form of constraints. I am a proud member of the Spoken Language Systems Lab (L2F) in Lisbon and of the Penn Research in Machine Learning (PRiML).

Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Doctoral Consortia
Date: June 15 th , 2010

Location: FCEE – Universidade Católica Portuguesa; Palma de Cima, Lisboa
E-mail: dgomes@math.ist.utl.pt

The Doctoral Consortia is a workshop for Ph.D. students from the dual degree programs in the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is twofold. One is to help students by providing feedback and general advice on developing their research in a constructive and interdisciplinary environment and preparing for their future careers, as scholars and beyond academia. The second is to provide a forum where PhD students can learn about the general set of activities being developed in the context of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.
Preliminary Program
9:00 OPENING SESSION

9:40 – 11:00 PRESENTATION SESSION I

Sven Stork, “Æminium – Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality”
Ana Venâncio, “Does Red Tape Hold Back Entrepreneurs? Evidence from Portugal”
Alexandre M. Mateus, “P2P on Campus: Who, What and How Much”
Filipe Militão – TBA

11:00 – 11:30 COFFEE BREAK

11:30 – 12:30 PRESENTATION SESSION II

Colleen Horin, “Network Reconfiguration, Demand Response, and Renewable Energy”
Sérgio Pequito, “Mean Field Games”
Rui Meireles, “Importance of line of sight in vehicular communications”

12:30 – 14:30 – Lunch

14:30 – 15:00 – LUNCH DEBRIEF

15:00 – 17:00 – GROUP VIEWING OF PORTUGAL WORLD CUP GAME!!!

17:30 – 18:30 – PRESENTATION SESSION III

Rodrigo Belo, “Broadband in Schools: Good or Bad for Students’ Performance?”
André Regateiro, “Revisiting firm size and Job Creation”
Hugo Conceição, “Self-organized Traffic Control”

18:30 – 19:15 – GUEST SPEAKER

“The Ph.D. dissertation: an opportunity to change the World.”
António Câmara, YDREAMS

First “Brainstorm on SMART ENERGY”
Date: June 15 th , 2010
Venue: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, Lisbon (http://www.cccm.mctes.pt/)
Local Organizer: António Vidigal (EDP Inovação)
Program Chair: Inês Lima Azevedo (CMU)
Event Co-Chairs: Marija Ilic (CMU) and Luís Magalhães (UMIC)
Coordination: José Moura (CMU), Paulo Ferrão (MIT-Portugal), João Barros (CMU-Portugal)
(access to this event requires an invitation)

9:00-9:30	Breakfast will be served
9:30 – 9:40	Welcoming remarks – Manuel Heitor and António Vidigal
9:40 – 9: 50	Agenda and goals for the workshop – Marija Ilic and Luís Magalhães
9:50 – 10:20	Short introduction from all workshop participants (Moderator: Marija Ilic)
10:20 – 11:00	Brainstorming session 1: Learning from pilot experiences of smart grids in Portugal (Moderator: António Vidigal; several participants will lead the discussion)
11:00 – 11:40	Brainstorming session 2: Key Technological challenges with smart grids (Moderator: Marija Ilic; several participants will lead the discussion)
11:40 – 12:00	Summary of findings from Session 1 and 2
12:00 – 13:00	Guest Lunch Speaker: Funding Opportunities in EU and Beyond (Moderator: Luís Magalhães)
13:00 – 13:30	Brainstorming session 3: Consumer interaction, public policies and interaction with other services and technologies (Moderator: Paulo Ferrão)
13:30 – 14:30	Brainstorming session 4: Research Needs: What are the fundamental research needs in the “smart grids” area? What are key technological, regulatory, and economic and policy related mechanisms that need to be aligned if smart grids are to be pursued in Portugal? (Moderators: Marija Ilic and António Vidigal; several participants will lead the discussion)
14:30 – 14:45	Summary of findings and closing remarks

“SMART ENERGY Brainstorms”: R&D for the Future of Smart Energy Grids: fostering pilot experiences in Portugal more

Date: June 19, 2010
Place: Faculdade de Ciências Económicas e Empresariais da Universidade Católica, Lisbon, Portugal
Registration: registration form (use the same form of the 2010 Annual Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Conference)

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Alumni Chapter, which was created this February, will be having its first official event on June 19, 2010, at Faculdade de Ciências Económicas e Empresariais da Universidade Católica. The main goals of this event are to build a close relationship between all the alumni, show what they got from the correspondent programs, and what they are doing in industry. Finally, there will be also a discussing on how this Regional Chapter can evolve and what path it should take.

Agenda

Part I: Alumni Community

10:00 – 10:15 Welcome Session

Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Representative

10:15 – 10:45 What is CMU’s Portuguese Alumni Chapter?

10:45 – 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 Round-table: Experiences by our Alumni

Next steps for our Chapter

Part II: Open to Friends and Families

12:30 – 14:30 Lunch

14:30 – 17:30 Activity in Lisbon – TBA