News: Event News

UTEN Portugal Workshop: Corporate Partnering to Facilitate University Commercialization Activities
Industry Focus: Commercialization and Technology Transfer in Information and Communication Technology

Date: June 15-16, 2010
Place: Faculdade de Ciências Económicas e Empresariais da Universidade Católica, Lisbon
Room: 520-A
Organizers: UTEN Portugal, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program
url: www.utenportugal.org
Registration: registration form (use the same form of the 2010 Annual Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Conference)

Summary
Presenters from Carnegie Mellon University will discuss the ways in which the university engages with external partners in the process of innovation and technology commercialization. An overview of each speaker’s area will be provided as well as strategies introduced to achieve the greatest benefits for the university, its faculty and its partners. The keynote speaker will present an overview of current trends in telecom industry and exciting new opportunities.

Keynote Speaker:
Hyong Kim, Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering, CMU

Invited Speakers:
Gene Hambrick, Corporate Relations of CyLab
Bill Swisher, Acting Senior Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations
Curt Stone, Executive in Residence at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, Director of the QoLT Foundry and Industry Liaison
Tara Brandstad, Associate Director, Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC)
MaryBeth Shaw, Assistant General Counsel
Amir Anwar, Director of International Alumni Relations
Joanne Kyriacopoulos, Export Control Compliance Officer

Advanced Corporate Partnering (15 th June)
Various examples of corporate partnering arrangements will be introduced and discussed, including corporate gifts, Sponsored Research Agreements, Consortium Agreements, Licenses and the use of Master Agreements. In addition, the panel will discuss, cultivating corporate partnerships, and alumni relationships, and efforts to attract key corporate partners to facilities on or near campus. Attendees will be introduced to Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab (cyber security) Consortium and Quality of Life ERC Consortium. Representatives will discuss the consortium structures, relationships with corporate members, member rights and privileges and models for commercialization partnerships. Specific issues in corporate partnering will be addressed, including publication, intellectual property ownership, the use of university facilities, access to students and faculty conflict of interest and consulting.

Hands-on Working Sessions (16 th June)
The Case Study sessions are intended to be interactive working sessions. Each case study will be introduced by one of the presenters. The participants will break into working groups to address and discuss the relevant issues of the case, followed by a group discussion. Case studies will focus on the details of various types of agreements commonly entered into with corporate partners, and may include sponsored research agreements, consortium agreements, licenses, and corporate gifts.

Workshop Agenda
Tuesday	Wednesday
Morning Session
8:30 Registration 9:00 Introductory Remarks José Mendonca – UTEN Director* João Barros – National Director of Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program * Representative from Portugal Telecom* 9:30 Keynote Speaker: Trends in the Information and Telecommunication Industries Hyong Kim, Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering, CMU 10:00 Engaging Corporate Partners Tara Branstad, Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC) Bill Swisher, Office of Corporate Relations 10:45 Coffee Break 11:15 Partnering for Innovation Aamir Anwar, Office of Alumni Relations Gene Hambrick, CyLab 13:00 Lunch	9:30 Specific Issues to Consider in Relationships with Industry Joanne Joanne Kyriacopoulos, OSP Mary Beth Shaw, Office of General Counsel Tara Branstad, CTTEC 10:30 – Coffee Break 11:00 Issues to Consider in Relationship to Industry Mary Beth Shaw 12:00 Case Study #1 Corporate Gifts Bill Swisher, Mary Beth Shaw 13:00 Lunch
Afternoon Session
14:30 Engaging Corporate Partners, cont. Curt Stone, Quality of Life Engineering Research Center and the QoLT Foundry Joanne Kyriacopoulos, Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) 16:00 Coffee Break 16:30 Engaging Corporate Partners, cont. Tara Branstad, CTTEC Mary Beth Shaw, Office of General Counsel 17:15 Models for External Partnerships Joanne Kyriacopoulos, OSP MaryBeth Shaw, Office of General Counsel Tara Branstad, CTTEC Bill Swisher, Office of Corporate Relations 18:30 Finish for the day 19:00 Port of Honor 19:30 Networking Dinner	14:30 Case Study #2 Sponsored Research Agreements and Consortium Agreements Joanne Kyriacopoulos, Mary Beth Shaw, Tara Branstad, Curt Stone, Gene Hambrick 16:00 Coffee Break 16:30 Case Study #3 Licensing and Start-ups Tara Branstad, Mary Beth Shaw 17:30 Wrap-up 18:00 End of the Workshop

*Pending

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

A series of meetings jointly organized by the CMU Portugal and the MIT Portugal Programs, together with the MOBI.e and INOVGRID Projects

June-December 2010

Background

The debate on smart energy grids is emerging worldwide and is attracting the attention of the industry, researchers and policy makers, from both operational and conceptual points of view.

Smart energy grids may have different meanings for different people. At the level of the customer, this might mean meters that can read automatically, time-of-day and time-of-use meters, meters that communicate with customers or control of customers’ loads. At the level of the distribution system, it might mean the automation of the distribution system, a selective load control, or managing distributed generation and “islanding”. For many the concept is associated with electricity and focused at the level of the transmission system, smart grids might mean measurement of phase and other advanced measurements, FACTS and other advanced control devices or distributed and autonomous control (see Morgan et al., 2009 for more detail).

Over the course of the past two decades, issues of affordability of energy services, security of supply, environmental concerns (including climate change) have pushed Portugal to foster policies to increase the share of renewable energy in the electricity generation mix, promote energy efficiency, consider the electrification of part of the vehicle fleet, and move towards a “smart” electricity grid. Still, today Portugal imports 83% of its energy needs (Eurostat, 2009), has the 5 th most expensive electricity retail price of the EU27 before taxes, moving to 9 th when all taxes are included (Eurostat, 2009).

To address part of these issues, Portugal has recently formulated an ambitious national energy strategy for 2020 (Res.Cons. Ministros nº29/2010), which includes, amongst other strategic areas, the reduction of the energy dependence to 74% and an increase in the share electricity generated from renewable energy sources to 60%, both by 2020. The strategy also proposes to create economic clusters around the production of renewable energy and energy efficiency. These goals will require that Portugal rethinks its energy systems in several fronts, and provides a unique setting for Portugal to pioneer research in the “smart energy” area. This requires bringing together different energy sources and their grids in order to provide an energy service with the best economic, environmental and energy performance, enabling the “co-generations” and the transformation of each citizen in an active and informed actor of the energy system.

We proposed a series of workshops, called “Smart Energy Brainstorms” that will be pursued during 2010. The main goal of the “Smart Energy Brainstorms” is to identify key strategic research areas in the realm of smart energy grids where Portuguese research groups and companies may join efforts with leading partners worldwide and promote Portuguese pilot experiences of smart energy grids at a leading international level. They will be organized within the context of the CMU-Portugal and MIT-Portugal programs in close collaboration with major public and private initiatives in Portugal in the area of smart energy grids, including the national effort on electric mobility through the MOBI.e Project, as well as the INOVGRID project promoted by the energy company EDP in the city of Évora. Other potential initiatives are welcome to join the brainstorms.

Accordingly, we seek participants to discuss the following issues:
· What are the different meaning of smart-grids and their implications for deployment? What are current efforts to deploy pilot and large-scale projects in the smart grids area?
· What are key technological, regulatory, economic and environmental issues related to the deployment of smart grids? How far US and EU contexts imply different implementation procedures?
· How do the different smart grid designs relate to consumer behavior?
· What are the main characteristics to exploit in the Portuguese pilot studies to make them unique? What are key research areas to pursue? How to build on the existing research efforts and create projects with targeted impacts on the state of the field?

The Program Chair for this event is Inês Lima Azevedo (CMU), and the Event Co-Chairs are Marija Ilic (CMU) and Luís Magalhães (UMIC). These sessions will have the overall coordination from José Moura (CMU), João Barros (FEUP, CMU-Portugal) and Paulo Ferrão (IST, MIT-Portugal).

The first of these brainstorms will take place on June 15 th , 2010, at the Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau in Lisbon (http://www.cccm.mctes.pt/), from 9h00 to 14h45.

Workshop: “Social Sciences and Engineering: what I need; what I can offer”
– A workshop to build an interdisciplinary research agenda in IT and beyond –

Date: June 15 th , 2010
Place: Faculdade de Ciências Económicas e Empresariais da Universidade Católica, Lisbon
Organizers: Ricardo Morla (UPorto) and Francisco Veloso (CMU/UCP)
Room: 537
Registration: registration form (use the same form of the 2010 Annual Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Conference)
Objectives
The objective of this workshop is to bring researchers from ECE and CS together with those in Economics, Business and the Social Sciences to discuss and develop cross-disciplinary research questions in the strategic directions of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.
Structure
The workshop will go from 9am to 1pm on Tuesday, June 15. There will be 4 short targeted presentations followed by periods of longer discussion. Two presentations will be based on a social science issue, paper or method and will be asking or suggesting how the engineering and natural sciences research can contribute to the issue at hand. Conversely, there will be two presentation from ECE/CS researchers which will also be asking or suggesting dimensions in which the social sciences can help. The discussion will be used to try to deepen the potential theme where joint projects could emerge. A summary of the conclusions will be made available.
Topics and Leaders
1) Networks and social analytics – looking for an engineering perspective (Pedro Ferreira, DEEC-IST)
2) Engineering applications and need to understand the role and impact on the market (Rui José, DSI-U.Minho)
3) Massive data, social sciences questions and opportunities to use engineering and science methods (Miguel Amaral, DEG-IST)
4) Machine learning tools and methods applied to the social sciences (Jaime Cardoso, DEEC-U.Porto).

The 2010 Annual Carnegie Mellon Portugal Conference, entitled “Smart Tech for Real People”, will be held at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, on June 14, 2010. This event is sponsored by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

Our main annual event will gather the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program community – academics, researchers, students, and industry partners – to present the latest results of the partnership, and help shape the future.

The program includes:
– research talks by Carnegie Mellon Portugal faculty, researchers and MS/Ph.D. students
– technical contributions by our industrial affiliates
– results and demos by all teams of ongoing research projects
– presentations of the new innovation networks: Security and Critical Infrastructures Protection (NET-SCIP), Future Internet Services and Technologies (NET-FIT), Services and Technologies for Interactive Media (NET-STIM), Software Engineering (SEI Portugal).
– welcome and closing addresses by senior government officials
– networking opportunities for students, faculty, researchers and industrial affiliates.

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: “Decision-theoretic Planning under Uncertainty for Active Cooperative Perception”
Date: Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Speaker: Matthijs Spaan (ISR)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
As robots leave research labs to operate more often in human-inhabited, larger environments, cooperation between sensor networks and mobile robots becomes crucial. For example, in urban scenarios, employing mobile robots is a need to augment the limited sensor coverage and improve detection and tracking accuracy. The fusion of sensory information between fixed surveillance cameras and each robot, with the goal of maximizing the amount and quality of perceptual information available to the system can be called cooperative perception. A promising decision-theoretic planning framework for active cooperative perception is that of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The suitability of POMDPs for the previously depicted scenario arises from their ability to inherently trade off task completion, which could be react to a potential event that has been detected, and information gathering in a efficient way, that is decide to send a robot to improve situational awareness. In this talk we will discuss how planning under uncertainty can be applied to active cooperative perception problems.

Bio:
Matthijs Spaan received a M.Sc. (2002) in AI and a Ph.D. (2006) in CS from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Currently he is a research scientist at the Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, and he is the principal investigator of a national project on “Decentralized Planning Under Uncertainty for Cooperative Systems”. His thesis was on “Approximate planning under uncertainty in partially observable environments” and was selected as a runner-up for EURON’s 7th Georges Giralt PhD Award. His scientific interests are in planning under uncertainty, sequential decision making, autonomous robots, cooperative multiagent/multi-robot systems, (decentralized) partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs/Dec-POMDPs), reinforcement learning, machine learning and AI in general.

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: Gradient Approaches to Reinforcement Learning
Speaker: Francisco Melo (INESC-ID)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Date: Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
In this talk I will present an overview of some of the past and current lines of research in reinforcement learning (RL), as well as some of the challenges that research in this area has faced in the last decades. I will describe a range of recent results that may bring significant advances on some of these fundamental research challenges, and yet rely on the “simplest” optimization approach – gradient search. The ultimate goal of this talk is to provide a high-level perception of RL while hint on current active avenues of research in this area.

Bio:
Francisco S. Melo received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon, Portugal. During 2007 he held an appointment as a short-term researcher in the Computer Vision Lab, at the Institute for Systems and Robotics (Lisbon, Portugal) and in 2008 he joined the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Since June 2009 he is a Researcher at the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group of INESC-ID, where he develops research within reinforcement learning, planning under uncertainty, multiagent and multi-robot systems, developmental robotics, and sensor networks.

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: “Multimodal pattern matching algorithms and applications”
Speaker: Xavier Anguera Miro (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~xanguera/)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala EA4 (Torre Norte)
Date: Friday, May 14th, 2010
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
After introducing myself and where I come from, in this talk I will focus on 3 projects I have been working in the last year. The first one is a novel pattern matching algorithm, based on the well known Dynamic Time Warping. The presented algorithm can be used to find real-valued subsequences within a longer sequence, without prior knowledge of their start-end points. I have applied the algorithm for the task of acoustic matching, for which I will show some preliminary results. Then I will continue to explain a second DTW-based algorithm, this one being able do an online of two musical pieces. One of the music pieces can be input life or be retrieved from an audio file, while the second one is extracted from an online music video. The online alignment allows for the music video to be played in total synchrony with the corresponding ambient/recorded audio. Finally, I will talk about video copy detection, which is the task of finding video duplicate segments within a big database. I will explain our multimodal approach, based on audio-visual change-based features.

Bio:
Xavier Anguera Miro: Ing. [MS] 2001 by UPC (Barcelona, Spain), [MS]
2001 European Masters in Language and Speech, Dr. [PhD] 2006 UPC University, with a thesis on speaker diarization for multi-microphone meeting recordings. From 2001 to 2003 he worked for Panasonic Speech Technology Lab in Santa Barbara, CA. From 2004 to 2006 he was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, CA. Since 2007 he is with Telefónica Research in Barcelona, Spain working as a research scientist in the multimedi research group led by Dr. Nuria Oliver. Although his background is in acoustic analysis, in the last 3 years he has been very interested in the area of multimodal algorithms and applications.

Information Society Forum – Future Internet
Date: May 10, 2010
Place: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, Lisbon, Portugal
Organizers: UMIC –Knowledge Society Agency
More informations available at: http://www.umic.pt/
PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
09:00-09:30 Recepção e Café Matinal

09:30-09:45 Sessão de Abertura

Luis Magalhães, Presidente da Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento (UMIC)
João Sentieiro, Presidente da Fundação para a ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
José Mariano Gago, Ministro da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior

09:45-10:15 Intervenção Convidada

Mário Campolargo, DG INFSO Director de Tecnologias Emergentes e Infraestruturas

10:15-10:30 Net-FIT Rede de Inovação em Tecnologias e Serviços para a Internet do Futuro

Rui Aguiar, IT e UAveiro

10:30–11:00 Intervalo para café

11:00-12:30 Sistemas e Arquitecturas: Painel e debate com a audiência

Moderador: José Silva Matos, INESC Porto e FEUP
Luís Correia, IT e IST-UTL
Marília Curado, CISUC e FCTUC
Paulo Monteiro, Nokia Siemens Networks
Luís Ribeiro, Critical Software
Susana Sargento, IT e UAveiro
Jorge Sá Silva, CISUC e FCTUC
Rute Sofia, INESC Porto
Fausto Vieira, IT
Representante da empresa ISA

14:00-15:30 Aplicações e Serviços: Painel e debate com a audiência

Moderador: Carlos Salema, IT e IST-UTL
Augusto Casaca, INESC ID e IST-UTL
João Paulo Costeira, ISR Lisboa e IST-UTL
Telma Mota, PT Inovação
Francisco Moura, CCTC e UMinho
Teresa Vazão, INESC ID e IST-UTL
André Zúquete, IEETA e UAveiro
Representante da empresa EDP Inovação
Representante da empresa Novabase

15:30-16:00 Intervalo para café

16:00-17:00 Plataformas: Painel e debate com a audiência

Moderador: Pedro Veiga, Presidente da FCCN e FCUL
João Paulo Barraca, IT e UAveiro
Luís Caires, CITI e FCTUNL
Michel Ferreira, IT e FCUP
Francisco Fontes, PT Inovação
António Melo, OutSystems
Manuel Ricardo, INESC Porto e FEUP
Pedro Veiga, Presidente da FCCN e FC-UL

17:00-17:45 Síntese e Encerramento

João Barros, Director do Programa Carnegie Mellon – Portugal
Paulo Ferrão, Director do Programa MIT – Portugal
Mário Campolargo, DG INFSO Director de Tecnologias Emergentes e Infraestruturas
Luis Magalhães, Presidente da Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento (UMIC)
Manuel Heitor, Secretário de Estado da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior

SEMINAR SERIES on ICTs POLICY RESEARCH: Innovations and Upgrades in Virtualized Network Architectures
Dr. Paul Laskowski

Tuesday, May 4 th 2010 16:30pm
Room V0.15, CMU Classroom, Civil Pavilion, Instituto Superior Técnico

Abstract:
Within today’s network industry, certain markets are renowned for their abundance of innovation (file-sharing networks, social networking applications), while others are more famous for resisting new technologies (land-line telephones, network-layer architecture). In this talk, I will argue that such differences are rooted in the way money flows through the network system. A simple model reveals three representative paths that money can take among users, network providers, and service providers. Using a novel economic theory, the classic model of Cournot competition can be generalized to explore all three market types, and compare them in terms of investment levels.

Applying this theory, I will investigate the contemporary movement to large-scale, “virtualized” testbeds. Faced with the difficulty of making changes to the internet architecture, researchers have recently turned to testbeds as a place to deploy new services. Despite the excitement, uncertainty surrounds the question of how technologies can bridge the gap from testbed to global availability. It is recognized that no amount of validation will spur today’s providers to make architectural changes, so if new services are to reach a widespread audience, the testbed itself must provide that reach. I will therefore analyze two questions: First, would today’s network providers (or a new set of providers) ever support a virtualized architecture on a global scale? Second, even if they did, would such a network, spanning a great many domains, support the adoption of new services or upgrades to the infrastructure?

Refreshments provided
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For those who won’t be able to be in the video conference room at IST, you can attend the seminar online through WebEx (link and instructions below).

Please follow the instructions in the email some minutes before 4:30am (GMT) and join the online meeting room.

Topic: Dr. Paul Laskowski – Innovations and Upgrades in Virtualized Network Architectures
Date: Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Time: 4:30 pm, GMT Summer Time (London, GMT+01:00)
Meeting Number: 843 240 383
Meeting Password: epp2010

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