News: Event News

Second Edition of CloudViews – Cloud Computing Conference

Date: May 20-21, 2010
Place: Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal

EuroCloud Portugal is very pleased to announce the second edition of CloudViews – Cloud Computing Conference. Having as main discussion subject the Cloud Ecosystem, CloudViews 2010 – Cloud Ecosystem will be a lively discussion and demonstration place of how Cloud Computing is enabling companies with the tools and methodologies that are helping them to optimize investments and to increase IT services. This year, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program is a partner of this event.

Discussion topics
Cloudviews 2010 – Cloud Computing Conference wants to be a lively discussion with most of its energy focused on the following topics:
Cloud Elasticity
Cloud computing platforms interoperability
Data management
IT departments and cloud computing integration
User perspective – how Internet (the cloud) will become our PC
Encryption and security technologies
Predictability and provision platforms
SLAs monitoring and agreements contracts
Elastic networks
Companies and startup opportunities – how to become a cloud computing provider and how to use cloud computing to add (real) value to business

Who should attend?
Everyone who has responsibilities and cares about IT technologies, namely
IT Administrators
Software Developers and Architects
Chief Information Office (CIO)

Service providers driven by internationalization and partnership projects; and companies that want to affirm themselves through the implementation of IT politics that favor the improvement of the quality of their services and products, allied with innovation, efficient investment and resources utilization, especially
Startup Companies
IT Companies
Service Providers

R&D centers aiming to promote knowledge transfer and IT users, particularly
Users and Service Consumers, including Academic Institutions
Researchers and Academic Developers

Why attend?
Service providers will be able to show how services will be deployed and offered to the clients.R&D centers, researchers and developers will be able to put on display their results and discuss issues and solutions related with Cloud Computing technologies

Companies will have the opportunity to understand how their data is being protected in the Cloud, how they can move from one provider to another, how they will be able to migrate from the current scenario to a Cloud-based one, in a planed and structured way; and most important, how other companies are already taking benefits from Cloud Computing and its Ecosystem.

Users will have the possibility to evaluate the proposed solutions based on their needs and the “simplicity criteria”: complex and unfocused solutions are not Cloud Computing.

For further information on the event, ways to participate, agenda, and speakers’ details, please visit the website at: http://2010.cloudviews.org.

ECE Back to Basics: Energy Efficiency: the Transition to Solid State Lighting
May 5 th , 2010
Speaker: Inês Lima Azevedo, Carnegie Mellon University, Dep. Eng. and Public Policy
Place: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Back to Basics is an international colloquium on fundamental tools for research in Electrical and Computer Engineering, held weekly at FEUP, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (UPorto).

Abstract:
Lighting constitutes more than 20% of total U.S. electricity consumption, a similar fraction in the European Union, and an even higher fraction in many developing countries. Because many current lighting technologies are highly inefficient, improved technologies for lighting hold great potential for energy savings and for reducing associated greenhouse gas emissions. Solid-state lighting shows great promise as a source of efficient, affordable, color-balanced white light. Indeed, assuming market discount rates, engineering-economic analysis demonstrates that white solid state lighting already has a lower levelized annual cost (LAC) than incandescent bulbs. The LAC for white solid-state lighting will be lower than that of the most efficient fluorescent bulbs by the end of this decade. However, a large literature indicates that households do not make their decisions in terms of simple expected economic value. After a review of the technology, we compare the electricity consumption, carbon emissions, and cost-effectiveness of current lighting technologies, accounting for expected performance evolution through 2015. We then simulate the lighting electricity consumption and implicit greenhouse gases emissions for the U.S. residential and commercial sectors through 2015 under different policy scenarios: voluntary solid-state lighting adoption, implementation of lighting standards in new construction, and rebate programs or equivalent subsidies. Finally, we provide a measure of cost-effectiveness for solid state lighting in the context of other climate change abatement policies.

Short bio
Azevedo’s research interests lie at the intersection of environmental, technical, and economic issues, such as how to address the challenge of climate change and to move towards a more sustainable energy system. She tackles complex problems in which traditional engineering plays an important role but cannot provide a complete answer. In particular, she has been looking at how energy systems are likely to be shaped in the future, which requires comprehensive knowledge not only of the technologies that can address future energy needs but also of the decision-making process followed by different agents in the economy. Azevedo has also been working on assessing how specific policies will shape future energy systems, especially in a carbon-constrained world.

More informations available at: http://sites.google.com/site/eceback2basics/program-3

Workshop on Facilitating Adoption of Parallel Computing
On Wednesday, May 5, in GHC 7501, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal sponsored Æminium – Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality project is holding an informal workshop at Carnegie Mellon University.

With the rise of multicore processors and the increasing richness of application functionality, leveraging parallel computation is increasingly necessary to achieve good performance. However, parallel computing is also difficult for programmers, due to the need to decompose the problem into sub-parts which can be solved in parallel, and due to the challenges of managing potential interference between concurrent* tasks.

This workshop focuses on research approaches intended to facilitate the practical adoption of parallel computing. These may include engineering approaches, new models of parallel computing, approaches for verification and reasoning in the presence of concurrency, and approaches for teaching parallel computing.

The current schedule of topics is listed below. We would like to emphasize discussion in the workshop, so our plan is to avoid long presentations. However, potential participants may propose to give a 5-minute lightning talks in one or two sessions, the purpose being to introduce ideas for discussion. The organizers will select a number of talks consistent with leaving the majority of each session for open discussion. We want to encourage discussion of work in progress; therefore, participants should be aware that some ideas presented may not yet be published and therefore should not be shared outside the workshop.

Program
9:00 a.m. Welcome and Workshop Introduction
9:15 a.m. Engineering Parallelism: What Works in Practice
10:15 a.m. Break
10:30 a.m. New Programming Models Facilitating Adoption of Parallelism
12:00 p.m. Lunch (provided for workshop participants, RSVP below)
1:00 p.m. Verification: Helping Developers Reason about Concurrency
2:00 p.m. Hardware Factors in Parallel Computing
2:45 p.m. Break
3:00 p.m. Teaching Parallel Computing
3:30 p.m. Wrapup
4:00 p.m. Informal Follow-up

* Please RSVP * to kari+@cs.cmu.edu for lunch, and optionally provide a topic on which you would like to give a lightning talk.

* Note: we use the term parallel to mean that many computations occur simultaneously on different processor cores, including both data parallelism and task parallelism. We use concurrent to mean a programming model with multiple threads of control, which may introduce non-determinism due to interference, and may or may not be executed in parallel. The workshop discussion will include both deterministic and concurrent forms of parallelism.

Interested faculty and students are invited to participate.

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: “Towards Closing the Loop: Active Learning for Robotics”
Speaker: Ruben Martinez-Cantin (http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~rmcantin/)
Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação)
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
The ability to adapt to changing environment autonomously will be essential for future robots. While this need is well-recognized, most machine learning research focuses largely on perception and static data sets. Instead, future robots need to interact with the environment to generate the data that is needed to foster real-time adaptation based on all information collected in previous interactions and observations. In other words, we need to close the loop between the robot acting, robot sensing and robot learning. Novel active methods need to outperform passive methods by a margin that compensates the potential of the extra computational burden and the cost of the active data sampling. In this talk, we present a common framework for active learning in different applications, such as planning, robot localization and mapping, calibration, sensor networks and computer graphics. Our results show that in many applications, active sampling provides an improvement, while in other applications is mandatory to achieve a good performance.

Bio:
Ruben Martinez-Cantin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Insitute of Systems and Robotics at IST in Lisbon. Before joining IST, he received a PhD and MSc in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Zaragoza in 2008 and 2003, respectively. During his PhD, he worked in the Robotics, Perception and Real Time Group under the supervision of Prof. José A. Castellanos in mobile robotics and Bayesian inference and reasoning. In 2006 and 2007, he has been a visiting scholar at the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence (LCI) at UBC in collaboration with Prof. Nando de Freitas. Previously, he worked as research assistant at University of Zaragoza, in vision based control for mobile robots and intelligent surveillance systems. He also developed some ideas for space robotics and got two grants by the European Space Agency. His research interests include Bayesian inference, machine learning, robotics, computer vision and cognitive models. He is also interested in the popularization of science.

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: Dynamic Network Analysis: Model, Algorithm, Theory, and Application

Speaker: Eric P. Xing (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~epxing/) Venue: IST Alameda, Sala PA2 (Edifício de Pós-Graduação) Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 Time: 13:00 Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
Across the sciences, a fundamental setting for representing and interpreting information about entities, the structure and organization of communities, and changes in these over time, is a stochastic network that is topologically rewiring and semantically evolving over time, or over a genealogy. While there is a rich literature in modeling invariant networks, until recently, little has been done toward modeling the dynamic processes underlying rewiring networks, and on recovering such networks when they are not observable. In this talk, I will present two recent developments in analyzing what we refer to as the dynamic tomography of evolving networks. I will first present new sparse-coding algorithms for estimating the topological structures of latent evolving networks underlying nonstationary time-series or tree-series of nodal attributes, along with theoretical results on the asymptotic sparsistency of the proposed methods; then, I will present a new Bayesian model for estimating and visualizing the trajectories of latent multi-functionality of nodal states in the evolving networks. I will show some promising empirical results on recovering and analyzing the latent evolving social networks in the US Senate and the Enron corporation, and the evolving gene network of fruit fly while aging, at a time resolution only limited by sample frequency. In all cases, our methods reveal interesting dynamic patterns in the networks.

Bio:
Dr. Eric Xing is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His principal research interests lie in the development of machine learning and statistical methodology; especially for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional and dynamic possible worlds; and for building quantitative models and predictive understandings of biological systems. Professor Xing received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Rutgers University, and another Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His current work involves, 1) foundations of statistical learning, including theory and algorithms for estimating time/space varying-coefficient models, sparse structured input/output models, and nonparametric Bayesian models; 2) computational and statistical analysis of gene regulation, genetic variation, and disease associations; and 3) application of statistical learning in social networks, data mining, vision. Professor Xing has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and is an associate editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics, the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology, and a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science, and the United States Air Force Young Investigator Award.

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: “Extracting geographic entities with Conditional Random Fields”
Speaker: David Batista (XLDB, FCUL)
Venue: TBA
Date: Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Time: 13:00
Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
Geographic Information Retrieval systems rely on the identification of place names in documents to determine the region about which they are relevant. Extracting location names from text is a common Natural Language Processing task, a simple approach is to used manually coded rules supported with dictionaries of place names or gazetteers. Despite these methods achieving good results, the rules are usually too restrictive and very specific in regard to a type of text. Another approach is to use machine learning, based on extracting features from texts where the geographic entities are annotated. Features can be surrounding words or properties of the word itself, like capitalization, or frequency of the word in corpus. A probabilistic model is then built based on these features to discriminate when a given word is or not a geographic entity. Work done on training and using Conditional Random Fields for extracting geographic references from a web crawl of the Portuguese web will be presented, and also available resources for research, such as a geographic ontology of Portugal.

Bio:
David has an MSc. Informatics Engineering from the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, he is part of the XLDB group at LaSIGE. Currently he is working on GREASE (Geographic Reasoning for Search Engines) project, which researches information access methods to large collections of documents having geographically rich text and meta-data, with emphasis on the web.

XI Annual Portuguese American Post-Graduate Society (PAPS) Forum 2010

The XI Annual Portuguese American Post-Graduate Society (PAPS) Forum 2010 will be held on April 10 2010, at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. The main goal of this event is “to bring together a group of people with similar interests (post-graduate students in North America) to discuss topics of interest to this community. This is achieved through getting interesting people to share their experiences with us, and through their talks organize social and networking events,” explained Carla Costa, Ph.D. Student in the Program in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship under the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal program.

The main topics in discussion will be Science, Technology, and their impact in other fields, such as art, society, industry. “We will also have an American historian of Portuguese history talking on how Portuguese history is perceived in academia abroad,” said Costa adding “we want to have a wide range of themes to cater to the diverse interests of the participants, while binding them together. Being interested in science and technology, but also in how they impact the rest of the world is also a distinctive trait of Carnegie Mellon University’s culture, which informs our reasoning.”

The XI Annual Portuguese American Post-Graduate Society (PAPS) Forum 2010 talks are open to the public. Post-graduate students in North America, either Portuguese or with a connection to Portugal (like belonging to Carnegie Mellon Portugal, MIT Portugal, or UT Austin Portugal or similar Programs) just need to register on the website http://www.papsonline.org/ as a member.

More information available at: http://www.papsonline.org/

XI PAPS Forum Preliminary Program Saturday, April 10 th , 2010
Place: Rachid Auditorium, Gates Center for Computer Science (CMU)

8:30 Registration / Breakfast

9:00 Welcoming Remarks
Anabela Maia – President PAPS
Prof. José Moura – Director of CMU-Portugal Program at CMU

9:30 Session I – Key note address
Prof. José Mariano Gago, Science, Technology and Higher Education Portuguese Minister
Prof. Manuel Heitor, Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education

10:30 Coffee Break

11:00 Session II – Science, Technology and Society
Prof. Douglas L. Wheeler, University of New Hampshire, History

12:00 Lunch at the Asian Students Association Conference Room (GHC 6115)

1:30 Session III – Science and Technology in Industry and Academia – round table
Luís Meireles – Biodevices
Vasco Calais Pedro – Bueda
Cláudia Ferreira – Hovione

2:30 Session IV – Science and Technology
Prof. Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science

3:30 Coffee Break

4:00 Session V – Science, Technology and Art
Artist Joana Ricou

5:30 Closing Remarks
Luis Pedro Coelho – Local Executive Committee

[Place: Pittsburgh Athletic Association, 4215 5th Avenue]

7:00 Cocktail / Dinner
Keynote Speaker: Maria do Céu da Conceição, Founder of the Dhaka Project, Woman of the Year in the United Arab Emirates in 2009, European Union award for people “Exceptionally Creative and Innovative”

1 st Workshop on the Economics of ICTs Overview

The 1 st Workshop on the Economics of ICTs took place in Porto, Portugal, on March 11 th , 2010. The event was organized by the Faculdade de Economia of the Universidade do Porto, Carnegie Mellon | Portugal Program, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Management and Economics (CEFAGE) of the Universidade de Évora.

In this event Alexandre Mateus, Ph.D. student in Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) under the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal program, made a presentation about his article titled “Characterizing Digital Media in a University Campus Network” (pdf) written with Jon M. Peha, professor in the Department of EPP and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Q. In your opinion, what is the most important conclusion of your work?
A. I think our work can offer some interesting insights for policymaking. In particular, we found P2P, and unauthorized transfers of copyrighted content to be widespread in a university campus, however decreasing over the 1-year period we looked at. While students transfer a lot of media using P2P, a significant share of those that use P2P also purchase media from the iTunes Store, which indicates that factors other than price or fear of legal consequences must influence students’ decision to purchase media versus transfer it from P2P, and such factors can perhaps be used by copyright owners to compete with P2P. Also, on the side of enforcement, we find that network monitoring technology was able to detect most users that transferred copyrighted content if those users did not activate traffic encryption, but that use of encryption can severely undermine the purpose of network monitoring for enforcement of copyrights.

Q. What could be the impact of your study?
A. I think our study contributes with empirical evidence to aid in the policymaking process. Over the years there has been debate as to how big copyright infringement using P2P is, which relied on poor and scattered evidence, and how to deal with it. Our work steps forward to bridge those gaps by providing a characterization of P2P file-sharing based on actual observation of activities performed on the network, and by evaluating the effectiveness of one of the principal technologies being considered as an enforcement mechanism for copyright protection online.

Q. This was the 1 st Workshop on the Economics of ICTs. Are these kind of events important to whom is doing a Ph.D.?
A. I think this type of event is always beneficial for Ph.D. students, for two main reasons. First, because you get exposed to what the research community is doing in your area and surrounding areas. But more important is that you get to expose your work and gather valuable input and criticism from your peers. There is nothing better than comments and criticism from an audience of knowledgeable people to help improve the quality of the research that you produce.

The 2 nd Workshop on the Economics of ICTs will be held in Évora, on March 25 th -26 th , 2011.

More information available at http://www.fep.up.pt/conferencias/ict

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar:”Machine learning tools and their use in automotive electronic design & validation process: Case study of FM09 (Formula Manipal)”

Speaker: Shadab Khan (Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica)

Venue: TBA

Date: Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Time: 13:00

Lunch will be provided

Abstract:
Automotive electronic is full of challenges. Engine controller units, executing millions of line code & performing decision making influenced by several parameters, is one of the most complex embedded device being used. In this presentation we explore the possibility of how machine learning tools can enable the process of making ECU modeling and design validation easier and smarter. A data acquisition system is another essential tool at a race car engineer’s disposal that provides him with data necessary to make valid adjustments to achieve an overall better performance from the car. We explore how machine learning tools helps in deriving the meaning from the data and analyze them to interpret the performance of the car in conditions which are unmeasurable during the normal lap run. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on further possibilities of use of Machine Learning tools to help an automotive design & validation engineer.

Bio:
Shadab is an undergraduate student at Dept of Electrical Engg, Manipal Univeristy, India. He is currently a visiting scholar at Institute for Systems & Robotics – Lisbon working on R & D of techniques of automatic karyotyping of chromosomes using advanced image processing algorithms. Shadab is Co-founder of ARRO, an organization that teaches various robotics related topics to college and school student in India & also guides them to carry out research projects. He is a Formula Manipal alumni, and worked on the electronics of the race car FM09.