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News: Event News

iFetch Project joins this year’s edition of the Summer School VISUM 2022

The CMU Portugal Large Scale project iFetch will be part of this year’s edition of VISUM 2022 a Summer School focused on Computer Vision and Machine Learning that will take place onsite in Porto between July 10 and 16, organized by INESC TEC.

The iFetch team led by Ricardo Sousa (LinkedIn/Twitter), the project’s principal Investigator at FARFETCH, will support a Mentorship Program on Conversational Agents included in the event as one of the mentors. While attending the VISUM summer school week, one of the students will be challenged by Ricardo Sousa to work on a computer vision problem while getting acquainted with the latest developments in conversational agents.

“We have decided to join this initiative and support this mentorship program as it is an outstanding opportunity to inspire young researchers in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Likewise, these initiatives are of paramount importance to us as it is iFetch objective to smooth the pathways between fundamental research and business. So we are delighted with this program and keen to start working with the team.”, explains Ricardo Sousa.

This event will be an inspiring opportunity for young researchers to get feedback from senior scholars and industrial researchers in Machine Learning and Computer Vision.

The Summer School will also host an Industry Day and iFetch will be one of the projects to be presented.

Applications to VISUM 2022 are open until March 31.
Original news article at the iFetch blog

Watch the project CMU Portugal Video:

The Portuguese Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education visits Carnegie Mellon University

The Portuguese Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education, Manuel Heitor, visited Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh on November 29th and 30th.

Minister Manuel Heitor was accompanied by CMU Portugal National Director Nuno Nunes and by the Program´s Executive Director in Portugal Sílvia Castro, as well as by Director at CMU José M. F. Moura and by the Associate Director of the Program at CMU Megan Flohr. The visit focused on strengthening the cooperation between Portugal, Carnegie Mellon University, and Industry through the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.

Minister Heitor held meetings with CMU’s Provost James Garrett; Dean William Sanders, College of Engineering; and Dean Martial Hebert, School of Computer Science, to discuss the main initiatives of the Phase III of the Program including the two Calls for Exploratory Research Programs (ERPs) supporting 13 research projects, the Call for Large Scale Collaborative Research projects (LSCRP) supporting 12 large research projects, the dual degree PhD programs with currently 24 students enrolled, and the student and faculty exchange visitors programs.

Manuel Heitor met with several faculty and students. In one of the sessions, he had a meeting with three ERP CMU PIs: Sheng Shen (Intelligent Beamforming Metasurfaces), Justine Sherry (SyNAPSE), and Louis-Phillippe Morency (Automatic generation of humor for social robots).

This session, was followed by three workshops addressing the themes of the Program’s Large-Scale Collaborative Research Projects:
• Understanding Conversations to Improve Productivity led by Nuno Nunes, and featuring Alex Rudnicky (ifetch), Alan Black, Craig Stewart (Unbabel, MAIA), Ruben Martins (GOLEM) and Jonathan Aldrich (GOLEM);
• Vehicular Technologies, Waste Management and Safer Forests led by Justine Sherry, and featuring Mitch Small (BEE2WasteCrypto), George Kantor (Safeforest), and Peter Steenkiste (FLOYD);
• Improving Machine Learning and Applications in Healthcare led by Pedro Ferreira (IntelligentCare), and featuring Christos Faloutsos (AIDA), Asim Smailagic (TAMI), and Carmel Majidi (Wow).

The Portuguese Minister had lunch and engaged in discussion with 17 Dual Degree Ph.D. students currently at CMU and some of their CMU advisors .

Finally, there were meetings with CMU faculty, for example, with Professor Peter Adams, Erica Fuchs, and Granger Morgan discussing decarbonization, and Professor Soummya Kar discussing the LSCRP project Building Hope and a collaboration with REN, the power transport company in Portugal.

The two days visit was an excellent opportunity for the Portuguese Minister to hear about the most recent achievements of the CMU Portugal Program directly from people who are involved in its different areas, from education to research. The agenda including the complete list of the participants in the visit can be found here.

Click for the Visit Full Agenda here.

 

Webinar #1 – AIDA Webinar Series I Improving 5G Management with Carlos Martins and Pedro Fidalgo from Mobileum

On December 7th took place the first Webinar of the AIDA Webinar Series I Improving 5G Management promoted by the team of the Large Scale Collaborative project AIDA with the support of the CMU Portugal Program.

This first Webinar was hosted by Carlos Martins and Pedro Fidalgo from the project’s leading company Mobileum and moderated by José Orlando Pereira (Senior Researcher at INESC TEC and Professor at UMinho).

Webinar #1 Summary: 5G presents an opportunity for telecom operators to capture new revenue streams from industrial digitization. The network evolution has opened up an abundance of new business opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) in verticals such as industrial automation, security, health care, and automotive. Expanding non-telecom value chains, and supporting new business models through shared infrastrucuture, multiple stakeholders, open interfaces increases the complexity of delivery chains, attack vectors and consequently exposure to risk and fraud.

This webinar aims to discuss risk management as a platform that is able to protect the 5G ecosystem in its multiple layers, and deploy an Integrated Risk Management strategy that manages high data volumes, real time visibility through local edges, ensuring  system-wide intrusion detection, tampering protection, confidentiality and data privacy, protecting the ecosystem and value chain.

Webinar #2: The impact of edge computing and 5G for Telcos
Let’s leverage from the computational power that is almost my neighbour (edge), without forgetting the full power at the cloud.

Date: February 11, 2022 | 3 p.m. (UTC)
Speakers: Ricardo Vilaça, INESC TEC and University of Minho, and Bruno Sousa, University of Coimbra
Moderator: João Vilela, FCUP, CISUC and INESC TEC



For the full Webinar #1 please watch the video: 

For more information visit the AIDA Website.

AIDA Webinar Series: Improving 5G Risk Management

The CMU Portugal Program and the coordination of the Large Scale Collaborative project AIDA will host between December 2021 and September 2022 a series of webinars on the improvement of 5G risk management.

The “AIDA Webinar Series I Improving 5G Risk Management” will count with a total of five (5) Webinars held every two months, gathering leading experts from academia to industry involved in the project. The main goal of this initiative is to launch a discussion that will contribute to highlight different topics and challenges related to this area. 

The five different sessions will consist of an overview talk by an academic or a business expert involved in the AIDA project, followed by a moderated discussion with attendees. 

With this initiative, the organization expects to share relevant knowledge and experiences to a broader audience in order to exemplify how the collaboration between academia and industry can play an important role on the improvement of 5G risk management for the benefit of the telco companies.

Registration to the Webinar #1 is currently open.

For more information visit the AIDA Website.

 

 

CAMELOT online Workshop highlighted the results of the first year of project

The CMU Portugal Large Scale Project CAMELOT organized on October 25th its first annual Workshop for an overview and balance of the first half of the project which was launched at the beginning of 2020 and will convene through 2022.

The workshop was held online and counted with representatives from all the institutions involved in the project, including Pedro Bizarro from the project’s leading Company Feedzai, Alcides Fonseca from LASIGE and Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL), Bruno Cabral from Universidade de Coimbra (UC), Paolo Romano from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and David Garlan from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. The Workshop was divided into four (4) sessions, one for each partner Institution starting with Feedzai, who presented work on detecting money laundering and on explaining predictions on time series.

Técnico and CMU followed next with two CMU Portugal Dual Degree Ph.D. students in Software Engineering as speakers. Maria Casimiro started her Ph.D. in 2019 and did an internship at Feedzai during the summer (more about her experience here) and Pedro Mendes who entered the Program in 2021. Both students are being supervised by Paolo Romano (IST) and David Garlan (CMU), researchers of the CAMELOT project, and worked on automatic adaptation and optimization of machine learning systems in the cloud.

In the second session, Alcides Fonseca hosted two presentations from FCUL, one on static verification of Machine Learning pipelines, by MSc student João David, and the second on Genetic Probabilistic Programming by PhD students Guilherme Espada and Paulo Santos, the latter also a PhD Dual Degree student with CMU Portugal.

The final session was chaired by Bruno Cabral, who introduced Qianying Liao, Hugo Matalonga and Francisco Ferreira, from the University of Coimbra, who worked on different approaches for privacy-preserving transfer learning.

The CAMELOT project expects to revolutionize the detection of financial fraud through Machine Learning techniques. The project aims to develop an innovative machine learning platform, which will tackle three key issues that hinder the efficiency and accuracy of modern AI applications such as machine learning models, cloud resources, anonymized data, privacy issues, and integrating information from different, independent, and heterogeneous data platforms.

More about the project here or watch the video below:

 

CMU Portugal Info session gathers over 90 potential Ph.D. candidates

This year’s edition of the CMU Portugal online Info Session “How to apply for a CMU Portugal Dual-Degree Ph.D. Scholarships” gathered on October 27th, 94 participants from all over the globe, a significant number of potential candidates to the Program’s Call for Dual Degree scholarships that will soon be launched.

This Session allowed future candidates to learn more about the application process and discuss any potential questions and concerns. The session started with a presentation by João Fumega, CMU Portugal Education Officer, who went through the main requirements to apply to a CMU Portugal Program scholarship available in 7 different Ph.D. programs.

From Carnegie Mellon University, Jenn Landefeld (Marketing and Communications Manager at the Computer Science Department) and Jessica Tomko (Assistant Director of Admissions, Electrical and Computer Engineering), gave a perspective on how the application process proceeds at the Carnegie Mellon University. Both focused on the specificities of the requirements by their respective departments that offer joint Ph.D. degrees with Portuguese Universities under the scope of CMU Portugal.

All presentations are available for download here.

Margarida Ferreira, Dual Degree student in Computer Science and Alex Gaudio, Dual Degree student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, were the two last speakers of the session. The CMU Portugal Ph.D. candidates shared their experience and advice with the audience.

At the end of the session, there was still time for Q&A. The lively session was full of many relevant questions about the application process.

During the session, all participants were informed about the main requirements, application processes, and guidelines, that are also available on CMU Portugal website. Each of the seven available Ph.Ds available has its own application process: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy, Human-Computer Interaction, Language Technologies, Robotics, and Software Engineering.

All CMU Portugal scholarships allow candidates to spend 3 years in Portugal hosted at a Portuguese affiliated University and 2 years at CMU. By the end of the Ph.D. candidates will receive two diplomas conferred by Carnegie Mellon and the University in Portugal.

For more information and doubts about the Ph.Ds please feel visit the FAQs section on our website or feel free to contact the CMU Portugal program at apply@cmuportugal.org

CMU Portugal welcomes its Ph.D. students on Pittsburgh Campus

On Thursday, October 7th, the CMU Portugal Program held the 2021 Fall Welcome Back Lunch on campus at Carnegie Mellon University. Dual Degree students attended from five different departments including Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute, Software Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy.

The CMU Portugal Program currently has 18 students on CMU’s campus this semester, one of the largest numbers ever. From this group, 15 attended the Welcome Back Lunch including many students who are at CMU for the first time. First year students Luis Gomes, Margarida de Almeida, and Pedro Mendes are spending their first academic year studying at CMU. Nuno Sabino, Afonso Tinoco, Manuel Fancisco Reis Carneiro, Pedro Malveiro Valdeira, Afonso Amaral, Patrick Fernandes, and Daniel Ramos are all in their second year of the Program and are now spending their first year at CMU. Neil Mehta and Diogo Mendes Cardoso were able to share even further experiences, it being their third year in the Program; and Jihoon Shin and Artur Balanuta are finishing their Dual Degree Ph.D. Programs at CMU.

At the Welcome Back Lunch, first year through final year students were able to meet and introduce themselves to their colleagues in the Program in an informal setting while enjoying lunch. While getting to know each other, they bonded over the neighborhood of Pittsburgh they are living in and the nuances of the local grocery stores and products in America and Portugal. Other topics of conversation included the courses offered at CMU and in Portugal, the differences between our various Dual Degree Ph.D. Programs, and their experiences settling in at CMU and Pittsburgh. During this networking event, the students also shared their experiences at CMU and their Portuguese Institutions such as Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT- UNL), Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC), Universidade do Porto (FEUP and FCUP) and Instituto Superior Técnico. Many students expressed their appreciation for the gathering and are looking forward to the next on- campus event.

Manuela Veloso awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Bordeaux

Manuela Veloso, a world renowned computer scientist and AI researcher and a Carnegie Mellon Portugal Faculty member since the launch of the partnership in 2006, was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Bordeaux (Université de Bordeaux). In the same Ceremony on October 5th at the University headquarters, Martin Vetterli, president of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, was honored with the same title.

The opening ceremony was hosted by the University president, Manuel Tunon de Lara, who, during his speech, emphasized the importance of this distinction in Academic life and handed Manuela Veloso the title and insignia of Doctor Honoris Causa.

In her acceptance speech, Manuela Veloso spoke about how she began doing research in AI and robotics, and highlighted the launch of RoboCup to foster worldwide research and competitions in robot soccer, an innovative initiative started in the mid 1990s, for which she was a co-founder. Notably, she also referenced a few of her personal life experiences that led to her long term dedication to the science and engineering of AI and robotics. She concluded explaining her new exciting career direction in AI and finance, which she has recently embraced as Head of AI Research at J.P. Morgan Chase.

Manuela Veloso started her pathway with an Electrical Engineering bachelor degree and a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico. Upon coming to the United States in 1984, she pursued a Master of Arts in Computer Science at Boston University and a Ph.D. also in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Her Ph.D. thesis, Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving, was supervised by Jaime Carbonell. Manuela Veloso joined the CMU Computer Science Department as an assistant professor, to then become Herbert A. Simon University Professor. She led the CMU Machine Learning Department from 2016 to 2018, when she took a leave of absence to create and head AI Research at J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the largest financial institutions. She is now Emeritus Professor in CMU’s School of Computer Science.

She was the founder of the CORAL Research Laboratory, for research in autonomous AI agents that Collaborate, Observer, Reason, Act, and Learn, with her many students and visitors over more than 25 years. She has published more than 300 scientific articles and she has graduated 45 PhD students. She was president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), co-founder and president of RoboCup. She further received several academic awards during her career, being Fellow of the four main professional associations in her area, namely AAAI, AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.

This year she was ranked in the top 10 of 35 world’s most influential women in engineering on the Academic Influence list long side astronauts, founders and CEOs of well-known technology and researchers from around the world. The Portuguese researcher has been strongly involved with the CMU Portugal Program, advising several dual-degree Ph.D. candidates in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Robotics, within collaborative projects between Portuguese and Carnegie Mellon research teams.

José M.F. Moura awarded with prestigious Doctor Honoris Causa by Universidade de Lisboa

In a Ceremony held on September 13th José M.F. Moura was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by Universidade de Lisboa, after a proposal by Técnico, where he studied and lectured. The prestigious award recognizes his academic, scientific and professional outstanding contributions, worldwide and with a strong impact in Portugal. José M.F. Moura is CMU Portugal Director at Carnegie Mellon since its launch in 2006 and a key supporter to its foundation and throughout the years.

With a career of more than 50 years and living in the United States since the 70s he never lost the connection to the Institution where he graduated and always kept supporting research and educational initiatives between Portugal and the United States.

At the Honoris Causa Ceremony the laudatory speech was given by Professor Isabel Ribeiro, Vice-president of Técnico for Administrative Modernization, who highlighted José M.F. Moura’s “long and brilliant career”.

During his speech, José M.F. Moura stated quoting Técnico’s article: “I am deeply honored and humbled to be awarded by Universidade de Lisboa and Instituto Superior Técnico”, adding “This is also the recognition of the merit of those who over the years have accompanied me, supported me, with whom I have had the privilege to collaborate and to live with.”

About his home Institution he added “Técnico was a school guided by excellence and rigour but, above all, it was a school of life”, said the laureate. “I wanted to show that in Portugal, particularly in IST Department of Electrical Engineering, we could do research”, he said about his decision to go to MIT, and how he did not hesitate to return and stay in Portugal.

Regarding his work under the CMU Portugal program, he highlighted “the CMU Portugal program was a success due to its directors in Portugal because they were on the ground, and the professors and students, both at CMU and in Portugal”.

This distinction was a reason to celebrate and to pay tribute to his impressive career, reason why CMU Portugal asked a group of people who were part of his path in Portugal, from students to co-workers, many of whom became close friends, to leave him a testimony.

Watch the videos here (in Portuguese with auto caption available on youtube) or directly on our youtube channel.

For more about the Ceremony you can read the original article at Técnico website and video available at their Youtube page. 

Interview with José M.F. Moura in Expresso.