News: In the Media

Identification and Risk Analysis in Programs

To anticipate risks and to adopt preventive measures to avoid possible errors in software programs will be one of the debate themes in the seminary “The Identification and Risk Analysis in Software Projects”. This initiative will happen tomorrow by 10 o’clock, in the Informatics Engineering Department of the University of Coimbra’s Science and Technology Faculty (FCTUC). The context of this seminary is the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, and it is for software engineers, team leaders and project managers who want to learn some more about identification and analysis of risks. The seminary will emphasize the “definition of success borders, risks identification process and their characterization, as well as the fundaments of the “mitigation techniques”.

Read the Portuguese article at Diário de Coimbra (December 10 th , 2010)

Interview with João Barros, National Director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, about the continuity of the partnership beyond December 2011.

Read the Portuguese article at Diário Económico (December 21 th , 2010).

High-Tech Degrees Guarantee Employement
Four groups of students from the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute of the University of Madeira (UMa) have presented the final essays of their master degrees in Human-Computer Interaction and Entertaining Technologies, in the University Campus.

Read the Portuguese article at Diário de Notícias da Madeira (December 17 th , 2010), Jornal da Madeira Online (December 17 th , 2010), Diário da Cidade (December 17 th , 2010)..

Inês Lima Azevedo Will Lead New Center To Develop Strategies Improving Climate and Energy Decision Making at CMU
The Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making, funded by a five-year, $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, will develop and implement strategies for protecting everything from fragile marine ecosystems to curbing dangerous carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation. “We plan to develop new, innovative insights and methods to assist key stakeholders as they address important decisions involving climate change and the ongoing transformation of the world’s critical energy systems,” said Ines Lima Azevedo, the center’s executive director and an assistant research professor in the university’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP). “At the same time, we’ll also be developing new theories and methods for supporting decision making under uncertainty.”

Read the Portuguese article at Pela Natureza Online (December 15th) // Portal do Ambiente Online (December 14th) // Jornal i Online // Correio do Minho Online // Comunidade Notícias Portuguesas Online // Notícias da Costa da Caparica Online (December 13th).

National Director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program Receives Young Researcher Prize IEEE ComSoc for Europe, Middle East and Africa
The Young Researcher Prize IEEE ComSoc for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) was awarded to João Barros, associated professor of the Engineering Faculty of the University of Porto (FEUP). João Barros is also professor of the MIT, national director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and responsible by the Telecommunications Institute (IT) delegation in the city of Porto.

Read the Portuguese article at Semana Informática (December 17th)

Drive-in Project Will Improve City Mobility

In the beginning of 2011, around 500 taxis from the city of Porto will have a NDrive GPS. The Drive-In project is funded by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, through the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. The main goal is to improve the communication among vehicles. Researchers from FCUP and FEUP are working on this project, with researchers from the University of Aveiro, the Telecommunications Institute and the Carnegie Mellon University. They work in partnership with NDrive, Brisa, Geolink, Raditaxis and the IMTT.

Read the Portuguese article at OJE Newspaper (December 20 th , 2010).

Manuela Veloso Named IEEE Fellow for Developing Robot Teams

Manuela M. Veloso, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, has been named a fellow of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) for her contributions to the development of cognition, perception and action in autonomous robot teams.

IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership conferred by the organization’s board of directors and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. Veloso, who holds the Herbert A. Simon Chair in Computer Science, is known for her research in artificial intelligence and robotics, and for her pioneering work on robot soccer, which has emerged as an important research tool for studying how autonomous agents can work cooperatively in complex, uncertain environments. She is president of the International RoboCup Federation, which sponsors annual world championships in robot soccer. She and her students have fielded RoboCup teams since 1997, and have been international champions several times. CMU’s team finished second this year in RoboCup’s small-size league.

Veloso’s current project consists of investigating and developing groups of service robots, which perform tasks for humans in indoor environments. Aware of their limitations, these service robots called CoBots for Companion Robots, ask for help from humans when they decide that they need help. They navigate using multi-modal sensory information, including WiFi vision and laser data. One version of the highly maneuverable omnidirectional robots is designed to serve as a guide for visitors and another is designed to provide mobile telepresence.

Veloso this year became president-elect of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She has been a fellow of AAAI since 2004. Last year, she received the 2009 Autonomous Agents Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. She is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award and the university’s Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research. She received her doctor’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon in 1992.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University Website
December 2010

João Barros Chosen for IEEE ComSoc Young Researcher Award

The IEEE Communications Society has recently chosen João Barros, national director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program as the recipient of the Young Researcher Award for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Region. This award honors researchers who have been very active in IEEE ComSoc publication and conference activities over the last three years. The upper age limit is 35. The award letter states that the awards committee “had received a large number of excellent submissions, which were assessed by the Awards committee for ComSoc EMEA Region. The assessment was carried out against a very stringent set of criteria”. The awards ceremony will take place in June 2011 at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2011) in Kyoto, Japan.

João Barros is best known internationally for his research on physical layer security, network coding and sensor networks, all of which can be used as building blocks for future internet architectures and applications. By applying fundamental principles of information theory, his research group at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP) and Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) has found new ways of communicating securely and efficiently in highly dynamic environments such as wireless networks and peer-to-peer networks. Physical-layer security technologies in the form of codes and protocols developed under his leadership allow wireless systems to exploit the noise in the communication channel to prevent eavesdroppers from extracting key information. The use of network coding in combination with some of the algorithms developed by João Barros’ group enables telecom operators to decrease the overall delay and increase the robustness of their network. Instead of storing and forwarding copies of whatever they receive, nodes in the network use simple linear operations to combine the different data packets. The destination no longer has to wait for a specific data packet, because it only needs to receive a sufficient number of combinations to recover the original information.

Recently, João Barros has been very active in the area of vehicular networking as a key enabler in intelligent transportation systems. Together with colleagues at the Department of Computer Science (DCC-FCUP), Universidade de Aveiro, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, Barros is investigating how cars, buses and other vehicles can be used as a massive urban scanner by picking up large quantities of measurements from different sensors, sharing this data over wireless channels and delivering the information to a data center for further processing.

João Barros is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the School of Engineering of the University of Porto, the Head of the Porto Delegation of the Instituto de Telecomunicações, and a Visiting Professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In February 2009, Dr. Barros was appointed National Director of the CMU-Portugal Program, a five-year international partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and 12 Portuguese Universities and Research Institutions. He received his undergraduate education in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Porto (UP), Portugal and Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany, until 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Germany, in 2004. João Barros received a Best Teaching Award from the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts, as well as scholarships from several institutions, including the Fulbright Commission (for a research stay at Cornell University), the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the Luso-American Foundation. He served as Secretary of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society between 2006 and 2009. Barros is a national delegate to the European Commission for the area of security. He has been a PI and Co-PI of numerous national and international research projects.

November, 2010

Isabel Trancoso Named IEEE Fellow

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, elevated Prof. Isabel Trancoso to IEEE Fellow. Recognizing the achievements of its members is an important part of the mission of the IEEE. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for one of the Association’s most prestigious honors, elevation to IEEE Fellow.

The IEEE Board of Directors, at its November 2010 meeting, elevated Prof. Isabel Trancoso to IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2011, with the following citation: for sustained contributions to speech technology, especially in the provision of research in and resources for the Portuguese language.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 385,000 members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.

source: www.ieee.org

Isabel Trancoso’s research interests lie in speech synthesis and recognition, coding speech-to-speech translation, and computer-aided language learning. She teaches, among others, speech processing courses and programming at the Instituto Superior Técnico. She is also a senior researcher at INESC ID Lisbon, having launched the speech processing group, now restructured as Spoken Language Systems Lab. Her current scope is much broader, encompassing many areas in speech recognition and synthesis, with a special emphasis on tools and resources for the Portuguese language. She is a member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee and the Permanent Council for the Organization of the International Conferences on Spoken Language Processing. She was elected Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing (2003-2005), and Member-at-Large of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors (2006-2008). Trancoso’s current research projects include VIDIVIDEO, LIREC, and POSTPORT.