News: Success Stories

Portuguese Professors Receive Highest Faculty Distinction at Carnegie Mellon

Irene Fonseca and Manuela Veloso, internationally respected educators and researchers in their fields of study, recently received the title of University Professor, the highest distinction awarded at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Along with Irene Fonseca and Manuela Veloso, Mark Kamlet (CMU Provost and Executive Vice President), Sheldon Cohen (Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology), and Jim Daniels (Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English), were also named to the 2014 Class of University Professors.

The Mellon College of Science Professor of Mathematics, Irene Fonseca has been since 1987 at CMU, where she leads the Center for Nonlinear Analysis, a center devoted to research and training in Applied Mathematics at the intersection of Mathematics and the Physical Sciences and Engineering. She is also the director of the Partnerships for International Research and Education project, a National Science Foundation-funded multi-institution grant that addresses issues in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics that arise from Materials Science. Irene Fonseca leads the Applied Mathematics Dual Degree Doctoral Program in the CMU Portugal Program. Irene Fonseca’s research lies at the interface of Applied Analysis with Materials and Imaging Sciences. (Irene Fonseca’s statement)

The Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science Manuela Veloso joined CMU in 1992, after earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science also at CMU. Manuela Veloso is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on robot soccer, an important research tool for studying how autonomous agents can work cooperatively in complex, uncertain environments. Since 1997, the robot teams fielded by her and her students have perennially been strong competitors in the championships of the International RoboCup Federation, of which she is a past president. She is the founder and head of the CORAL research group that investigates autonomous robots and software agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act and Learn to perform planning, execution and learning tasks.

Manuela Veloso’s has been involved in the CMU Portugal Program co-leading research projects and co-advising dual degree doctoral students. Recently, Manuela Veloso and Francisco Melo, from INESC ID, were awarded a research grant for an Entrepreneurial Research Initiative (ERI) titled “INSIDE: Intelligent Networked robot Systems for Symbiotic Interaction with Children with Impaired Development.”

The title of University Professor is typically awarded to professors who represent the intellectual leadership of CMU through their expertise and accomplishments in their respective fields of study.

June 2014

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Irene Fonseca will be in Portugal for the Workshop “Trends in Non-Linear Analysis 2014,” which will take place between July 31 and August 1, 2014, at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL).

 

Dragana Bajovic and Dusan Jakovetic, alumni of the dual degree Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, have received the A.G. Milnes Award Best Doctoral Thesis in ECE at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Dragana Bajovic started her studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008/2009, and within five years she finished her dual degree Ph.D.. She spent part of her time with her advisor in Portugal João Xavier, from IST-UL, and was at CMU with her co-advisor Bruno Sinopolli. An expert in distributed optimization and information processing in sensor networks, Dragana Bajovic defended her dissertation in May 2013 on “Large Deviations Rates for Distributed Inference.”

Following a similar path, Dusan Jakovetic also graduated in 2013 from IST-UL and CMU. Co-advised by João Xavier, researcher at IST-UL, and José M.F. Moura, the Philip and Marsha Dowd University Professor at CMU, Dusan Jakovetic defended his thesis titled “Distributed Optimization: Algorithms and Convergence Rates.” He focused his research on wireless sensor networks, distributed smooth and non-smooth optimization, and consensus algorithms. According to this alum, the dual degree Ph.D. allowed him to test this dynamic research area in a real-world environment. Dusan Jakovetic is also a researcher at the BioSense Center.

The A.G. Milnes Award is given to an ECE doctorate whose Ph.D. work is judged to be of the highest quality and is likely to have a significant impact in his or her field. The recognition, given by Carnegie Mellon University, is an acknowledgement of the high quality and impact of the students’ work.

June 2014

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Dragana Bajovic and Dusan Jakovetic will be in Lisbon, at IST-UL, for the 2014 Edition of LARSyS Summer School.

Universidade do Porto Has a New Rector

Sebastião Feyo de Azevedo was elected the 18th Rector of the Universidade do Porto, now in its 103rd year of existence, succeeding José Marques dos Santos, who was the Rector in the past eight years. Elected with a program entitled “Anticipating the Future, Daring to Change,” Sebastião Feyo de Azevedo leaves the position of Dean of the Faculdade de Engenharia of the Universidade do Porto (FEUP), which he had occupied since 2010. The Rector of the Universidade do Porto leads the government and external representation of the University, and chairs its Management Board and Senate.

Sebastião Feyo de Azevedo visited CMU with José Marques dos Santos, the former U.Porto Rector, in May 2011.

July 2014

Faculty Exchange Program: An Opportunity to Learn And Foster Collaborations

Fernando Morgado Dias, an assistant professor at the Universidade da Madeira (UMa) and researcher at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI), spent four months at Carnegie Mellon University, more specifically at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, hosted by Mario Berges.

When he decided to participate in the Faculty Exchange Program, in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, Fernando Morgado Dias had a double goal. Firstly, he wanted to attend and contribute to at least one course. “The idea was to experience the CMU culture and to understand the methods used and possibly apply them in Portugal,” he said. Secondly, he wanted to “develop a professional connection with colleagues at CMU in order to promote future collaborations.”

While at CMU, Fernando Morgado Dias attended the Applied Machine Learning and the Machine Learning courses. The goal “was to expand my knowledge in these areas as they are relevant to my research. They not only complement my knowledge about Artificial Neural Networks, but they also make it possible to select the most appropriate tool for each problem within Machine Learning,” the professor explained. According to Fernando Morgado Dias, the choice of the second course was due to the fact that “it is closely related to a course that I teach, which is Advanced Digital Systems. Both courses are project-based and the approach followed at CMU will influence the next edition of this course at the Universidade da Madeira,” he said. In addition, “I was part of the Advanced Digital Design Project course where I worked on two project proposals and taught one of the lectures,” he explained.

Fernando Morgado Dias worked with Mario Berges and his Ph.D. student Lucas Pereira (visiting researcher at CMU and Ph.D. Student at the UMa) on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). “My goal is to continue developing this work during the next semester,” he stated. The NILM approach has been broadly studied over the last few years and promises to monitor energy consumption with a limited number of resources. However, according to the researcher, the approach faces several challenges due to the lack of labeled data to develop algorithms or empirical solutions to control the consumption of energy. “It is this latter problem that we are addressing,” he stressed.

The stay at CMU was also an opportunity to discuss opportunities for future collaborations with other colleagues, such as Yuvraj Agarwal and Norman Sadeh, professors at CMU, and Aminata Garba, professor at CMU-Rwanda. “With Yuvraj Agarwal and Norman Sadeh, I discussed a project proposal on smart grid management with applications to the Island of Madeira. With Aminata Garba, I discussed the possibility of collaborating with CMU-Rwanda, more specifically in terms of applied research that is useful to that country,” he concluded.

June 2014

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Faculty Exchange Program
The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program supports a Faculty Exchange Program, in which individuals holding a doctoral degree and affiliated with Portuguese Higher Education Institutions or Research Labs, can spend one term working in research, education and innovation at Carnegie Mellon University to experience its culture and best practices.

Dual Degree Ph.D. Student Recreates Indoor Scenes in 3D Using Photographs

Ricardo Cabral, a dual degree Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in the scope of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, has recently published a paper titled “Piecewise Planar and Compact Floorplan Reconstruction from Images,” which describes the work done in order to develop an automatic method to recreate 3D models of indoor scenes using photographs of those same locations. This method was developed as part of an internship that the Portuguese student did at Google. The paper will be presented at the 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2014), which took place between June 23 and 28 in the United States.

Co-written with Yasutaka Furukawa, the paper shows that by focusing on reconstructing the dominant structure of the scene (the floorplan and walls, which is usually piecewise planar), the reconstructions are simplified and maintain the relevant information for navigation applications, for instance, while retaining appealing aesthetics for visualization by allowing the viewers to infer the geometry of clutter objects.

This is different from most existing methods, which focus primarily on producing 3D models of every single location with millimetric precision. The paper argues that models are never perfect and thus trigger noticeable rendering artifacts, which are unappealing for viewers. This is a well-studied phenomenon in the field of human aesthetics: a robot or a computer animation which looks and moves almost but not exactly like natural human beings is unpleasant to human observers.

According to the student, co-advised by João Paulo Costeira at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL) and Fernando De la Torre at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), “this work can be applied in architecture and civil engineering, but it can also be used to locate things and find directions in critical infrastructures, such as airports, hospitals, or malls,” he explains. The fact that our method is fully automatic allows companies to use this technology to build models and maps of indoor locations at a global scale. “Because this work was done during my internship at Google, an opportunity that came to be because of the CMU Portugal program, we were able to use their massive photo database,” Ricardo Cabral explains.

Computer vision, the area that this paper addresses, is a recent area, and over the past 40 years its “holy grail was making computers look at images and see the same way humans do,” he clarifies. “In our research at CMU and IST-UL we have been trying to develop large-scale systems that are able to process the increasing amount of imagery available on the Internet,” he adds. This has led to solutions for various problems in medicine (diagnostic aids and imaging technologies), entertainment (e.g., Microsoft Kinect and special effects in movies), robotics (e.g., self-driving cars), or manufacturing (e.g., automatic inspection).

The CVPR is the premier annual Computer Vision event comprising the main CVPR conference and several co-located workshops and short courses. With its high quality and low cost, it provides an exceptional value for students, academics and industry researchers.

You can learn more about the project here.

June 2014

Robert Simione Successfully Defended his Ph.D. Dissertation

On June 25, 2014, Robert Simione had his final public oral examination for the degree of doctor of philosophy, with a dissertation titled “Properties of Minimizers of Nonlocal Interaction Energy.” Co-advised by Diogo Gomes, from the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL), and Dejan Slepčev, from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Robert Simione enrolled in the Applied Mathematics dual degree doctoral program, at IST-UL and CMU, in 2009.

The examiners were Dejan Slepčev (Committee Chair, co-advisor, CMU), Diogo Gomes (co-advisor, IST-UL), David Kinderlehrer (CMU), Giovanni Leoni (CMU), and Huiqiang Jiang (University of Pittsburgh). More information at http://www.math.cmu.edu/graduate/dissertation.php?SeminarSelect=949.

July 2014

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CMU Portugal Program Ph.D. Alumni

CMU Portugal Program: A Model for How International Partnerships Can Work
By Ed Schlesinger*

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program (also known as Information and Communication Technologies Institute – ICTI) was and continues to be a grand international partnership. It has brought together students, faculty, and staff across multiple disciplines at Carnegie Mellon University with their counterparts across Portugal in both academia and industry. This partnership, supported and encouraged by the Government of Portugal through the Fundação para Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), has, I believe, succeeded in achieving all the goals that were originally part of the vision that was articulated when the CMU Portugal Program was founded. Moreover, it is my expectation that in the coming years as the bulk of the students begin to graduate from this program and enter the workforce in academia, industry and government and as spin off companies grow and prosper we will witness an impact exceeding even those ambitious early goals.

Since the founding of the CMU Portugal Program, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon has been a central participant in the Program. My own belief is that partnerships of this sort, in various forms, that bring together academia, government and industry whether local, regional, or as in this case international are essential for both the advancement of research and education in an engineering context and are equally essential for economic growth and development in society in the twenty-first century. It is for this reason that I have personally worked to contribute as much as I could to making this partnership a success.

It is not always easy for a partnership such as this to achieve success. Attention must be focused on challenges and issues on all fronts; the education of students, the development of joint research projects, the translation of these efforts into an impact in society through spin off companies; partnerships with existing companies and more. A vision such as this can be easier to describe broadly than to implement in detail in terms of day-to-day operations. One cannot underestimate the challenges associated with creating an academic process that allows universities with very different academic cultures or industry and academia in multiple settings to work together. Addressing policy issues associated with everything from admissions, to conflicts of interest, to academic policy, intellectual property, and more required and continues to require constant attention and stewardship. The long term commitment of the faculty, the academic leadership, the industrial and government participants has been essential and is a key element that has allowed us to work through these and other challenges and that ultimately resulted in the working structure and success we see today.

I believe that in many ways the CMU Portugal Program serves as a model for how international partnerships can work and demonstrates the benefit of such partnerships. I have no doubt that with the continued commitment of all involved CMU Portugal Program will continue to advance all the institutions and societies participating in this partnership and I look forward to seeing this in the coming years.

*Benjamin T. Rome Dean
Whiting School of Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Formerly Head of ECE at Carnegie Mellon University

February 2014

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The Op-Ed is an essay written by a member of the CMU Portugal Program Community. It is a new area/section of the CMU Portugal Program Newsletter.

Irene Fonseca Receives Highest Faculty Distinction at Carnegie Mellon

“ On April 29, I was deeply honored to be named one of five new CMU University Professors. My nomination and subsequent election to University Professor is without a doubt one of the greatest professional highlights of my nearly three decade-long career at CMU. I thank my fellow University Professors for bestowing such recognition upon me and my life’s work. This is a truly remarkable group of scholars and academics, each of whom has left an indelible mark on the university through their research, teaching, and service.

As I join the ranks of University Professors, I look forward to working with many of my colleagues, as well as the rest of the CMU community, to continue to further the mission and impact the university has around the world and across disciplines. The CMU Portugal Program is just such an endeavor, and I’d be remiss in not taking this opportunity to congratulate fellow CMU Portugal faculty member Professor Manuela Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science, who was also just named University Professor. ” Irene Fonseca statement about the title of University Professor, the highest distinction awarded at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

June 2014

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M-ITI Wins International Competition

A team of students of the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI) has won first place at an international competition that took place as part of the 2014 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014). At the conference, the students have presented an interactive game, called Volcano Salvation, which they have developed between September and December 2013 in their game design course.

After submitting the game to the CHI 2014 student game competition, the Portuguese team was one of the three teams selected to present their work at the conference, which took place in Toronto, Canada, between April and May 1, 2014.

Volcano Salvation is an innovative computer game that combines two input modalities: hand gestures to lift, move, and manipulate objects, and head tracking to change perspective within the game world. The two input devices are a webcam and a Leap Motion controller. Volcano Salvation is an immersive strategy game that contributes to the field of game design by offering players novel challenges that require coordinating complex head and hand orientations, which it achieves through the game’s unique use of these two touchless input devices.

The team is composed of Sheila Christian, Júlio Alves, André Ferreira and Rúben Freitas, all from the M-ITI, and Dinarte Jesus and Nelson Vieira, from the Universidade da Madeira.

The Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (Madeira-ITI) is a not-for-profit innovation institute founded by the Universidade da Madeira, Madeira Tecnopolo, and Carnegie Mellon University.

June 2014