News: Success Stories

Bernardo Toninho, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science:
“Being a Teaching Assistant was a Tremendously Satisfying Experience”

The research environment at Carnegie Mellon University, “particularly conducive to producing great work,” is one of the first things Bernardo Toninho highlights about his experience as a dual degree Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

Enrolled at the Faculdade de CIências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT/UNL) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) since 2009/2010, Bernardo Toninho positions his research “at the intersection of proof theory or logic and concurrency theory, mainly focusing on developing a logical foundation for the study and development of concurrent systems.” His research applies concepts from logic to the study and analysis of concurrent interactive systems, of which “common examples include web services such as Amazon, Google, etc.,” he explains.

During his studies, he has been working closely with his advisors Luís Caires, faculty member at the FCT/UNL, and Frank Pfenning, head of the Computer Science Department at CMU, which has been “extremely helpful to have such breadth and depth of experience available.”

During his Ph.D., Bernardo Toninho has already published with his advisors, as well as completed the Teaching Assistant requirement of the CMU portion of the program, which was “a tremendously satisfying experience.”

“A logical foundation for session-based concurrent computation,” is the title of the dissertation proposal that Bernardo Toninho expects to defend “sometime mid/late January 2014, or early February at the latest.” After he finishes is Ph.D. until the end of the year, he is confident that several interesting career opportunities will open up for him.

CMU Portugal: How has been your experience in the Program so far?
Bernardo Toninho [BT]: I spent my first semester in the Program at FCT/UNL, because I had to defend my Masters’ thesis. I then spent two contiguous years at CMU, which gave me the chance to fully experience the culture and the environment of CMU (and U.S. research universities in general). Beyond the more superficial cultural differences, the research environment is particularly conducive to producing great work for multiple reasons. The facilities and tools available are all “state of the art,” but the most important and harder to replicate factor, when compared to the Portuguese universities, is the critical mass of people. The sheer number of Ph.D. students and professors in general make for a great diversity of research interests, larger research groups for each specific (sub) field, and it becomes very easy to run into someone in the hall that wants to share an interesting idea or is willing to listen to yours. There is also a greater focus on Ph.D. students overall, that crosscuts the departments and the university, which is fairly uncommon in Portugal.

CMU Portugal: What other differences can you identify when comparing Portuguese universities and CMU?
BT: The focus on classes is very different from the Portuguese (and European) Ph.D. cultural style. Classes are challenging and time consuming, but I think in the end they become a great asset. On one hand, they enable interaction between Ph.D. students that wouldn’t generally interact with each other simply because they work on completely different areas of Computer Science. On the other hand, they expose you to the “state of the art” of each research field, which is of the highest importance from a scientific culture point of view, and put the students in a position where they can potentially apply their domain-specific knowledge to different contexts. The Teaching Assistant (TA) requirement of the CMU portion of the program, requiring each Ph.D. student to TA a graduate class is also a tremendously satisfying experience.

CMU Portugal: During your doctoral studies you have been co-advised by two faculty members. Is it complex?
BT: Working with two advisors can often be challenging, especially when they live in different continents, but my experience has been nothing but positive. Both Luís and Frank provide very different perspectives on each research topic we address, and while it is sometimes challenging to combine the two perspectives, it is always extremely helpful to have such breadth and depth of experience available to me. While I prefer a more hands-off advisory style, which is very much compatible with my advisory setup, I have regular meetings (videoconference or in person) with both my advisors, which is a good way of keeping a continuous discussion and moving forward with the research.
“My research applies concepts from logic (more precisely, proof theory) to the study and analysis of concurrent interactive systems”

CMU Portugal: Can you give us an overview of your research?
BT: My research applies concepts from logic (more precisely, proof theory) to the study and analysis of concurrent interactive systems, that is, logically and physically independent systems that coordinate with each other through communication to perform certain tasks. Common examples include web services such as Amazon, Google, etc. The development of such systems is particularly error prone and their theory is usually very complex. By applying well-known ideas from logic to this seemingly unrelated area, we can develop a clean and systematic account of several phenomena that are common in this setting.

CMU Portugal: How do you position your research?
BT: My research lives at the intersection of proof theory or logic and concurrency theory, mainly focusing on developing a logical foundation for the study and development of concurrent systems. While my work is mostly of a theoretical nature, it has relevant practical implications, given that it provides us with tools and frameworks that allow for a better understanding of concurrent interactive systems.

CMU Portugal: During your Ph.D. you have been working with the INTERFACES project, in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program. What were the most important learning points from your participation in this research project?
BT: The research in INTERFACES is quite varied, ranging from the more theoretical foundational work to industry-oriented research. My research leans towards the foundational aspects of INTERFACES, but the most interesting aspect of the project is seeing how our more theoretical ideas can also be adapted to fit an industrial setting.
INTERFACES “the most interesting aspect of the project is seeing how our more theoretical ideas can also be adapted to fit an industrial setting”

CMU Portugal: How do you see yourself in the future, after concluding your Ph.D.?
BT: I really enjoy doing research, so I would definitely like to work in a research laboratory or a university. I mostly lean towards an academic setting since I also enjoy the teaching aspects of the work, but I see myself as having several interesting opportunities when I conclude my Ph.D..

December 2013

Rui Aguiar Elected to the Steering Board of European Technology Platforms

The Portuguese faculty member and researcher at the Universidade de Aveiro and Instituto de Telecomunicações, Rui Aguiar, is one of the six European academics elected to the steering committee of the European Technology Platform Net!Works and Integral Satcom Initiative (ISI). For Rui Aguiar, who has been deeply involved in the CMU Portugal Program, this election is an enormous honor, because this organization “will lead the next decade of European research on mobile communications.”

Rui Aguiar holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade de Aveiro, an he is associate professor with “Agregação” at the Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics department at the same University. He is the coordinator of a research group centered on advanced telecommunications and networking (ATNOG), and he is also responsible for the Multimedia and Networking research line inside the Aveiro pole of the Instituto de Telecomunicações. Rui Aguiar is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of ACM and a certified Engineer in Portugal. He has been deeply involved in the CMU Portugal Program, throughought the coordination of the dual degree Professional Master Program in Information Networking (MSIN), between the Universidade de Aveiro and the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon University.

In addition to Rui Aguiar, the other researchers voted to the committee are: Arturo Azcorra, full professor at the department of Telematics Engineering at University Carlos III of Madrid and the founding director of the networking research institute IMDEA Networks (Spain); Carles Antón-Haro, director of R&D Programmes in the Centre Tecnòlogic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) (Spain), Emilio Calvanese-Strinati, Smart Devices & Telecommunications strategy program director of CEA-LETI (France); Nicola Blefari Melazzi, professor at CNIT – Consorzio Nazionale per le Telecomunicazioni (Italy); and Alessandro Vanelli-Coralli, associate professor at the University of Bologna – DEI (Italy). The Net!Works is the European Technology Platform for communications networks and services, and gathers more than 700 players of the communications networks sector: industry leaders, innovative SMEs, and leading academic institutions. The mission of Net!Works is to strengthen Europe’s leadership in networking technology and services so that it best serves Europe’s citizens and the European economy.

The role of the researchers will be to implement the Strategic Research Agenda, which will be followed by a public-private partnership or PPP (Public-Private Partnership, for its acronym in English) composed by 400 ICT research entities from the EU and partner countries. This PPP will lead to the development of the “Horizon 2020 Advanced Infrastructure 5G networks for the Future Internet” (“Horizon 2020 Advanced 5G Network Infrastructure for Future Internet PPP”). This program is intended to provide solutions, architectures, technologies and standards to create ICT infrastructure and intelligent communications networks that are ubiquitous, robust, flexible, interoperable and cost effective.

The European Technology Platforms (ETPs) are industry-led stakeholder fora that develop short to long-term research and innovation agendas and roadmaps for action at EU and national level to be supported by both private and public funding. ETPs span a wide range of technology areas and have to date played an important role by developing joint visions, setting Strategic Research and Innovation Agendas and contributing to the definition of the research priorities including those under the Research Framework Programs.

January 2014

MSc Students Deliver a Message of Innovation with Capstone Projects

On December 19, 2013, the dual degree Professional Master students of the CMU Portugal’s Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program, taught by the Universidade da Madeira (UMa) and Carnegie Mellon University, presented their capstone projects at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI), in Portugal.

Welcoming around 50 participants, including M-ITI alumni and current students at UMa, the event engaged the audience, as project presenters delivered a message of innovation and entrepreneurship. After the projects presentation, the audience had the opportunity to see a demo session. On the following day, the M-ITI welcomed Miguel Poiares Maduro, the Portuguese Minister Assistant and of Regional Development.

The MHCI project course is an 8-month long capstone project of the Master’s in HCI and it integrates everything the students have learned in their coursework into one “end-to-end” experience. Working in interdisciplinary teams with an industry sponsor, students produce a working prototype that serves as a proof of concept of a novel service or product idea. The students come from a variety of backgrounds including Computer Science, Psychology, Design, and other related programs. This year, three teams presented their capstone projects in Madeira.

MHCI’s team Power House, whose members are Ray Liaw (USA), Cátia Sousa (PT), Shailie Thakkar (USA) and Sam Lavery (USA), presented the project that wants to create a design solution for the first floor exhibit of the Casa da Luz Museum that is appealing to both youth and tourists. The Casa da Luz is a science museum that focuses on the evolution of electricity in the island of Madeira. Re-envisioning the exhibit’s space and developing a module within the exhibit using various research and design methods, the project encourages individuals to think about their electricity consumption choices using simple, colorful interactions and a dynamic LED feedback display, as well as information panels with rich supplementary content. According to the team, their goal is to understand the unique electricity challenges in Madeira, the construction and narrative of museum spaces, and the best ways to engage museum patrons, in order to create an optimal experience that encourages exploration and learning.

The second capstone project presented, called Eat & Travel, was introduced by the team Edesia, which includes members Raunaq Gupta (India), Ashley Wilson (USA), Sheila Christian (USA). Eat & Travel is a technology startup that is trying to bring an immersive experience for people traveling to restaurants along the Lisbon coast. According to the team members, these immersive experiences will convey a sense of travel through exotic foods and virtual boat tours. The developers of the MHCI capstone project are responsible for designing a web experience that can attract potential clients and patrons to a new and innovative concept of restaurant.

Finally, team Epic (MHCI), composed of Namrata Kannan (India), Luis Guzman (Guatemala), Kristine Mendoza (USA), Susan Buenafe (USA), presented the Wow!Systems, a project that focuses primarily on multimedia installations and wants to expand to the domain of application development. More specifically, the researchers believe that there is a niche to be found in the realm of creative writing and tools that support this activity. Their goal is to understand what fuels creativity and writing in order to develop an application that provides a compelling writing experience, and because writing is difficult, according to the team, Wow!Systems is here to make the writing process epic.

On 20 December, the M-ITI also welcomed Miguel Poiares Maduro, who had the opportunity to become familiarized with the work conducted at the Institute, including with the projects mentioned above and other initiatives developed at the Universidade da Madeira. The M-ITI was created as part of the CMU Portugal, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and it operates in the domain of human-computer interaction, combining contributions from computer science, psychology and design in order to address/engage in important scientific and technological challenges that are both relevant to society and have a significant economic impact.

January 2014

Paul van der Boor, Ph.D. in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship:
“We Were Always Expected to Conduct Excellent, High-quality and Publishable Research”

“Three Studies on Innovation and Diffusion: Evidence from Mobile Banking in Developing Countries and a User Innovation Survey in Portugal” is the title of the dissertation that Paul van der Boor successfully defended on November 14th, 2013. He expects his work to have an impact “on policy makers for how innovation is conducted, on managers in the way they look at the development of new products and services, and at an academic level by introducing two new methodologies that will allow other researchers to conduct service innovation studies,” he explains.

Passionate about technology diffusion and renewable energies, during his dual degree Ph.D. Paul van der Boor redirected his interests to the study of innovation and diffusion in developing countries, and to the role that users play in innovation. With the support of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science, Paul van der Boor issued a survey to almost 10 thousand people to study various patterns of market and not-market diffusion in Portugal. In this survey “12 per cent of the respondents were active user innovators,” explains Paul van der Boor.

In looking back to the five years of his doctoral studies, Paul van der Boor has nothing but positive things to say about the experience: “the CMU Portugal Program is a unique opportunity for students to interact with a broad range of high-quality faculty, across continents, and to work on very interesting projects,” he stresses. Pedro Oliveira (Católica-Lisbon), Francisco Veloso (Católica-Lisbon), Jeroen de Jong (RSM Erasmus University), and Serguey Braguinsky (CMU) were his advisors during this period.

Paul van der Boor started his dual degree Ph.D. in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship in 2009/2010, at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL), Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, and Carnegie Mellon University.

CMU Portugal: What were the main findings of your dissertation?

Paul van der Boor [PB]: There were three main findings. Firstly, we found that users are important sources of innovation in developing countries and when firms adopt these innovations, user innovations diffuse faster than producer innovations. Secondly, most user innovations are not as widely diffused because user innovators don’t put enough effort into sharing their innovations, even if they’re willing to share them for free. Finally, rapid diffusion of digital communication technologies allows industries to be formed in the ‘South’ (i.e., developing countries).

CMU Portugal: What is the real impact of these findings?

PB: Hopefully these findings will inform innovation policy makers about how innovation is conducted, which will allow them to make better decisions. Furthermore, there are other findings, such as the fact that users in developing countries are pioneers in commercially valuable innovations, which will impact the way managers look at the development of new products and services. At an academic level, we created two new methodologies that will allow other researchers to conduct services innovation studies, as well as validate user innovations that are found through large-scale national innovation surveys. Last but not least, we provide insights into the way novel industries can come out of developing countries, which is largely enabled by the digital age, where the diffusion of technology happens at a faster rate.

“These findings will inform innovation policy makers about how innovation is conducted, which will allow them to make better decisions.”

CMU Portugal: How did you implement the User Innovation Survey in Portugal?

PB: The aim with the user innovation survey conducted in Portugal was to provide a better understanding of user innovation, especially for innovation scholars and innovation policy makers in Portugal. The survey builds upon the experience of similar large-scale national surveys in the UK, the Netherlands, Japan, Finland and other countries and contains the largest sample of user innovations collected to date. With the help of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science, the survey was sent to almost 10 thousand people, all with higher education. Overall, we received a 26% response rate, which showed that 12% of our respondents were active user innovators.

CMU Portugal: How do you comment on the experience of being able to work with two different advisors, in two different countries?

PB: Actually, I worked with four advisors in three different countries! In summary, the benefits outweigh the costs, because, of course, it is more complex and difficult to schedule meetings and to cooperate. However, the overall experience was positive because I got to work with people with a broad background and from different cultures in different projects over the course of the Ph.D.

CMU Portugal: Did you do an internship during your doctoral studies?

PB: No, I didn’t do any internship but I spent several weeks at a time in Sierra Leone, working on an NGO I co-founded, called E-Luma (www.e-luma.org). This was very important because it was one of the motivations for me to do a Ph.D. on technology in developing countries. The main tasks were restoring a hydroelectric powerplant in a rural village called Yele, and lead a new business model for taking solar lights to the market.
“I got to work with people with a broad background and from different cultures in different projects over the course of the PhD.”

CMU Portugal: In looking back to the four years of your doctoral studies, can you identify which were the most challenging periods and the biggest learning experiences?

PB: The most challenging periods were the earlier years as I found it difficult to find my specific research questions, to decide on the data that was needed to answer these questions and take ownership of the process. Once I was able to set a clear direction, work became much easier and more enjoyable. Some of the biggest learning experiences came from interacting with excellent faculty in the program. Furthermore, I realized that the research community I was part of set very high standards: we were always expected to conduct excellent, high-quality and publishable research. This in itself expanded my way of thinking about the research I was doing.

February 2014

José David Lopes Benefited from the CMU Portugal Program Support

José David Lopes, a researcher at INESC-ID, has recently concluded his Ph.D. as part of the doctoral program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL). During his doctoral studies, José David Lopes had the opportunity to spend time in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in the United States, where he used lexical entrainment in Spoken Dialog Systems to improve the interaction between machines and humans.

José David Lopes was co-advised by Isabel Trancoso, a researcher at INESC-ID and professor at IST-UL, and Maxine Eskenazi, professor at CMU. Although he did not participate directly in the CMU Portugal Program, he benefited from its support, through funding for his visits to CMU, the opportunity to stay with dual degree doctoral students from the Program while in Pittsburgh, as well as the integration in CMU’s research team.

“When we started planning his Ph.D.,” stated Isabel Trancoso, “we were looking for a co-advisor for José David since the plan was to have him spend some time abroad and the topic of his thesis matched Maxine’s research areas perfectly.” When they asked her if she wanted to co-advise him, “she accepted immediately.” The research topic, according to Isabel Trancoso, “was new and challenging” and “basically he tried to adapt the way the Spoken Dialog System talks to the user as the conversation is happening.” For that, he used lexical entrainment to improve the performance of the system. A Spoken Dialog System (SDS) is a computer system that aims to establish spoken dialog with humans, while lexical entrainment is a phenomenon in conversational linguistics of the process where the subject adopts the reference terms (for instance, a word) of their interlocutor to ensure maximum clarity in the communication between the parties. This process is necessary to overcome ambiguity.

José David Lopes defended his thesis, titled Lexical Entrainment in Spoken Dialog Systems , in the beginning of December 2013. According to Maxine Eskenazi, “he did a great job. I know that when I get students from INESC-ID they have a really strong background, they have taken excellent courses and they’re capable of doing great things. They are not daring enough, I would say, but we make them daring,” she explained. “I pushed him to do a lot of things and he ended up doing an excellent two-way lexicon entrainment system that we are hoping others will want to copy,” the professor added. According to José David Lopes, “the ultimate purpose was to allow for a better interaction between SDSs and humans.”
Teaching Machines How To Speak With Humans
While at CMU, José David Lopes started by trying to understand if people pick up the words provided by an automatic dialog system. It is known that when humans talk to each other they adapt the speech if they want the dialog to succeed. “From previous work we knew that users would pick things up and if they do not we try to understand how the system can throw out a new word that is easier for the speech recognizer,” Maxine Eskenazi explained. Therefore, first the idea was trying to see if the system could understand the words provided by the human and if it could throw out words that are easier for the system to recognize. Then, “he developed a decision mechanism to help the system find out the best word to use so that it can perform better. He put it on our live Let’s Go! system, which people use to find bus schedules in Pittsburg. So he had real users testing it,” Maxine Eskenazi clarified. After the work in Pittsburg, José David Lopes went back to Portugal, where he created the Noctívago , a query system for the night buses in Lisbon. “José made very significant contributions, and he never gave up, even when facing the many difficulties of building a multimodal dialogue system for Portuguese with non-real users,” Isabel Trancoso explained. “There were some contacts with the bus company in Lisbon at an early development stage of the system, but unfortunately so far the system has not yet reached real users,” José David Lopes added.

As a result of his research, José David Lopes found that lexical entrainment is a relevant behavior in dialogs between humans and machines. “We were able to prove that the systems that used lexical entrainment performed better than the systems that did not.” And according to the researcher, this happens for two reasons: the system was not only able to detect whenever a lexical component was hindering the dialog flow, and propose a different synonym that could be better recognized by the user, but also to detect when the user preferred a specific lexical item, adopting it to enhance the engagement between the user and the system. One of the most positive things about being at CMU was “that having Maxine Eskenazi as a co-advisor allowed me to test this on their Let’s Go! system, which provides bus schedule information to real users in Pittsburgh. It was a great challenge, and the results were very encouraging,” the researcher confessed, adding that the experience of being co-advised by two professors, one in Portugal and one at CMU, “was very easy. They [Isabel Trancoso and Maxine Eskenazi] are very important references in the area and it was a real pleasure working with them.”
System On The Way To The Spanish City of Bilbao

José David Lopes’s research efforts in this area are now beginning to bear fruit. After developing a system that provided schedule information for night buses in Lisbon based on CMU’s system, a research group from the University of the Basque Country proposed to the Bilbao city council a system similar to the Let’s Go! . “I was in Pittsburgh at the time and after developing a similar system for the Portuguese language and working with Let’s Go! , they invited me to come to Bilbao to help them build it,” José David Lopes explained, adding that “hopefully the first demo will soon be available for testing.”

When questioned about the future, José David Lopes stated that he does “not have long-term plans. I’m finishing the task in Bilbao, and soon I will start a post-doc at KTH in Sweden.” The experience he acquired during the Ph.D. made he think that “I want to keep doing research for the next couple of years. I learned a lot both at INESC-ID’s Spoken Language Laboratory and at CMU’s Language Technologies Institute, and I want to use that knowledge in my research, always bearing in mind that what I do should be used to make people’s lives better,” he concluded adding that he “would like to thank the CMU Portugal Program for the help and support provided throughout my Ph.D.. Although I was not a Ph.D. student from the program, I felt I was treated like one of their own.”

February 2014

Sérgio Pequito, Dual Degree Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering:
“Being a TA Is The Ultimate Test On How Much You Know”

Being a Teaching Assistant (TA) is vital for students in any of CMU Portugal’s dual degree Ph.D. programs. But for nonnative English speakers, a different language and culture can be quite challenging. For that reason, Carnegie Mellon University provides help to newcomers through the Intercultural Communication Center (ICC). We spoke to Sérgio Pequito, a dual degree Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program, currently at CMU, who told us about his experience as a TA and about the importance of the ICC to Ph.D. candidates.

The mission of the ICC is clear: the Center not only provides support to nonnative English speakers so that they can improve their language and cultural skills, but also helps International Teaching Assistants (ITA) and faculty develop the skills they need to provide effective instruction in the US. According to Peggy Heidish, the director of the ICC, the main goal is to “ensure the success of international students by helping them maximize language skills and cross-cultural understanding so that they reach their full potential academically and then professionally.”

For Sérgio Pequito, the ICC “is one of those places where you want to go when you arrive at a place like CMU.” Although some students see it “as a necessary evil because the Center is responsible for making the ITA test, a compulsory test for nonnative speakers, enforced by Pennsylvania law, the truth is that teaching is much more than standing in front of students talking about technical jargon,” the doctoral candidate stated. For that reason, the Center provides help in several aspects, such as “improving not only the accent, the pace and speed of the speech, but also the presentation skills for a general audience and for class situations,” he explained. Furthermore, the ICC offers a variety of non-credit workshops and seminars that focus on the language skills immediately applicable for graduate students at CMU. For example, seminars on presentation skills, communicating data, or building academic fluency” which, according to Sérgio Pequito, “are very helpful.” In the opinion of Peggy Heidish, the Center is also an “opportunity to better understand the style of academic communication needed for a globalized campus”, such as CMU. And she adds: “our 28 years on campus have given us a deep understanding of the needs of CMU international students, so we are able to pull from a rich repository of information and materials well tested for use with CMU graduate students.”

Carnegie Mellon University has a vast cultural diversity as people from all over the world, and with different backgrounds, study at the University and this “diversity is part of what makes the university so dynamic,” according to the ICC director. To overcome these differences, “the ICC offers all sorts of courses, such as ‘Language and Culture for Teaching’, taught by Peggy Heidish, which provides an overview of how the American school system works, of importance when teaching undergraduate courses, especially because it is different from the Portuguese [system],” Sérgio Pequito clarified. For instance, “most of the time in US classes, the teacher starts with an application/example, and then goes on to the theory. This is the opposite of what happens in Portugal and other places, where the theory is introduced first, and then followed by all sorts of results,” he added.
“Be the TA you would like your TAs to be”
During his dual degree doctoral studies, Sérgio Pequito taught three classes as a TA, although he was simply required to teach two. When questioned about the importance of being a TA, the Ph.D. candidate stated that “it is more than a requirement; it is the ultimate test on how much you know.” In fact, “anyone can talk about jargon and technical content to look smart, but it takes real skills to make advanced material accessible to those who are not experts,” he revealed. According to the student, this skill is particularly useful when TAs have to speak about their research, and it is a skill that makes candidates appealing to employers. For Peggy Heidish, “the fact that students come from a cross-section of departments helps them practice and develop the fluency to communicate with people outside of their fields.”

“Personally speaking, I love teaching and that was the reason why I did more TAs than required. And each time, it was a completely different experience,” especially because of “the amount of things I have learned with the students, and through their questions,” Sérgio Pequito explained. In terms of the role of a TA, Sérgio Pequito’s opinion is clear: “you should be the TA you would like your TAs to be.” And he offers some more advice: “when we are students, most of the time we complain that teachers do not give us enough feedback and that they take forever to deliver the homework and the answers to the questions. Try to keep it always on time and only then you will understand how tough life can be. But in the end it is worth it.”

Sérgio Pequito is a Portuguese student pursuing a 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, as part of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). The doctoral candidate is co-advised by António Pedro Aguiar, from Faculdade de Engenharia of the Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Diogo Gomes, from IST/UL, and by Soummya Kar, from CMU. On May 20, 2012, Sérgio Pequito received CMU’s ECE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. This award is given annually to acknowledge a graduate student who has demonstrated exemplary teaching.

February 2014

Maxine Eskenazi, researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute:
“The Best About the Dual Degree Program Is Supervising People Who Can Do Great Things”

Maxine Eskenazi, researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, is co-advising Rui Correia and Pedro Mota, two dual degree Ph.D. candidates in Language Technologies, at Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa and CMU, in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program.

Rui Correia, co-advised by Maxine Eskenazi and Nuno Mamede, researcher at IST-UL/INESC ID, is trying to automatically detect meta-discourse markers in talks. “When you give a talk, you do things that organize your speech, which are called meta-discourse items,” Maxine Eskenazi explains. How to introduce a talk, how to give examples, how to engage the audience are all meta-discourse items. In order to find those markers, Rui Correia is using TED talks in Portuguese and in English and “eventually the goal is to develop a system that could teach people how to give presentations,” she adds.

Pedro Mota, also co-advised by Maxine Eskenazi, jointly with Luísa Coheur, researcher at IST-UL/INESC-ID, is focusing his research on Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, which are large online courses that may have up to 100 thousand people registered. “When you have these massive courses, the problem is knowing how to give individual attention to students, how they can be followed so that we are sure that they are understanding,” the CMU researcher explains. With that motivation, together with other researchers, Pedro Mota is building a virtual teaching assistant, which will monitor the playback of a lecture and stop it at certain teaching points to “talk to the student and try to see if the student understood the message that the professor was trying to get across,” she clarifies. For that to be possible, the teacher will sign certain teaching points and the system will search for other materials in the literature, besides the materials that the teacher provided, in order to augment the information made available to the student. “This will be extremely useful in the future as more and more courses will be online,” she believes.

REAP PT – A Project “That Blossomed Into Something Great”
An interesting outcome mentioned by Maxine Eskenazi was REAP-PT, the system developed within CMU Portugal, with the collaboration of IST-UL, INESC-ID, Universidade do Algarve, Universidade de Lisboa, and CMU. The goal of the project was to provide students with individualized texts, a particularly useful capability in language-teaching classes, where students often have diverse reading levels. The texts provided by the system come in the form of authentic documents from the Web, and by tracking and assessing the students’ knowledge, REAP-PT finds documents that meet their individualized criteria.

“The REAP project was something that Jamie Callan, professor at CMU, and I started. The idea was to develop a system that would go on the web and look for documents that students could read, and it was supposed to find documents that were at the level of the student,” the researcher explains. Furthermore, the documents retrieved will contain a list of words that the student should learn, and then the system “automatically generates questions to ask the students,” Maxine Eskenazi clarifies, adding that the system was “adapted for Portuguese and it went on to be very successful.”
“It is Amazing What the Students Are Doing”
Maxine Eskenazi got involved with the CMU Portugal Program through her collaboration with Isabel Trancoso, researcher at INESC-ID and professor at IST-UL. “In the beginning, the greatest challenge was convincing my colleagues that this was a good thing. And now I am surprised with the number of colleagues who applied to the last Call for Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives, people who were very wary of working with someone new,” she confesses. “They have seen how successful some of our students are and now they think they should get involved in this,” the researcher adds.

According to Maxine Eskenazi, being part of the Program was “not that challenging for me because Isabel and I know each other and we work on similar things.” But the greatest thing about the Program is the opportunity to co-advise “students who have a good, strong background,” people who find, thanks to the dual degree, “that they can do amazing things in astonishing amounts of time,” she reveals.

Maxine Eskenazi admits that it must be hard for dual degree Ph.D. students to have two advisors, and for that reason she believes that both the students and the professors should be able to travel, so that the students “feel they are taken care of in both countries.” The CMU professor believes that the advisors should see their students at least every six months that is why she has been in Portugal several times and “hopefully will be there next summer. Even when students and professors are distant, maintaining contact frequently is key to take stock of what everybody is doing,” she explains. “With the MOOC project, because there are a lot of people involved we have a weekly Skype meeting. With Rui Correia’s project, we have ‘Friday afternoon mail’ where the team tell us what they have done that week and then we give them feedback,” the researcher explains.

Even though at first the program sent first and second year students to CMU, the professors realized that it was best to have them spend their first year in Portugal “so they could get used to Ph.D. programs first. We had no problem finding equivalent courses at IST-UL, because now the students can take half of the courses in Portugal and the other half at CMU,” she explains, stating that the teaching quality is similar. “They perform very well here. One of the things that I can note for Rui Correia, for instance, is that he was a Teaching Assistant (TA) for Jaime Carbonell, a really well-known and respected professor with about 50 TAs, and Rui is in the top three TAs that professor Carbonell has ever had,” she reveals with pride, adding that “this is just one of the many things that has our colleagues saying they should have a Portuguese student because they are really good. It is amazing what they are doing.”

February 2014

 

Saurabh Shintre, a dual degree Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Faculdade de Engenharia of the Universidade do Porto and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), was awarded a Bertucci Graduate Fellowship. According to the dean of CMU’s College of Engineering, James Garrett, this award is the “recognition of the student’s outstanding work in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

For Saurabh Shintre, currently at the Faculdade de Engenharia of the Universidade do Porto, “it is a great honor to be awarded the prestigious Bertucci Graduate Fellowship. I am really happy that the hard work we put in our research has been appreciated,” he confessed proudly.

His research focuses on the quantitative analysis of the threat posed by side channel attacks on the security of computer systems. According to the student, “side channel attacks are essentially private information leaks in the system.” Although numerous side channel attacks have been demonstrated in the literature, “there has not been much focus on performing a thorough and systematic analysis of the amount of information leaked in these attacks. We want to develop a theoretical framework where this analysis can be performed,” he explained.

Saurabh Shintre enrolled in the dual degree program in 2010-2011, is co-advised in Portugal by João Barros, faculty member at FEUP and former national director of the CMU Portugal Program, and at CMU by Virgil Gligor, co-director of Cylab. According to the student, this award has inspired him “to work even harder and to contribute more to scientific research at CMU”, and for that reason he thanks his advisors, “Prof. Virgil Gligor and Prof. João Barros, as this would certainly not have been possible without their guidance and support.”

The Bertucci Graduate Fellowship, which provides $10,000 in tuition support, was created through the generosity of John and Claire Bertucci, and was established to provide merit fellowships to graduate students pursuing doctoral degrees in Engineering.

February 2014

Fernando De La Torre:
“As Educators We Teach Dual Degree Students What Top Research is About”

Fernando De La Torre, a professor and researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), is deeply involved in the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, co-advising the dual degree Ph. D. students Ricardo Cabral and Jayakorn Vongkulbhisal, as well as hosting faculty members from Portuguese universities. In an interview to the CMU Portugal Program, he had nothing but pleasant things to say about the Program.

According to Fernando De La Torre, the CMU Portugal Program “is amazing” and he only wishes he had had the chance to apply to a similar Program when he was doing his Ph.D. The Program “is excellent and it is a win-win situation for everyone: for CMU, for Portugal, for the students and for companies. The best business is when everybody gets something out of it and this is a perfect business idea for several reasons,” the professor confesses.

Fernando De La Torre has been working for the last four years in collaboration with João Paulo Costeira and Alexandre Bernardino, professors at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL), as part of the CMU Portugal Program. This is a partnership that works at a technical and human level, in the researcher’s opinion, because “we are in the same wavelength in the way we approach many things in research and also in life,” he stresses. “It has been very exciting. I typically go to Lisbon twice a year to see them and the students,” he adds.
“ A good paper typically takes more than one year of work for the student. ”

But the greatest advantage of being part of the CMU Portugal Program is, according to Fernando De La Torre, “having access to very talented students like Ricardo Cabral and Jayakorn Vongkulbhisal,” who the professor is currently co-advising with João Paulo Costeira. And the fact that the students receive support from the Program is also a plus “because we are not obligated to have deliverables for projects, and so we are able to focus more on basic science,” he states. “This gives us more flexibility to do basic research, which is a great advantage.”

Because research is important to the students’ development, the advisers’ role as educators is to try to teach them what top research is about. According to Fernando De La Torre, “CMU and IST-UL have high standards for research and a common problem is that students believe they have to publish extensively in order to get a good job and that is not true,” he reveals. In fact, this is a general problem in the scientific community “because some researchers are more worried about de quantity of the papers that they publish than the quality,” he adds. But research is something that requires “a lot of hours, students have to be very meticulous with every sentence they write, and run experiments adequately.”

According to Fernando De La Torre, “a good paper typically takes more than one year of work for the student. It is very uncommon that one student can publish more than one good paper a year as first author. And that is the difference between CMU and IST-UL and all the other universities because our standards for the quality of research are very high. Usually one good paper takes two years,” the professor explains. And he stresses: “these quality papers are the ones that are going to have an impact and give you a good job in academia, industry, or anywhere else. It is better to do few things and do them well. When students are in a top institution they learn that this makes a difference.”

While at CMU, dual degree students are faced with a new reality. “Although for them the language is not an issue, as their level of English is very good, the feeling of living abroad for the first time is not easy, and sometimes they are overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to do,” Fernando De La Torre reveals, especially due to the fact that in the beginning the Program is “very demanding for students because they have a lot of classes, the qualifiers and the Teaching Assistanshipt work.” Another aspect that Fernando De La Torre stresses is the fact that sometimes the Program is difficult for students because they have at least two advisors. For instance, for Ricardo Cabral “it must be very difficult having three advisors because each of us is pulling him in a different direction based on our expertise, but he is managing it very well,” he reveals.

“With this partnership we have produced really high-level and high impact joint publications in top-notch journals and conferences.” This means “the scientific output has been outstanding, comparable to any one of the Ph.D. students here at CMU,” he reveals.

Faculty Exchange Program is a ‘seed’ for collaborations
Fernando De La Torre has also been hosting faculty members from Portuguese universities under the Faculty Exchange Program, in the scope of the CMU Portugal. According to the professor, the collaboration with other faculty members in Portugal through this Program “has also been excellent. In Portugal you have great professionals who are very dedicated to education and with a great scientific background.”

For the faculty members, the Faculty Exchange Program “is very valuable because they see the educational standards we have here at CMU,” Fernando De La Torre states. Even though the CMU professor believes that a four-month period is not much to establish a research collaboration, “for the faculty, the Program has a good educational value because they see how we do things, how we teach at CMU.” While at CMU, the faculty members have regular meetings with Fernando De La Torre “where I talk about how I run my group, the content that we teach and a big difference that we find is that they have to teach many hours in Portugal, and here we have different teaching conditions,” the professor explains, adding that “maybe they can take to Portugal what they learn here and help change the system.”

However, even though it is difficult to establish a research collaboration or produce a research outcome in such a short period, “the contact is very valuable because they get to know the people,” says Fernando De La Torre. And with the new initiatives, more specifically the Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives (ERIs), it will be possible to establish new connections, “which is very valuable. It’s very good to put a ‘seed’ to start collaborations,” he reveals.“ João Paulo Costeira and Alexandre Bernardino and I are also trying to find other funding sources besides CMU Portugal, so I believe this will be a long-lasting partnership.”

About Fernando De La Torre
Fernando De La Torre currently leads two laboratories at CMU. In the Human Sensing Laboratory, he tries to understand human behavior using various sensors, such as audio, video and wearable sensors. “The kind of behavior we try to understand are things like activity, emotion or facial expression. We are very interested in monitoring people, especially for healthcare applications,” the researcher explains. According to Fernando De La Torre, from physiological data, it is possible to understand the activity of people and infer their emotional states. “We have some experience in detecting depression, a work we are developing in collaboration with the University of Pittsburg. The assessment of your level of depression is usually based on the expertise of the clinician and what on how you behave,” the researcher believes. Therefore, what the researchers want to do at the Lab is to provide physiological measurements for depression. By monitoring people, they will try to predict different degrees of depression. With different sensors, the researchers will be able to monitor “hot flashes in women with menopause and men with prostatic cancer, for instance,” he explains.

The other laboratory is the Component Analysis Laboratory, where researchers work on Machine Learning. The goal of the component analysis techniques is to extract useful information from a signal, by decomposing the signal into useful/interesting components. According to Fernando De La Torre, “Component analysis is a very versatile technology that can be used for classification, clustering, visualization or modelling high-dimensional data. It has been applied to solve problems in many scientific disciplines such as signal processing, robotics, bio-informatics, or computer vision,” he concludes.

February 2014