News: Success Stories

Innovative Projects Give Positive Advantages to Portugal
On March 1, 2011, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program held the ICT Portugal Workshop: New Project in Networking, Software, Energy and Security, at Centro Cultural e Científico de Macau, in Lisbon. The event gathered more than 30 researchers, dual degree Ph.D. students, and entrepreneurs to discuss the link between academia and business, leveraging the knowledge creation and the exportation growth of high technology evolution of the most recent research projects.

Throughout the day, the 12 principal investigators who were awarded funding in the second Call for Proposal revealed the main ideas and objectives, to be achieved by 2013. These 12 selected projects include, for example, the development of software systems to ensure the reliability of infrastructure and services to prevent aircraft accidents or combat a highly damaging bug, the creation of systems that anticipate errors and adapt automatically, or the management of next generation networks applied to television and video services we know today.

João Sentieiro, president of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), opened the workshop with a positive message about the progress that these new projects represent, as “a way of demonstrating that this partnership [with CMU] should continue.” Additionally João Barros, national director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, took stock of the last five years and the growth of the partnership, whose “excellent performance was evidenced by the external evaluators of the program.”

“The international assessment of new projects has revealed the high quality of many research groups in Portugal and the bonds of trust established with many national companies and renowned researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU),” said João Barros. “We believe that these projects will bring great benefits not only for the various stakeholders, but also for society in general.”

João Barros also spoke about the crucial importance of the investment in research and development carried out by the FCT, “by focusing on creating advanced knowledge in consortia with strong business participation and in close cooperation with a very strong American partner. The Carnegie Mellon Portugal program allows exploring Portugal’s new ways to create value in areas such as software, energy, next generation networks and cyber security, where the country can develop comparative advantages.”

These 12 projects are the result of the last Call for Proposals that took place between 2009 and 2010. They were selected from a total of 22 that were evaluated by a panel of four international experts: Sir John O’Reilly, Luigia Carlucci Aiello, Tariq Durrani, and Joel Moses.

The projects are developed by researchers from six Portuguese institutions of higher education (Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Fundação da Faculdade de Ciências, Faculdade da Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra, Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto do Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Universidade Católica Portuguesa), Carnegie Mellon University, and more than 10 companies, including Portugal Telecom, Novabase, Nokia Siemens, Critical Software, OutSystems, EDP, EPRI, ISA, Autonomy – Renewable Resources, Logica, Observit, among others.

João Barros said that this program “also contributed to the strengthening of national competence in information and communication technologies and has had a greater international impact of the work of many researchers, students and industry professionals.”

March, 2011

Novabase Academy Graduates 2011 Visit Carnegie Mellon University

From April 9 to April 14, 2011, Luis Lobo, Executive Director of the Novabase Academy, and six Academy graduates visited Carnegie Mellon University to attend classes, explore CMU’s cutting edge research and technologies, and learn more about the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.

Novabase Academy is a training program for recent college graduates that offer a two week intensive training program prior to becoming full time employees at the company. The program consists of courses, projects, and team-building exercises, all designed to prepare participants for their work at Novabase. “It’s rewarding to see the next generation achieve their goals and set themselves up as future leaders in their field,” says Lobo.

This year, 500 trainees were narrowed down to 83 who ultimately received offers of employment from the company. Of those 83, Sandra Botelho Simões, Ana Amorim Duarte, Telmo da Rocha Pereira, Andreas Dieter Mendes Seufert, Ricardo António Nunes Gorrão, and Paulo Alexandre Mareco de Sousa were selected as the top six in their class. The trip to CMU has been offered as a reward for the top graduates for the last three years.

“[We want to] use the relationship with the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program to market new candidates and create additional awareness within Novabase,” Lobo says.

The visit was comprised of meetings with faculty and staff, attended classes and events, and going on tours of CMU’s facilities. Lobo says that he and the graduates especially enjoyed meeting with Jenna Date, director of the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI), as well as touring both the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) facilities. He also calls the Novabase reception, held on April 11, a “delightful” opportunity for the Novabase group to engage faculty and students in the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.
________ “I loved the integration, openness, and diversity,” Lobo says. “Professors affiliated with one department teach classes for another department. [I love the] involvement of classes with corporations.” _________
Of particular interest for the Novabase group was their hands-on visit to the HCII class “Rapid Prototyping of Computer Systems,” taught by Daniel Siewiorek, Buhl University Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering. The class was divided into groups, with the Novabase graduates grouped together. Each group was then given supplies to make model airplanes. Once each group had completed the project, the class went outside to test each group’s design. Lobo notes that the Novabase plane was the only model plane that glided and lasted the longest in the air.

Novabase is a corporate sponsor for the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. It is the largest IT company in Portugal. Founded in 1989, it currently employs about 1700 people. According to the company website, Novabase’s vision is “to make life simpler and happier for people and businesses, through technology.” Innovation and entrepreneurship are two of Novabase’s core values. The company encourages its employees to make a difference by providing a stimulating work environment based on professionalism, competence and integrity and by providing professional opportunities which encourage creativity and responsibility.

April 2011

The Information Shared Online can be Easily Reproduced
The Internet is a place where people are increasingly sharing information about their lives with friends, relatives, colleagues, and even strangers. While recent technologies like online social networks, location and photo sharing have made it possible for people to create and maintain social relationships online; they also pose significant threats to privacy.

Vassilis Kostakos, an assistant professor in the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute at Universidade da Madeira (UMa), explains that “an important threat to privacy is the fact that information we share online can be easily reproduced, is easily searchable, and most often becomes accessible to people we never thought of initially.” Therefore, a challenge for users is to manage their privacy according to their expectations. “Currently systems like Facebook make this challenging because the controls they provide are too complex, and most people just use the default settings,” explains Kostakos.

To empower users to control their privacy, to develop tools to protect users’ privacy, and to develop trustworthy services, a multidisciplinary team lead by Vassilis Kostakos and Norman Sadeh, faculty at Carnegie Mellon, is carrying out the WESP: Weaving Together Technology Innovation with Human and Policy Considerations project, in the scope of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. “WESP is an innovative project because it combines computer science with psychology and human subjects experiments to understand better people’s expectations about privacy, and contrast them with their actual behavior”, explains Vassilis.

Norman Sadeh

Throughout this project, the team has conducted a large number of studies to date. In one experiment with 100 Facebook users, for example, this team found that although people claim to be concerned about privacy, in fact their behavior suggests the opposite. “For instance, we found that although women claim to be much more concerned about privacy than men, their posts are typically much more open and visible to more people than those of men.” Kostakos team also found that people usually underestimate the number of friends they have on Facebook by about 30. In the scope of this project, Kostakos’ team is conducting a global survey on privacy to understand how people from different countries think about privacy. Please take part by visiting: http://worldprivacy.info/.

The WESP project is coordinated by a multidisciplinary team lead by Vassilis Kostakos, from UMa, in Portugal and by Norman Sadeh, at Carnegie Mellon University. This project involves three Portuguese universities (Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Universidade da Madeira, Universidade do Minho), two companies (Sapo/Portugal Telecom and IBM), and Carnegie Mellon University.

Soon we will post more information about this project achievements.

April 2011

The Partnership Brings Researchers Closer to Industry

Since its inception in 2006, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program has increased the connection between academic and industrial communities in key focused areas of information and communication technologies. One of the results of this partnership is DognÆdis, a start-up founded by Mário Zenha-Rela, faculty, and Francisco Rente, a Ph.D. student at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC).

“The most fundamental role of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program was the mindset change, as this partnership brought us much closer to industry,” says Mário Zenha-Rela adding that “before this program much of the faculty activities were centered on research and kept inside the University, and this partnership was designed to break that vicious circle.” Zenha-Rela spent the fall 2007 at Carnegie Mellon and felt it was a stimulating experience in regards to science, technical, management and pragmatic approaches. Zenha-Rela says his “experience of working with some of the world’s top experts,” combined “with the Portuguese easiness with different cultures and practices made this jump into industry almost natural.”

On the other hand, Zenha-Rela is one of the professors involved in the dual degree professional master in Software Engineering (MSE), taught at FCTUC and Carnegie Mellon University. The creation of this professional master, within the partnership, encouraged faculty to look for industry support. Zenha-Rela indicated that by participating as a faculty member in the MSE program made him aware of multiple industrial practices.

DognÆdis, a portmanteau of “Dognitas,” meaning “quality,” and “dis,” meaning place, space or temple in Latin, is a start-up focused on security audit and consultancy, software assurance, and business continuity support. In the beginning of 2011, this start-up launched a security expert review software that is a code verifier of potencial security flaws at the source code level. The DognÆdis team designed “the tool to be integrated into a standard software development cycle.” Zenha-Rela says “when a potential security breach is detected, a ‘trouble-ticket’ is sent to the quality or project manager with specific suggestions on how to fix it.” Even inexperienced programmers can develop secure code, especially for web applications. Part of this technology will be deployed under a “freemium” model, which means that a free version will be available on the web.

DognÆdis’ second product is a security appliance, a monitoring agent that is deployed inside local networks triggering alarms when suspicious activity (both from internal and external threats) is detected. “While there are already several identical systems, we think that our innovations will make a difference,” says Zenha-Rela.

Currently, DognÆdis is working in two directions: to create partnerships abroad (Brazil, Angola, Dubai), and to develop other products using state-of-art technology. Zenha-Rela says that “since we have a very strong research background, the point is selecting wisely the ideas to pursue further, not lack of them.”

March 2011

Paper Introduces New Type-Based Access Control in Data-Centric Systems

Researchers at the INTERFACES project, funded by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program, will present a paper entitled “Type-Based Access Control in Data-Centric Systems in Proceedings”at the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP) . The conference will be held on March 26 to April 3, 2011, in Germany.

This paper was writen by 5 people, Luís Caires, João Costa Seco, Jorge Perez and Hugo Vieira, from CITI and Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCTUNL), with Lúcio Ferrão, from the OutSystems company. This is the industrial partner of the INTERFACES project which aims at the development of new techniques for enforcing security, integrity, and correctness requirements on distributed extendable web‐based applications. It introduces novel, semantically rich notions of interface description languages, based on advanced type systems and logics. ESOP is an annual conference dedicated to fundamental issues in the specification, design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems.

In the paper the authors introduce a new programming language approach for enforcing access control policies in data-centric programs by static typing. According to the paper’s abstract, this language “is based on the general concept of refinement type, but extended so as to address realistic and challenging scenarios of permission-based data security, in which policies dynamically depend on the database state, and flexible combinations of column- and row-level protection of data are necessary”. Throughout this paper the authors state and prove the soundness and safety of their system, maintaining that “well-typed programs never break the declared data access control policies.”

March, 2011

Workshop in December 2010: Frontiers in Entrepreneurship Research in Debate
On December 17-18, 2010, Catholic Lisbon, school of Business and Economics hosted the workshop “Frontiers in entrepreneurship research: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Human Capital”, which gathered more than 100 participants.

The keynote speaker, Maryann Feldman from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill presented “Dealmakers and the making of a High Tech Entrepreneurial Region”. During the afternoon and all Saturday, a panel of international researchers such as Peter Thompson from Florida International University, Simon Parker from University of Western Ontario and many others (amongst them Ph.D. student from the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program ‘Technological Change and Entrepreneurship’) presented cutting edge work on the rise of entrepreneurship as a driver of innovation, competitiveness and economic development. Each presentation was followed by comments that gave the opportunity to discuss specific items.

December 2010

European Newsletter Published Article about the DRIVE-IN Project

The Future Internet Forum, in association with ceFIMS FP7 Coordination Action, published, in February 2011, its first Newsletter with a special feature about the Largest Vehicular Network Testbed in Europe which is taking place in Portugal. The name of the project that is responsible for this initiative is Drive-In – Distributed Routing and Infotainment through Vehicular Inter-Networking. The project is affiliated with the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program which is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

The article explains the particularities of the Drive-In project that has a large-scale vehicular ad-hoc network of 500 taxi cabs, which offer practical examples of the economic and social benefits of intelligent transportation systems. These cabs are circulating in the city of Porto, Portugal, with a prototype that helps researchers to collect and test data for improving security and efficiency of vehicular transportation. The intelligent vehicles will provide real-time information pertaining to the conditions of the pavement, noise levels, and traffic accidents which will affect the quality of life.

The Drive-In project involves researchers from Portuguese universities (Porto and Aveiro), research institutions (Instituto de Telecomunicações), public administration (Instituto de Mobilidade e dos Transportes Terrestres), companies (NDrive, Geolink, RadiTaxis), and Carnegie Mellon University.

The Future Internet Forum (FIF) is composed by representatives of the Member or Associated States initiatives and activities on Future Internet. It consists of either high-level officials from the competent ministries or experts from a public or private institution mandated specifically to represent national Future Internet (FI) initiatives.

Read the article at the Future Internet Forum Newsletter (pdf file).

February 2011

Faculty Exchange Gives Positive Experience

Ana Groznik is an assistant professor at Faculdade de Ciências Económicas e Empresariais (FCEE), Universidade Católica Portuguesa, who spent the fall 2010 Semester at Carnegie Mellon. She traveled to Pittsburgh to participate in the Faculty Exchange program, launched by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal partnership. She considered her experience at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, one of the top business schools in the world, “definitively a very positive experience.”

Ana’s goals were to start a new research stream, adopt new research tools, expand her personal network, and get a fresh perspective on teaching quantitative courses. She had several meetings with her host Alan Scheller-Wolf, faculty of Operations Management at theTepper School of Business, to discuss several potential research topics, primarily in the context of health care. They decided to focus on the management of diagnostic service centers which advise patients about appropriate treatments over the phone, based on their symptoms. When managing such centers, a balance must be found between the accuracy of advice given, callers’ waiting times and operational costs. Groznik is studying the optimization of management of nurse-line and other advice centers through analytical models. “I had an excellent chance to broaden my research experience, as well as to observe and learn from one of the best teaching practices in the field”, concludes Groznik.

February 2011

Faculty Exchange Gives an Intellectual and Cultural Enriching Experience

Vitor Grade Tavares, professor at the Faculdade de Engenharia from Universidade do Porto (FEUP) and senior researcher at INESC Porto, spent the 2010 Fall Semester at the Carnegie Mellon University, participating in the Faculty Exchange Program, launched by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. He has called the experience “enlightening.”

During his stay, Tavares had the opportunity to teach a few lectures of 18-623, a graduate course on Analog Integrated Circuit Design. The class is regularlarly taught by Larry Pileggi, Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “From the teaching experience it was possible to understand the common practices and course organization at this level,” says Tavares. Tavares is the Portuguese principal investigator of the new research project called SELF-PVP: Self-organizing power management for photo-voltaic power plants. This project presents a line of research that aims to achieve at least 15% increase in power efficiency in a photovoltaic (PV) power plant, using a novel, distributed, real time and on-line, adaptive network controller of sensors/actuators to bring optimality to the overall power output of the panels’ array. His stay at the Carnegie Mellon University coincided with the project kickOff, so he had “several meetings to redefine the strategy and to start the preliminary studies.” This project also involves two faculty members from Carnegie Mellon, Shawn Blanton and Peter Steenkiste.

Tavares also worked closely with a dual degree Ph.D. student in developing his doctoral thesis. To this end he had regular weekly meetings with the student and his advisors Miguel Coimbra, from the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto (FCUP), and Xin Li from Carnegie Mellon in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. With this experience Tavares hopes to strengthen his current level of cooperation with Carnegie Mellon University as well as apply new practices upon his return to Portugal.” He says that the exchange is “difficult to handle from a family perspective, but it is a highly intellectual and cultural enriching experience.”

February, 2011