News: Success Stories

Ferreira and Agyapong Examine Spillover Effects from Wiring Schools with Broadband
Does the usage of Internet in schools spill over society in general? The research paper entitled “Spillover Effects from Wiring Schools with Broadband: Implications for Universal Service Policy,” states that the answer is yes.

The paper, written by Pedro Ferreira, faculty at Instituto Superior Técnico , and Patrick Agyapong, a Ph.D. student in Engineering and Public Policy, analyzes Portuguese data on the Internet usage in schools and by society between January 2006 and December 2008. By means of the Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional (FCCN), Portugal completed connecting all schools to the Internet through DLS (1 Mbit/s or more) in January 2006.

“The students carry the habit of using Internet at school to other Internet access points, most notably home, where they can act as liaison to older family members and friends transferring the specific Internet related training they get in school to people that otherwise would find it hard, and perhaps useless, to obtain,” said Ferreira. “[This conclusion has] deep implications for Universal Service Policy (USP) because it shows how, in the absence of such a formal policy, specific USP-like projects that fully engage local communities with telecommunication operators through the local Government can contribute to a more widespread effective adoption of broadband by society at large.”
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Ferreira and Agyapong measured internet usage in schools by the amount of traffic through the DSL router at the school premises. The usage by population at large was measured by the amount of traffic through a carrier’s Central Offices (CO).
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“The carrier sampled is the one that provides the DSL connection to all schools in the country who, coincidentally, has a very significant share of the broadband market in the country,” explained Agyapong. “[This data was complemented] with yearly information on population density and a number of education related variables such as basic education rate, dropout rate and illiteracy rate.”

Based on the results, Ferreira and Agyapong concluded that “doubling the traffic from schools yields roughly a 5% increase in the traffic through the carrier’s COs in the subsequent year.” They also found that “population density is highly correlated with Internet usage by society at large and that illiteracy rate is a significant barrier to using the Internet.”

Now this research team feels that it is necessary to design and administer a survey targeted at both schools and students to ask for more details about how internet has been used. This will help to learn more about how students use the Internet in schools in order to better appreciate the mechanics behind the spillover effect, and also how students carry the habit of using the Internet in the school to other access points. Another concern is to explore the panel structure of the data, because, Ferreira and Agyapong explained, “we have data on the CO traffic and on the school’s traffic on a monthly basis for the entire period of analysis, but we lack monthly data for our control variables because population density and the relevant education related variables are only measured once a year.”

May 2010

Gopala Anumanchipalli Presents a Paper at the 7 th ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW)

Gopala Krishna Anumanchipalli, dual degree Ph.D. student in Language Technologies, will present a paper entitled “Improving speech synthesis for noisy environments”, at the Seventh ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Speech Synthesis. This meeting will take place at Kyoto, Japan, September 22-24, 2010. Anumanchipalli is co-author of this paper with Ying-Chang Cheng, Joseph Fernandez, Xiaohan Huang, Qi Mao, and Alan W Black, his advisor.

The Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute awards are intended to enable R&D opportunities for applicants wishing to visit and work with the M-ITI team for a short period of time. This awards are open to both researchers and faculty of all levels, and are meant to cover transport, accommodation and living costs incurred as part of the visit. The amount of the award and the duration of the visit will be negotiated with each awardee, and will depend on the nature of the research.

The recipients of the awards will be encouraged to collaborate closely with faculty and researchers at this institute during their visit.

Award cateogories:
•Category 1. We are currently accepting proposals from anyone wishing to collaborate with us on developing secure, privacy aware, and trustworthy technologies in the context of online and mobile social networks. Applicants with interests in human-computer interaction, social networks, network analysis, machine learning, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and formal method development are encouraged to submit a proposal. For more information, contact Prof. Vassilis Kostakos at vassilis@cmu.edu.

Category 2. We are currently accepting proposals from anyone wishing to collaborate with us in the area of sustainable ICT. The work should seek to develop and deploy new sensing techniques for measuring resource consumption and travel behavior, to design and evaluate visualisations and motivational techniques for presenting this information and to study and design new services in the area of sustainability. Applicants with interests in human-computer interaction, social networks, service design, sensor networks and ubiquitous computing are particularly encouraged to submit a proposal. For more information, contact Prof. Nuno Nunes at njn@uma.pt.

Candidates of all nationalities are eligible for this award. Successful candidates will be allowed to apply for subsequent awards.Closing date: There is no explicit closing data. Applications will be evaluated on an ongoing basis.Evaluation criteria: Applications will be assessed on the qualities of the applicant, the proposed work’s scientific merit, originality, and relevance to the theme of the call. Successful applicants will be contacted on an ongoing basis.

Application Form

Portuguese Firemen Begin to Test New Vital Jackets™ on the Field

An interdisciplinary team under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program is currently working on a project that will provide real time bio-feedback for First Responders.

Five Portuguese firemen from Amarante, Portugal, are already using Vital Jackets™ when in duty. An experience within the interdisciplinary research project Vital Responder – Monitoring Stress among First Responder Professionals, which seeks to change the way First Response Professionals are able to do their work. The end goal is to produce a new garment in the form of a t-shirt that monitors the vital signs of First Responders, while still comfortable and non intrusive to their work.

Currently, these jackets are only collecting ECG data, because the purpose is to make sure that those jackets are wearable during stress situations. “The jacket should not interfere with all the equipment that the fireman uses during his task,” said Pedro Gomes, researcher of the Vital Responder project.

Bruno Pinto, Diogo Pinheiro, José Ribeiro, Luís Martins, and Rui Ribeiro are from the Permanent Intervention Team from the Firemen Corporation of Amarante, on the North of Portugal. This team works night and day to rescue people in car accidents, put out forest and building fires, and many other activities.

“Using the jacket is a very positive experience which allows us to contribute to the development of innovative firemen protective clothing,” said Ribeiro, adjunct of the firemen commander and leader of the team. “[The jacket] will aid the firemen in high temperature situations, and also will aid the commanders to make decisions according to the real health condition of the firemen.” Ribeiro’s hope is that if the jacket works, it will provide crucial information that can help save many more people’s lives.

At this time, the research team has over than 140 hours of data. The target is to create a large database of sensor data which will allow them to answer the question: “How can we use a variety of sensors such as the ones present in the Vital Jacket™ technology to quantify, detect, and predict physiological stress on first responder professionals?” The answer to this question will be given by part of this research project team led by Miguel Coimbra, from the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto.

The project Vital Responder – Monitoring Stress among First Responder Professionals, in Portugal, is led by João Paulo Cunha from IEETA. This team is composed of researchers from the Faculdade de Ciências and the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Instituto de Telecomunicações, IEETA, Universidade de Aveiro, Carnegie Mellon University, and partner companies like Biodevices, Petratex and McLaren. Engineers, computer scientists, clinical consultants and Ph.D. students are working alongside to achieve the same goal: “Explore the synergies between innovative wearable technologies, scattered sensor networks, intelligent building technology, and precise localization services to provide secure, reliable and effective first-response systems in critical emergency scenarios.” (Extract from the project proposal)

The team responsible for this project envisions two modes of operation: offline and online. In the offline mode, data collected from the First Responders under critical situations is used to post-analyze their health status and reactions to different stress situations and infer their fitness for further service in these situations.

The online mode will enhance its usefulness even further, enabling the management of their effort, life threatening alarms to the First Responders coordinators and nearby colleagues and facilitate intervention for rescue in case of life threatening events.

In addition to the ECG sensors and embedded electronics already present in the Vital Jacket™, the Vital Responder research project team will embed oxygen saturation, body and ambient temperature, 3 axis MEMS accelerometer, gyroscope, humidity, and sweat level.

More information about the Vital Responder project available at http://vitalresponder.cmuportugal.org .

April 2010

Novabase Academy Sends Its Best

From April 10-15, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program hosted Paulo Trigo, Novabase Executive Director, and several Novabase Academy students for the Novabase Study Tour 2010. They attended classes such as Management of Software Development for Technology Executives and met with several Program researchers and professors, including Manuela Veloso, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and David Garlan, Professor and Director of the Master of Software Engineering Professional Programs (MSE).

Novabase, a corporate sponsor for the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program, is the largest IT company in Portugal. Founded in 1989, it currently employs about 1700 people. Trigo, who has been with Novabase for ten years, is a managing director responsible for the partnership between Novabase and Vodafone, a multinational mobile network operator based in Newbury, England.

Novabase Academy is a training program for recent college graduates that offers 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. The trip to Carnegie Mellon, the Novabase Academy Study Tour, is a prize that is offered to the “best” students coming out of the Academy. “It’s to engage them,” says Trigo. “It’s a good opportunity to have some offsite team-buidling,”

While visiting Carnegie Mellon, Trigo and the students were afforded the opportunity to learn more about the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and various university practices. Of particular interest to Novabase, says Trigo is the manner in which Carnegie Mellon emphasizes practical applications into course methodology.

“We felt immediately that we could apply some of the lessons that people brought from here.” Trigo says that the academic and practical worlds are not very “connected” in Portugal, and that Novabase stands to benefit from applying practices learned at Carnegie Mellon. He sees the visiting students as ambassadors from Portuguese industry. The company’s hope is that the students who attend the Novabase Academy Study Tour will be able to bring this knowledge back to Portugal with them and propagate it internally. “The Carnegie Mellon Portugal program is very in touch with reality, with the industry,” Trigo says. “It’s not some disconnected academic track.”

April 2010

INTERFACES Project Responds to Security Concerns

INTERFACES – Certified Interfaces for Integrity and Security in Extensible Web-based Applications is a project that addresses security concerns for large scale software systems. It is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program.

The problems involved in software security have real world significance, whether in everyday activities – such as changing profile security settings on popular networking sites – or large scale business endeavors – such as modifying web applications in response to changing requirements. Most often, security malfunctions are the result of “bugs,” or mistakes in the programming.

The INTERFACES project seeks to develop programs that will automatically analyze software, helping developers to detect potential errors in the programming before they occur. INTERFACES will be able to signal which parts of the system are insecure – for example, by coloring the program code on the screen – and possibly even correct the software. This is a complex problem because many software systems are constructed as a piecemeal from internet sources, and are subject to strict security and resource usage requirements. The INTERFACES project is approaching these challenges by conducting thorough research that runs the gamut from theory to actual development.

Luís Caires

In a short brief detailing various aspects of the project, Principal Investigators Luis Caires and Frank Pfenning said that the “broad objective of this partnership is the promotion of bothways knowledge transfer between top notch academic
research and industrial R&D.”

Team members represent several of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program’s affiliates: Vasco Vasconcelos of the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL), António Melo and Lúcio Ferrão of OutSystems, João Costa Seco of Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCTUNL), Filipe Militão and Bernardo Toninho, dual degree Ph.D. students, and Hugo Vieira of FCTUNL. Two postdoctoral researchers were also recently hired to assist with the project.

Frank Pfenning

In keeping with the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program precedent of collaboration, this project works in tandem with OutSystems, one of the program’s many Industrial Affiliates. OutSystems is a Portugal-based software company with clients in 16 industries. The company provides an “All-in-One Agile Platform” for management of web business applications that are built for continuous change, a special consideration of INTERFACES.

“A key novelty of this project is the use of sophisticated logic and type systems that will lead to the design of programs that can actually automatically analyze other programs, and help developers to detect and correct errors even before the modules are installed, just by looking at the way they are glued to each other, i.e. at their INTERFACES.” The INTERFACES project was launched in May of 2009, but is already showing promise.

Technical results have already been published and team members are currently working on a prototype of a self-correcting web-application development system, which will be able to “detect possible security breaches before they happen, and warn the software developer at the right time.”

With completion projected for 2012, the project team is making towards its goal of “bridging basic research results to validation and product improvement in real systems.”

More information about the INTERFACES – Certified Interfaces for Integrity and Security in Extensible Web-based Applications project available at /WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=1564

May 2010

Cristina Carias Presents a Paper at the Schumpeter 2010

Cristina Carias, dual degree Ph.D. student in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship (TCE), will present a paper entitled “Entrepreneurship, the Initial Labor Force, and the Location of New Firms”, at the 13th Conference of the International Schumpeter Society on Innovation, Organization, Sustainability and Crises. Carias is co-author of this paper with her Carnegie Mellon advisor Steven Klepper.

This conference will take place at Aalborg University in Denmark on 21-24 June 2010.

Abstract
“ A model of the location choice of new firms is developed in which founders locate their firms close to their home region in order to hire workers they know about through their prior employment. The model is tested using a matched employer employee data set for Portugal. Consistent with the model, new Portuguese firms in the same industry as their founder’s prior employer were more likely to locate in their founder’s home region, to hire workers from the founder’s prior employer and other firms in the same region and industry, to employ them longer, and to perform better than other new firms.”

Read full version of the paper at:
http://www.schumpeter2010.dk/index.php/schumpeter/schumpeter2010/paper/viewFile/286/35

The MHCI Project course is an 8-month long capstone project for the Master’s of HCI program and integrates everything the students have learned in their coursework into one “end-to-end” experience. Students work in interdisciplinary teams with an industry sponsor to 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.

2009

Portugal Telecom / Sapo – Sapo is the Internet division of Portugal Telecom, the leading web portal in Portugal.

Critical Software – Critical Software provides solutions, services and technologies for mission and business critical information systems across several markets. Critical’s success lies in bringing quality and innovation to our customers’ information systems in a timely and cost effective manner. We have a solid track record of on time, on budget and on quality projects and have successfully released technologies and products worldwide in specific niche markets.

Promosoft – Promosoft Integration is the quintessential company, dedicated to the integration of solutions and the provision of IT infrastructures (system software and hardware), as well as support and/or integration of own or third party management applications and of specialized non-application solutions. It also provides services in the following areas: technological consultancy, applications and architectural design of integrated solutions and the incorporation of value added into third party products.

2008

• Portugal Telecom – MEO -Students are applying usability methods to develop a prototype that will enhance the TV experience for Meo users across platforms. Meo is an innovative TV service provided by Portugal Telecom, that gives its users the ” power” to control their interaction.
• Outsystems (Carnegie Mellon Program)

Check the HCII/CMU Project page for details on past projects and sponsors.

Portuguese Students won Carnegie Mellon University’s first Open Innovation Competition

Two Portuguese master students of software engineering under the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal program, Marina Santana and João Pina, won first place in Carnegie Mellon University’s first Open Innovation Competition March 20. Their team won this competition with a proposal to predict the success of Internet startups by incorporating social networks into the traditional Delphi method of forecasting.

This Open Innovation Competition is an interdisciplinary project sponsored within Carnegie Mellon University by Project Olympus (SCS), the Don Jones Center for Entrepreneurship (Tepper), and the Institute for Social Innovation and Masters of Information Systems (ISI, MISM, Heinz College). In this competition nine teams of six students each presented their ideas for predicting emerging consumer Internet trends to a panel of six judges, including Charles Moldow, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who sponsored the campus-wide competition. The first-, second-, and third-place teams won prizes of $2,000, $1,000 and $500, respectively.

Santana and Pina won first place in Carnegie Mellon University’s first Open Innovation Competition in the Orange Team with Logan Powell, a Tepper MBA student; Shing Yan Lau, a junior majoring in statistics; Elaine Lee, a senior majoring in mathematical sciences; and Rakesh Mishra, a Ph.D. student in the Mellon College of Science.

In its proposal titled “Algorithmic facilitation of the Delphi method using crowdsourced forecasting data”, the team noted the success of the Delphi Method, an iterative process developed by the RAND Corp. in which a panel of experts anonymously answers questionnaires and the results are summarized by a facilitator over two or more rounds until a consensus emerges. To apply the method to forecasting Internet consumer trends, the team concluded that an extremely large group of experts would be required. They plan to use social networks to gather rankings regarding the merits of various Internet consumer ideas and then use an algorithm to evaluate each participant’s predictive power over time.
Marina Santana and João Pina, both students in the master’s dual degree program in software engineering, are supported by the industrial affiliate NOVABASE. They are doing their dual degree master program jointly at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra and at Carnegie Mellon University. “Our mentor at Carnegie Mellon Universiy is Grace Lewis and at Universidade de Coimbra are Paulo Rupino, Pedro Bizarro and Marco Vieira,” said Santana and Pina, adding “although we have always received full support and incentive from them, this competition was mainly taken as an extra-curricular project.”

Q. What took you to participate in the Carnegie Mellon University Open Innovation Competition?
A. We always felt passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship, so we decided to attend a Tepper Business School related course while at the Carnegie Mellon University. When the opportunity of participating in the contest came up, we just couldn’t resist.

Q. What kind of idea did your team developed?
A. We were asked to predict what the next big thing in the internet will be. The challenge was to know if something could become the next Twitter or Facebook. Our team took advantage of our multidisciplinary skills to create an idea that uses technology, social economic factors, and consumer preferences. We developed a method that brings the human factors into the equation in order to organically evolve through time until it gets to the best possible prediction.

Q. What’s the importance of this award for you?
A. This award shows us that the world class education we are having both at Universidade de Coimbra and at Carnegie Mellon University is proving to be inspirational. We feel really proud to have our work recognized even when competing at the highest level with some of the most talented people from around the world. We hope that this will help us foster the innovative thinking along our lives.

March 2010