Afonso Amaral leads international alliances research at the Critical Technology Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on technology and manufacturing policy and regulation. His research specializes in advanced manufactured products, trade, innovation, and industrial mobilization strategies to address product shortages and crises. He co-develops an early warning mechanism for monitoring supply chain disruptions with the Chief Economist team at the European Commission’s DG GROW.
I graduated in Instituto Superior Técnico, where I have joined the local Capture-The-Flag (CTF) team called STT. Ever since, I have participated in many security competitions and have been dedicated to the field of computer security, first focused on cryptography and now on web analysis.
His research has been featured in top venues such as ASE, ICSE, PLDI, and TOSEM. Notably, his work on PolyglotPiranha, a refactoring tool developed with Uber’s Programming Systems Group, is used by multibillion-dollar companies.
I’m a PhD student at LTI@CMU and IST. I’m interested in machine learning and natural language processing, with a particular focus on machine translation and interpretability.
Rudolph Santarromana’s research focuses on the social, political, and regulatory challenges to deploying low-carbon technologies. He received his B.S. from the University of Illinois, M.S from Instituto Superior Técnico, and finished his PhD in 2024 in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico, receiving an award for “Outstanding Dissertation”. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked on projects with several organizations including EDP Renewables, the United Nations, and grassroots advocacy organizations.
Maria da Loura Casimiro is a Software Engineering PhD student at the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) of INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon and at the Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University. She received her BSc. (2016) and MSc. (2018) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, having a major in Computers and a minor in Systems, Decision and Control. Her research interests include cloud optimization, machine learning, self-adaptation of systems and planning.
Luís Borges is a CMU Portugal student in Language Technologies, having started his PhD in 2019. His Master’s degree was focused on the application of Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning techniques on the topic of fake news detection. For his PhD, he is working on Neural Information Retrieval, also leveraging NLP and Deep Learning tools.
