Author Archive: José Barboza

‹Programming› 2022, Porto + Online

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The International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming is a new conference focused on programming topics including the experience of programming. It was named ‹Programming› for short. ‹Programming› seeks for papers that advance knowledge of programming on any relevant topic, including programming practice and experience.
After Brussels, Nice, Genova, Porto, Cambridge, this sixth edition will follow a dual format, taking place in two moments, two venues, to offer two different kinds of experience:

First in Porto, Mon 21 – Fri 25 March, 2022, a charming city that will be happy to be able to embrace the participants, as soon as they arrive;
Later in an online venue, Mon 11 – Thu 14 April, 2022, 4 days, 2.5 hours/day, in different timezones, to welcome all around the world.

Ademar Aguiar, Associate Professor @DEI/FEUP, is the General Chair for this edition and tells us that the week ahead will be full of interesting sessions, with 2 keynotes, 15 talks, 6 demos, 3 workshops, 1 tutorial.
In addition, an Open Space track will welcome and host last minute ideas and interests on leading sessions among all participants.

The Social Program includes several social events, providing a mashup of Porto’s attractions, from historical to cultural, gastronomic and social, including local academy and industry. All of this to promote informal and playful conversations, to make sure that the experience will be unique and memorable.

Back to the future is the motto for 2022!

For + info and registration: https://2022.programming-conference.org/

CreativityTalks | Prof. António Sampaio da Nóvoa will be our next guest

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There are many “futurisms” that suggest an education without schools, based on the immense possibilities of technologies and artificial intelligence. These “futurisms” gained strength with the pandemic and the different forms of isolation to which we have been subjected. But education does not take place in “confinement”, it always requires a relationship, an encounter, working together. This is not the time to announce the “death of school”, but rather to invent it anew.

“Inventing the School anew” will be the topic of the 6th Creativity Talk, presented by Professor *António Sampaio da Nóvoa, on March 17, at 18:00, at the FEUP’s Anfiteatro Nobre (B032).

The session will be moderated by Amélia Lopes, Full Professor and President of the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto.

The participation in the lecture requires a (free) registration at Eventbrite (places available to the capacity of the room by order of registration).

If you cannot attend in person, you can attend remotely through the following address: https://youtu.be/V2I0h0EQBO0

*Bio

António Sampaio da Nóvoa is a Full Professor at the University of Lisbon. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and a PhD in Education Sciences from the University of Geneva. He was Rector of the University of Lisbon between 2006 and 2013. He was Portugal’s Ambassador to UNESCO between 2018 and 2021.

DEI Talks | The Digital Score – “What’s really going on {in} here?” by Prof. Craig Vear

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Prof Craig Vear is a Research Professor at De Montfort University where he is also a director of the Creative AI and Robotics Lab in the Institute of Creative Technologies. His research is naturally hybrid as he draws together the fields of music, digital performance, creative technologies, artificial intelligence, creativity, gaming, mixed reality and robotics. He has been engaged in practice-based research with emerging technologies for nearly three decades, and was editor for The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research, published in 2022. His recent monograph The Digital Score: creativity, musicianship and innovation, was published by Routledge in 2019, and he is Series Editor of Springer’s Cultural Computing Series. In 2021 he was awarded a €2Million ERC Consolidator Grant to continue to develop his Digital Score research – digiscore.dmu.ac.uk 

Join us on the 24th February, at 14:30, in room B024 of FEUP, for the presentation and discussion of this project – Investigating Technological Transformation of the Music Score (DigiScore).

The opening section will position the digital score amongst a broader understanding of the function and purpose of all music scores: that of a communications interface between musicians. After defining that which signals a digital score as a different proposition, he will outline the research aims and objectives of the DigiScore project. Will position this research among the core principles of flow, phenomenology, embodiment, and media affect, and outline the focus of the research as seeking meaning-making from inside the creative acts of digital score musicking (Small 1989). The final section will outline some of the current new insights, and present key questions that he would wish to discuss with those present in the room as way of allowing their voice into the development of this researchers and expanding the community of research in this area. 

‘LITHME – Language In The Human Machine Era’ is coming to Porto

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LITHME, the EU-funded research network includes all European countries plus a number of international partner countries, and is funded for four years, 2020-24. Over this period of time it is planned to include stakeholders to strike up a productive dialogue between academic researchers and industry. Academics will gain foresight of future technologies, while industry stakeholders will gain insight in the potential social and linguistic effects of their inventions.

As part of the LITHME management team and chairs of Work Group 1 on ‘Computational Linguistics’, Henrique Lopes Cardoso (FEUP) and Rui Sousa-Silva (FLUP) will host on 1-2 June 2022 a roadshow in Porto. This roadshow aims to further the links among the LITHME network, the industry, and the community by inviting companies to showcase their products and services. The roadshow will take place at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.

This roadshow will focus on language technologies and human-machine interaction, which allow us to speak to and through technology, the software powering the human-machine era, and human integrated devices. This includes but is not limited to: innovative human-machine interfaces; machine translation and interpreting; machine sign language interpreting; text-to-speech, speech to text and speech-to-speech technologies; and virtual reality and augmented reality, among others.

Simultaneously, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities will host the LITHME Training School (30 May – 3 June), whose objectives are widening the knowledge of LITHME’s activities, bringing together trainees from across linguistics, language research, and language technology, providing intensive training on new and emerging interdisciplinary challenges and familiarizing trainees with unique technologies developed by our sponsors.

The Program will cover the following topics:

  • 30 May: Language and Computation, Language Technology;
  • 31 May: Language and Law, Language Rights;
  • 1 June: Language Vitality and Endangerment, Technology-assisted Language Learning;
  • 2 June: Language Ideologies, Language Variations and Change;
  • 3 June: Language Professionals, Translation and Teaching of Languages

Participating Companies and further details about the event will be announced in the coming weeks @ https://lithme.eu/.

CT UP took office for the four-year term 2022/2025 and one of the 11 members elected to this Commission is Pedro Silva from the DEI-FEUP

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The University of Porto Workers’ Commission (CT-UP) took office for the four-year period 2022/2025 last 28 January, at the Rectory building.

“We are now available to collaborate, to help and to contribute to the growth of our University and to the well-being of the entire community of the University of Porto”, said Pedro Sampaio, one of the 11 members who are now part of that representative body of workers of the University and the first of its kind in Portuguese Higher Education.

The electoral act held last December 13, in all Organic Units and Autonomous Services of the U.Porto, also resulted in the election of Ana Nogueira (SASUP), Maria João Leite Cardoso (Rectory), Paula Teixeira Pinto (Rectory), Pedro Miguel Silva (FEUP), Rui Pedro Costa (FFUP), António Rodrigues (FADEUP), José Miguel Magalhães (Rectory), Rosa Barros (FCNAUP), Miguel Diogo (FEUP) and Maria Armandina Moreira (FMUP).

Created in 2013, the U.Porto Workers’ Commission is a pioneer body in the framework in Higher Education in Portugal and its mission is to defend and enhance the interests and rights of all employees of the academic community through an active and constructive participation in the management of the institution.

1984 Revisited: Was George Orwell an optimist?

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Debating privacy in the digital era – 03/02, 14:30, online

George Orwell’s masterpiece “1984” offers today an almost realistic description of the vast surveillance system on which capitalist democracies are now based. For the first time in the history of humanity, electronics have made it possible to bring together in the same instruments and the same gestures the work and the supervision exercised over the worker. Big Brother is no longer a figure of speech – he has become an everyday vulgarity.

This work will serve as inspiration for the Workshop promoted by the Doctoral Program in Digital Media at U.Porto, to be held online on February 3rd, at 14:30.

The afternoon will be dedicated to the theme of privacy in the digital era and intends to address its multiple implications today and to foresee future ones – namely regarding the transparency/opacity of digital systems and its relation with digital literacy, surveillance capitalism, prediction algorithms, among others.

To help this reflection, the session will open with a lecture by Professor Luís Borges Gouveia (Fernando Pessoa University/CITCEM – Transdisciplinary Research Centre “Culture, Space and Memory”), followed by a round table with Amílcar Correia (Co Director of Público newspaper), Arlindo Oliveira (President of INESC) and Filipe Vilas Boas (Artist).

The event will be held at Zoom https://bit.ly/35qpn9x,  with live broadcast on Youtube https://bit.ly/34lwLTl

Gilberto Bernardes will coordinate one of the transversal curricular units created to help think “outside the box”.

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The initiative of U.Porto, which will start in the next second semester, intends to bring students closer to some of the main cultural institutions of the city. The collaboration with Casa da Música, Teatro Nacional S. João, Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis and also with Jardim Botânico and Faculdade de Belas Artes, resulted in the creation of curricular units of transversal skills (3 ECTS), that the undergraduate and master students will be able to add to their basic training and enrich their career by experiencing the backstage of the artistic and cultural activity of Porto.

Music and Society will be the UC coordinated by Prof. Gilberto Bernardes, Assistant Professor of DEI/FEUP and Coordinator of the Specialization in Interactive Music and Sound Design of the Masters in Multimedia of U.Porto, in collaboration with Óscar Rodrigues from Casa da Música, and will be an opportunity to understand and explore music in different socio-cultural contexts, particularly in the classical context and in community intervention, and to reflect actively on the mission and challenges of the fabric of creative industries, with special focus on the branch of music creation.

The course will take place on Fridays, from 17:00 to 19:00, and will be held at FEUP and Casa da Música.

Applications are open until January 31st, and detailed information about these CU’s can be seen here and here.

Photo: Egidio Santos/U.Porto

PhD Defense in Digital Media: ”Playing the Museum: A framework for the design of location-based games with augmented reality for museum spaces”

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Candidate:
Maria Van Zeller de Macedo de Oliveira e Sousa

Date, Time and Place
26th January, 10h00, Sala de Atos da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Streaming: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsg2ymeaHLRLbsGt67JmKw

President of the Jury
Doutor Carlos Miguel Ferraz Baquero-Moreno, Professor Catedrático da FEUP

Members
Doutor Pedro Júlio Enrech Casaleiro, Professor Auxiliar Convidado da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra;
Doutora Teresa Isabel Lopes Romão, Professora Associada do Departamento de Informática da Faculdade de Ciência Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa;
Doutor Mário Jorge Rodrigues Martins Vairinhos, Professor Auxiliar do Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro;
Doutora Paula Cristina Menino Duarte Homem, Professora Auxiliar do Departamento de Ciências e Técnicas do Património da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto;
Doutor António Fernando Vasconcelos Cunha Castro Coelho, Professor Associado com Agregação do Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (Supervisor).

PhD Defense in Digital Media: ”New Strategies and User-Generated Content in the Public Service Media News in the Digital World – The Portuguese Case”

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Candidate:  Daniel dos Santos Catalão

Date, Time and Place

15th of December,14:30, Sala de Atos da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

 

President of the Jury

Doutor António Fernando Vasconcelos Cunha Castro Coelho, Professor Associado com Agregação da FEUP

Members

Doutor Francisco Rui Nunes Cádima, Professor Catedrático (aposentado) da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa;

Doutora Felisbela Maria Carvalho Lopes, Professora Associada com Agregação do Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade do Minho;

Doutora Catarina Sofia Lourenço Rodrigues, Professora Auxiliar da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade dos Açores;

Doutor Fernando António Dias Zamith Silva, Professor Auxiliar do Departamento de Ciências da Comunicação e da Informação da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Coorientador);

Doutor Sérgio Sobral Nunes, Professor Auxiliar do Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

Streaming via YouTube

Dealing with memory latency in the age of big data

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“Lecture DEI Series
Date: June 25th
Time: 14:00
Room: Auditório A – INESCTEC
Speaker: Walid A. Najjar
Affiliation: Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of California Riverside
Abstract
For over two decades the gap between processor and memory speeds has been the most daunting challenge in computer architecture. The advent of big data applications has exacerbated the problem. Traditional multi-core architecture mitigate memory latency through the use of massive cache hierarchies that take up over 80% of the chip area and a proportional percentage of the energy budget. However, big data applications exhibit very poor data locality and cannot benefits from large cache hierarchies. Such applications will be fully impacted by memory latency. Hardware multithreaded architectures have the ability to mask memory latency by context switching between ready threads when a memory access is performed. Classical hardware multithreaded architectures, such as barrel processors (e.g. the UltraSparc and the Cray XMT), must maintain a full state for every thread which requires a lot of resources. FPGAs allow us the opportunity to configure custom or semi-custom processing cores for specific applications.
In this talk I will describe the implementation of data processing applications on the latency masking Filament architecture using semi-custom data paths.
Short Bio
Walid A. Najjar is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California Riverside. His areas of research include computer architectures and compilers for parallel and high-performance computing, embedded systems, FPGA-based code acceleration and reconfigurable computing.
Walid received a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1985 and 1988 respectively. From 1989 to 2000 he was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University, before that he was with the USC-Information Sciences Institute. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS.”