Category Archives: Events

DEI Talks | “A Journey Through Cybersecurity: Research on IDPS for NC enabled systems and Real-World Automotive Security Challenges” by Reza ParsaMehr

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The talk entitled “A Journey Through Cybersecurity: Research on IDPS for NC enabled systems and Real-World Automotive Security Challenges” will be presented by Dr. Reza ParsaMehr, december the 17th, at 17:00, in room B021.

Abstract:

My journey in cybersecurity began in the classroom. For more than five years, I served as a university lecturer and faculty member in Iran, teaching and supervising students in computer networks, network security, and secure system design. My path then moved into advanced research, where I contributed to the EU Horizon 2020 SECRET project funded under Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme. I developed some intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms for network coding–enabled 5G mobile small cells.
Transitioning to industry introduced a new reality, where cybersecurity directly affects safety, regulation, and large-scale engineering. Today, as Security and Privacy Team Leader at Aumovio Engineering Solution, I work as a security and privacy specialist and oversee blue-team, penetration testing, and cybersecurity maintenance across automotive platforms while ensuring compliance with ISO/SAE 21434, UNECE R155/R156.
In this keynote, I’ll introduce my research on intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms for network-coding–enabled systems, followed by an overview of real automotive cybersecurity challenges and potential solutions.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Reza ParsaMehr is a cybersecurity specialist with a background as a university faculty member, researcher, and industry security leader. He holds a Ph.D. in Security in Telecommunications and currently leads the Security and Privacy Department at Aumovio Engineering Solutions, focusing on automotive cybersecurity, secure architecture design, and regulatory compliance.

Creativity Talks | “Neurorobotics: Connecting the Brain, Body, and Environment” by Jeffrey L. Krichmar

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The seventeenth session of Creativity Talks will feature Professor Jeffrey L. Krichmar, an expert in neurorobotics and computational neuroscience at the University of California, Irvine, as the keynote speaker, presenting “Neurorobotics: Connecting the Brain, Body, and Environment.”
The talk will take place on December the 4th 2025, at 17:30, and will be moderated by Armando Sousa (DEEC).

Abstract:

Neurorobots are robots whose control systems follow structural and dynamical aspects of the nervous system. Their artificial brains can be thoroughly probed and recorded as the robot interacts with the world. Neurorobotic design principles fall into three categories that follow natural organisms: First, they must react decisively to sensory events. Second, they must have the ability to adapt, learn and remember over their lifetime. Third, they must weigh the different and sometimes conflicting options that are crucial for completing tasks. Following these principles can not only increase our understanding of how brain responses lead to flexible behavior, but they may also lead to more intelligent systems. In this talk, I will describe the field of neurorobotics and then present neurorobot interaction case studies that focus on how neuromodulation and neurohormones can influence affect, learning, and behavior.

The talk will be broadcast online:

About the Speaker:

Jeffrey L. Krichmar received a B.S. in Computer Science in 1983 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University in 1997. He spent 15 years as a software engineer on projects ranging from the PATRIOT Missile System at the Raytheon Corporation to Air Traffic Control for the Federal Systems Division of IBM. From 1999 to 2007, he was a Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute. Since 2008, he has been a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Krichmar has over 20 years of experience designing adaptive algorithms, creating neurobiologically plausible neural networks, and constructing brain-based robots whose behavior is guided by neurobiologically inspired models. He has over 160 publications and holds 9 patents. His work has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), National Science Foundation, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Additionally, he has worked with industry on sponsored research contracts from Qualcomm, Northrup Grumman Corporation, and Toyota Motor North America. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and the Society for Neuroscience. He recently published a book, “Neurorobotics: Connecting the Brain, Body, and Environment” that lays out principles for designing intelligent systems.

DEI Talks | “From Digital Media to Generative AI: The Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech” by Prof. Jay Bolter

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The talk “From Digital Media to Generative AI: The Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech” will be presented by Prof. Jay Bolter on November the 20th, at 16:30, in room D101 (previously announced in room I-105) and will be moderated by Prof. António Coelho (DEI).

The talk will also be broadcast online:

DEI Talks | “From Digital Media to Generative AI: The Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech” by Prof. Jay Bolter | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams

Abstract:

“For more than 25 years, I have been working with students and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology on the history, theory, and practice of digital media. Highlights of that work include projects in our Augmented Environments Lab exploring virtual, augmented, and mixed reality—particularly in the contexts of cultural heritage, entertainment, and personal expression. My interest in the role of digital media within the broader history of media has led to papers and books such as Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), co-authored with Richard Grusin, and Reality Media: Augmented and Virtual Reality (2021), co-authored by Blair MacIntyre and Maria Engberg. In my presentation, I will review this body of work and suggest how it connects to current research with students, with a particular focus on generative AI. In harvesting billions of words and images from the internet, generative AI performs an algorithmic remix—or remediation—of all the digitized and digital media of the past.”

About the Speaker:

Jay David Bolter is now Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech. In 2025, he retired as the Wesley Chair of New Media and co-Director of the Augmented Environments Lab. He has lectured extensively in North America and Europe and served as a guest professor at Malmö University in Sweden. His books include Remediation (with Richard Grusin), Windows and Mirrors (with Diane Gromala), The Digital Plenitude, and Reality Media (with Blair MacIntyre and Maria Engberg). CV (PDF)

SINF 2025: Another inspiring edition of Semana de Informática wraps up

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By Álvaro Paralta, SICC, FEUP

“Lectures, workshops and problem-solving sessions. These were some of the activities at the latest edition of Semana de Informática (SINF), organised by the Informatics Group of the Student Association of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (NIAEFEUP). The initiative took place between 21 and 24 October at the Faculty of Engineering and was attended by more than 20 companies.

Over the four days, the companies interacted freely with FEUP students from their respective stands, distributed along the main corridor of the faculty. But that’s not all. In addition to the job fair itself, the programme also included workshops, lectures, problem-solving sessions and a networking dinner between the companies with the highest level of sponsorship at the event and the invited students.

According to Diogo Fernandes, president of NIAEFEUP, the overall assessment of the event is “very positive”. “We got the impression that the companies, in general, were very satisfied. And the feedback we received, both from trainers and speakers, was that the students participated actively in the activities – they were always very interested and engaged,” he comments.
“For us, organising a SINF means having the opportunity to bring new topics to students, as well as providing them with another opportunity to interact with companies. This is clearly something in which FEUP excels, in general – the ease with which we are able to reach the business community. There are always many job fairs and activities with companies that enhance this relationship. And having an activity of this type dedicated solely to Computer Engineering is very important,” reflects Diogo Fernandes.

Among the topics covered at SINF were Artificial Intelligence, Digital Transformation, Cybersecurity, Quantum Computing, Career Development and Entrepreneurship. “We have noticed that this has been an area that has been emerging more and more – not only because of growing demand from students, but also because of what we have seen at the events we have participated in,” explains Diogo.

There was also room for new features, such as problem-solving sessions and a networking dinner. “The contact that a company has with a student through a job fair is usually relatively quick and does not allow for much discussion or in-depth conversation. With this in mind, we prepared these activities, which we believe allowed for more detailed contact between the company and the student,” shares the president of NIAEFEUP. “With the problem-solving sessions, we gave companies a chance to closely observe the students’ ability to solve challenges. On the one hand, we managed to give students a more relaxed moment; on the other hand, companies were able to see their skills in a very practical way – not only in terms of solving the challenge itself, but also their teamwork, communication and leadership skills,” explains Diogo Fernandes.

The networking dinner was also developed in a more personalised way. The companies with the highest level of sponsorship were able to directly invite students who had positively impressed them during the interaction at their respective stands. This allowed the relationship between the employer and the potential candidate to be deepened, enabling mutual interests and opportunities to be explored in a more informal way and with more time.

NIAEFEUP organised this edition of SINF in the aftermath of the National Meeting of Computer Science Students, which took place in April at FEUP. “This was an added challenge because it was a very large event to which we were all very dedicated. This meant that we ended up starting SINF a little later,” shares the student. “It was challenging, but we already had a well-defined plan. We ended up gaining a lot of experience from the meeting, and that helped us.”

With their eyes already set on the future, NIAEFEUP’s goals include organising more training sessions with companies throughout the year. “We want to be more involved in the student training process, meeting their needs. And that’s what we’re working on,” concludes Diogo.

More information here.”

ECMLPKDD 2025 – European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases

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The European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD), the largest European event dedicated to Machine Learning and one of the most important worldwide in the field of Artificial Intelligence, took place in Porto between 15 and 19 September 2025.

The organisation counted on the active participation of several students and researchers from the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), notably Carlos Soares (General Co-Chair) and João Mendes Moreira (Workshops Co-Chair).

Held at Alfândega do Porto, the conference brought together more than 1,300 participants from 60 countries, including around 450 students. The programme featured seven keynote speeches by some of the world’s leading researchers in the field, including Pedro Domingos (University of Washington), Cynthia Rudin (Duke University), Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh), Francisco Herrera (University of Granada), Sašo Džeroski (Jožef Stefan Institute) and Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante – Institute of Humanity-Centric AI).

The scientific programme included around 400 accepted papers, in addition to numerous presentations at the 32 workshops associated with the event, reflecting the vitality and diversity of the European Machine Learning and Data Science community.

ECMLPKDD 2025 was supported by several national and international companies, including BNP Paribas, EDF, Google, ASML, NOS, NEC, Amazon, AstraZeneca and Banco de Portugal, as well as an institutional partnership with Porto Digital.

More information on the ECMLPKDD website.

DEI Talks | “smtgcc: Using an SMT solver to find bugs in GCC” by Krister Walfridsson

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The talk “smtgcc: Using an SMT solver to find bugs in GCC” will be presented by Krister Walfridsson on December the 4th, at 16:00, online:

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Meeting ID: 373 912 942 228 7
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Abstract:

“SMT solvers are increasingly effective for finding compiler bugs and validating optimizations. This talk presents smtgcc, a translation-validation tool for GCC. It is similar to Alive2 for LLVM, but smtgcc’s approach diverges from Alive2 because GCC and LLVM follow different design choices. I will explain how smtgcc works and discuss issues in formalizing the semantics of GIMPLE, GCC’s IR.”

About the Speaker:

Krister Walfridsson became involved with the GCC project while studying at university in the mid-1990s. Since completing his studies, he has worked with both compilers and operating systems in various embedded environments. Most recently, he spent 10 years at Arm as a principal compiler engineer in the Mali GPU team. He is currently taking a few years off to work on personal projects and to dance.

DEI Talks | “Knowledge Graphs + AI: The Evolution of Automated GitHub Issue Resolution” by Prof. He Ye (University College London)

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The talk entitled “Knowledge Graphs + AI: The Evolution of Automated GitHub Issue Resolution“, will be presented by Prof. He Ye on November 17th, at 14:30, in room B008, moderated by Prof. Alexandra Mendes (DEI).

Abstract:

“AI coding agents are becoming increasingly capable, achieving strong results on benchmarks such as SWE-bench. However, most still struggle with real-world challenges such as issue reproduction, precise context retrieval from large codebases, and the high cost of LLMs. In this talk, I will introduce our recent code agent, Prometheus — a knowledge graph-powered, multi-agent system designed to tackle GitHub issues in practice. Prometheus transforms entire repositories into a unified knowledge graph stored in Neo4j for scalable and structured reasoning. This enables precise, cross-language context retrieval, allowing large language models to generate accurate and efficient fixes. Prometheus delivers robust performance, resolving diverse issues across seven programming languages. I will show how combining LLMs with knowledge graphs can advance automated issue resolution beyond today’s benchmark-driven limits. We have recently transitioned this research into an off-the-shelf product that helps industry resolve software issues automatically.”

About the Speaker:

He Ye is an Assistant Professor at University College London. She previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and received her PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her research centers on developing the next generation of code agents to automate software engineering tasks, with a focus on codebase context retrieval, automated issue resolution, and code agent memory construction. Beyond academia, she is the co-founder of EuniAI, a startup committed to turning research into real-world solutions that help developers address practical software challenges.

DEI Talks | “Energy-awareness in compute acceleration: The role of FPGAs” by Prof. Shreejith Shanker

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The talk entitled “Energy-awareness in compute acceleration: The role of FPGAs“, will be presented by Prof. Shreejith Shanker on October 30, at 11:30, in room B012, and will be moderated by Prof. Tiago Carvalho (DEI).

Abstract:

“The talk will cover a set of projects that my team at TCD is working on, spanning embedded and distributed systems to high-performance media workflows, and how FPGAs are enabling an energy-performance trade-off in these applications.”

About the Speaker:

Dr. Shreejith Shanker is an Assistant Professor of Reconfigurable Computing at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and leads the research group on reconfigurable architectures, accelerators and workflows. His research interests include reconfigurable and adaptive computing architectures, in-network computing, post-production media workflows, design automation tools and distributed embedded systems, with a focus on performance-energy trade-off and hardware-software codesign approaches.

DEI Talks | “Declarative Programming” by Steven Pemberton (ACM Distinguished Speaker)

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The talk “Declarative Programming” will be delivered by Steven Pemberton, a renowned researcher in Computer Science and Information Technology and an ACM Distinguished Speaker, on October 23rd at 10:00, in room B033, and will be moderated by Prof. João Ferreira (DEI). Admission is free.

Abstract:

“In the 50s, when the first programming languages were designed, computers cost millions, and relatively, programmers were almost free. Those programming languages therefore reflected that relationship: it didn’t matter if it took a long time to program, as long as the resulting program ran as fast as possible.
Now, that relationship has been reversed, which I call Moore’s Switch: compare to the cost of programmers, computers are almost free.
And yet we are still programming in descendants of the programming languages from the 50s: we are still telling the computers step by step how to solve the program.
Declarative programming is a new approach to applications: rather than describing exactly how to reach the solution, it describe what the solution should look like, and leaves more of the administrative parts of the program to the computer.
One of the few declarative languages available is XForms, an XML-based language that despite what its name might suggest is not only about form. Large projects, at large companies such as the National Health Service, the BBC and Xerox, have shown that by using XFoms, programming time and cost of application can be reduced to a tenth and sometimes even much more.”

About the Speaker:

“Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the field of computer science and information technology, with a long and rich history of contributions to the development of the internet and the web. He is affiliated with the Dutch national research centre Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he conducts research on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies.
At university he was tutored by Dick Grimsdale who built the world’s first transistorised computer, and who was himself a tutee of Alan Turing. After university, Pemberton — coincidentally — worked in Turing’s old department in Manchester, writing software for the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing had worked on.
Pemberton was the first user of the open internet in Europe when the CWI created the first connection in 1988, and has been involved with the web from its inception, co-designing several web standards, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He chairs two groups at W3C.
In addition to his work on the web, Pemberton has also made significant contributions to other areas of computer science, such as the design of programming languages, having co-designed the language that Python is based on, and the study of human-computer interaction. His involvement with ACM includes being editor in chief of The SIGCHI Bulletin, and then ACM interactions for a decade; he has chaired the CHI Conference and he co-founded the Netherlands local SIGCHI group, and chaired several local CHI conferences there.
He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award.
As a speaker, Pemberton is known for his engaging and informative presentations, which draw on his deep knowledge of computer science and his passion for technology, and cover both social and technological aspects of computing. His talks are always thought-provoking and entertaining, and he has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events around the world. In 2023 he became an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He is bi-lingual in English and Dutch.
A fuller bio, videos, and a full list of talks is available on his website: https://www.cwi.nl/~steven”

DEI Talks | “Software process modeling and test automation: Introducing the Reliable Software Architectures Research Group” by Prof. Přemek Brada

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The talk “Software process modeling and test automation: Introducing the Reliable Software Architectures Research Group” will be presented October the 9th, at 15:30, room B031, and will be moderated by Prof. Ana Paiva (DEI).

Abstract:

“In this talk, I will give an overview of research done by the Reliable Software Architectures Research Group at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czechia. The focus will be on analysing software process data to detect project management (anti-)patterns, where we’ll discuss the challenges in modeling software process elements in a way that is conducive to mapping onto the information gathered in project management tools. We’ll also touch the topic of analyzing software implementations to perform advanced verification and testing.”

About the Speaker:

Přemek Brada is an Associate Professor in Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czechia.  His research has covered the areas of software architecture consistency, interactive methods of architecture visualization, and software development methodologies including analysis of related process data.  He teaches bachelor and master level courses on object-oriented design and modeling, advanced software engineering practices, and also knowledge management. Currently he serves as the head of department, and is a member of the Board of Informatics Europe, the association of European informatics faculties and departments.