Category Archives: Events

DEI Talks | “Safe Evolution of Smart Contracts Supported by LLMs and SMT Solvers” by Augusto Sampaio (UFPE)

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The talk “Safe Evolution of Smart Contracts Supported by LLMs and SMT Solvers” will be presented April the 24th, at 14:00, in room B006, moderated by Nuno Macedo (DEI).

Abstract:

The focus of this talk is a framework that supports the safe deployment and upgrade of smart contracts based on the design-by-contract (dbc) paradigm. The input is (i) an interface specification with invariants and pre- and postconditions for each function, and (ii) an implementation to be verified. The deployed version of a smart contract must conform to this specification. Specification evolution might involve both changing the data representation as well as extending the interface with new functions, provided the evolved specification is a refinement of the original one. A distinguishing feature of the overall approach is the automation of the verification process in a hidden formal methods style. Since developers tend to be reluctant to provide formal specifications for software components, we are investigating state-of-the-art NL processing technologies, using Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly, ChatGPT, to automatically infer formal (dbc) interface specifications from textual requirements. Also, when an upgrade involves change of data representation, we use the Alloy Analyser to automatically infer the relation between the two data representations. The applicability of the framework is evaluated in the context of Solidity smart contracts that implement some Ethereum standards. This project is a collaboration between Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (Brazil), The University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre (UK), and The Blockhouse Technology Limited (UK).

About the Speaker:

Augusto Sampaio is a DPhil from Oxford University, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of York, Commander of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Science, and a Professor at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. His main research interests are software engineering formal methods; formal approaches to testing; design, simulation and verification of robotic systems; and safe evolution of smart contracts. He is an Editorial Board member of Formal Aspects of Computing (ACM) and Science of Computer Programming (Elsevier), and has been a PC member of leading conferences in the field (FM, ETAPS, SEFM, ICFEM, ICTAC …). He published more than 150 papers and supervised 60 PhD and master’s students.

New Doctors honoured at Conferment Ceremony 2025

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The José Carlos Marques dos Santos Auditorium hosted another ‘Conferment Ceremony – Doctoral Awards & Career Award’ on April the 10th, at 17:00, awarding the most honourable distinction to those who completed their doctorate and defended their thesis in the 2023/2024 academic year.

The Prof. Doutor Joaquim Sarmento and Fundação Eng.º António de Almeida institutional awards were also presented, as well as the 2024 Career Award, this year given to Eng.º José Manuel Fernandes, founder of the FREZITE Group.

There was also time to honour the doctoral graduates who have completed 25 or 50 years of study, including Prof. Rui Carlos Camacho de Sousa Ferreira da Silva (DEI), and those who obtained the title of Agregado in 2004, including Prof. Gil Manuel Magalhães de Andrade Gonçalves, also from DEI.

The final speech was given by the Vice-Rector for Training, Academic Organization, Health and Well-being, Prof. José Castro Lopes.

The honoured doctorates linked to DEI:

Doctoral Programme in Informatics Engineering

Artur Jorge da Silva Rocha
Luís Carlos de Sousa Moreira Neto
Maria José Gomes Pedroto
Miguel António Mourão de Abreu
Pedro Miguel dos Santos Pinto
Tiago André Queiroz Soares da Costa
Yassine Baghoussi

Doctoral Programme in Digital Media

Abel João Gavinho Vaz Tavares Neto
Ana Sofia Airosa Coelho de Passos Baptista
Diogo Fernandes Santos
Hermann Bergmann Garcia e Silva
Joana Patrícia de Sousa Rodrigues
Juliana Carolina Campos Monteiro
Luís Alberto Teixeira Aly (Cum Laude)
Luís Henrique Pinto Arandas
Mariana de Oliveira Magalhães (Cum Laude)

PhD in Computer Science (Joint programme with FCUP, UA and UM)

Francisco José Torres Ribeiro
Rui António Ramada Rua
Simão Paulo Rato Alves Reis
Thiago de Andrade Silva
Ziad Kassam

DEI Talks | “Cyber Security Threat Landscape in the Context of Industry 4.0” by Haider Abbas

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The talk “Cyber Security Threat Landscape in the Context of Industry 4.0” will be presented April the 14th, at 14:30 (1h), in room I-105, moderated by Pedro Diniz (DEI).

Abstract:

Industry 4.0 is revolutionizing the ways in which industries function. Big data, industrial control systems, supervisory control, and data acquisition systems, smart machines, robotics, internet of things (IoT) etc., all fall under the umbrella of Industry 4.0. With the fourth industrial revolution comes new operational risks for smart manufacturers, connected devices, and digital supply networks. With increasing digital transformation and interconnected nature of industry 4.0, cyberattacks can have significantly greater effects than ever before while the manufacturers may not be prepared for the potential risks. Without the strong cybersecurity practices in place, industries can be subject to industrial property theft, production sabotage, industrial espionage etc. To address the cyber risks adequately in the era of industry 4.0, it is crucial to make the cyber security strategies secure and resilient and integrate them fully in the organizational strategies from the beginning. This talk will discuss different types of attacks smart industries can be targeted for. The talk will also recommend some techniques and cyber security practices that the manufacturing industries must adopt to protect themselves against such attacks.

About the Speaker:

Haider Abbas is the head of the R&D Department at the College of Signals, NUST, and founder of the National Cyber Security Auditing and Evaluation Lab (NCSAEL). He is a Cyber Security expert with advanced training from MIT, Stockholm University, IBM, and EC-Council, and holds a PhD in Information Security. Dr. Abbas is an editor for several renowned journals and has chaired numerous international conferences. He has authored over 130 research papers and has received multiple prestigious awards, including the NUST Best Researcher Award. He is a Fellow of the IET, BCS, and IST, and a Senior Member of IEEE. Additionally, he serves on the Board of Governors for Pakistan’s National Information Technology Board (NITB).

ENEI back to Porto

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The Encontro Nacional de estudantes de Informática – ENEI’25 is coming up and on its 16th edition, will take place from 11 to 14 April at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) and the Higher Institute of Engineering of Porto (ISEP/IPP), organised jointly by the student groups NIAEFEUP (Informatics Engineering Group of the Students‘ Association of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto), NCGM (Computer Graphics and Multimedia Group) and NEI-ISEP (Computer Science Students’ Group of the Higher Engineering Institute of Porto).

The more than 500 participants of the event will have the opportunity to take part in a wide range of activities, including talks (21), workshops (33), competitions, a job fair and countless networking moments throughout the days and nights of the event. Times and locations of the activities can be found at the event’s webpage.

The organisation highlights some of the 21 talks scheduled:

‘AI, Copilots, and the future of software development’ by Eddie Aftandilian, Principal Researcher at Github Next;
‘How to look through skin with AI’ by Michael Pound, Researcher at the University of Nottingham, Member of the Youtube Channel Computerphile;
‘The programmer who didn’t know how to code – Powered by IEEE Portugal’ by Charalampos Patrikakis, Professor at University of West Attica. IEEE Distinguished Visitor;
‘Cyberwarfare: Who Needs a Gun when you have a Keyboard? – Powered by ACM FEUP’ by Haider Abbas, Head of the R&D Department at College of Signals, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan;
‘What impact does software development have on an F1 team?’ by João Romão, Graduate Software Engineer at Aston Martin F1 Team;
‘Approaches and Challenges of Virtual and Augmented Reality in Health and Rehabilitation’ by Joaquim Jorge, Full Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). IEEE Fellow. UNESCO Chair on AI & XR;
‘How to make software for Hollywood studios’ by Nuno Fonseca, Founder and CEO Sound Particles (Alumnus ProDEI);
‘A story on Computer Vision: from zero to hero’ by José Costa Pereira, Assistant Professor at DEI/FEUP;
‘CRDTs: Building blocks for high availability and beyond’ by Carlos Baquero (DEI/FEUP) and Nuno Preguiça, co-creators of CRDTs;
‘Competitive Programming: Will it make you a better programmer?’ by André Restivo, Associate Professor at DEI/FEUP.

Also on show there will be a Points System that will allow participants to win more than 100 prizes. The event’s points are called bytes. All participants will be able to earn bytes by taking part in activities, completing tasks or securing podium places in the event’s various competitions, among other things. On the ENEI website there will be a shop where can be bought items with bytes. ‘This way, participants will have plenty of motivation to make the most of the event’s programme!’ say the organisers.

Discovering the latest technological trends, finding motivation for upcoming challenges, meeting students with common interests, contacting relevant companies in the field and leaving the event with new skills is what the organisers want to offer to all students travelling to Porto at the end of the week for what’s expected to be one of the best ENEI’s ever!

DEI Master’s Presentation

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On April 9th, the José Carlos Marques dos Santos Auditorium (FEUP) will open its doors at 14:30 for all those who wish to find out about the master´s programmes at the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI).

It will be a session aimed at providing guidance and clarification for all students who intend to choose one of the master’s programmes offered at DEI. At the end of the presentations, participants will be able to find out in more detail how the courses work, their areas of study and the employability offered by each one, thus making it easier to choose when applying.

It will also be an opportunity to get to know the master’s programmes of the Department of Computer Science (FCUP), which have been invited to participate.

The organisation has provided a form for those interested to ask questions in advance so that they can be answered at the end of the session.

Admission is free and registration is not required.

Programme

14:30 | Auditorium opening
14:45 | Opening of the session
15:00 | Presentation M.EIC – Master’s in Informatics and Computing Engineering (Prof. Rui Rodrigues)
15:15 | Presentation M.IA – Master’s in Artificial Intelligence (Prof. Henrique Lopes Cardoso)
15:30 | Presentation MM – Master’s in Multimedia (Prof. Jorge Barbosa)
15:45 | Presentation MCI – Master’s in Information Science (Prof. Carla Teixeira Lopes)
16:00 | Presentation MESW – Master’s in Software Engineering (Prof. Nuno Flores)
16:15 | Presentation MECD – Master’s in Data Science and Engineering (Prof. José Luís Borges)
16:30 | DCC – FCUP Masters Presentation (Prof. Pedro Ribeiro)
16:45 | Q&A on the application process

‘A journey through the asphalt. Rock music in Porto in the 1980s’

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The exhibition entitled ‘Uma viagem pelo asfalto. O rock no Porto nos anos oitenta’ will open on April 8 (opening at 18:30) and will be on display at Casa Comum until September 20.

For an extended period of around five months, visitors will be able to travel through a boiling phase in the 1980s, when the city of Porto experienced the heyday of exuberant urban tribes, which arose from an effort by young people to differentiate themselves and, at the same time, identify with a group that society recognised as such.
There were many tribes, from punks to goths, from metalheads to skinheads and rockabillys. Music was consumed with the avidity of discovery, with the help of pirate radios, and people went to places where they idolised bands like GNR, Taxi and Trabalhadores do Comércio.

The exhibition will take us on this journey through photographs, posters, newspaper cuttings and vinyl covers.

André Cunha, Beatriz Dobbs, Gurpreet Kaur, Inês Aguiar, Patrícia Amaral and Rodrigo Ferreira, students of the Master in Multimedia of U.Porto, supervised by Gilberto Bernardes, a lecturer at DEI, contributed to this exhibition by developing an interactive application for intuitive navigation through a wide range of multimedia content about the bands and key venues of Rock in Porto in the 80s.

More info here.

DEI Talks | “Towards AI-Assisted Synthesis of Verified Dafny Methods” by Prof. Cristina Videira Lopes

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The talk “Towards AI-Assisted Synthesis of Verified Dafny Methods”, will be presented March the 24th, at 11:00, in room I-105, moderated by Rui Maranhão (DEI).

Abstract:

“LLMs show “great promise” in code synthesis. Can they keep the promise and ensure that the synthesized code is provably correct?
In this talk I will present our work on synthesizing formally verified Dafny methods. LLMs don’t know much about Dafny, but they learn fast with proper RAG-CoT prompts. We spent 6 weeks hand-coding 50 verified algorithms in Dafny, and then GPT4 was able to generate 103 new ones with the right postconditions and the necessary verification hints.
Md Rakib Hossain (Misu) co-led the work, with assistance from Iris Ma. Joint work with James Noble.”

About the Speaker:

Cristina (Crista) Lopes is a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine, with research interests in Programming Languages, Software Engineering, and Distributed Virtual Environments. She is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. She is the recipient of the 2016 Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest for her work in the OpenSimulator virtual world platform. Her book “Exercises in Programming Style” has gained rave reviews, including being chosen as “Notable Book” by the ACM Best of Computing reviews.

WIER’25 – Workshop on Informatics Engineering Research

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On the 13th of March, the Doctoral Programme in Informatics Engineering (ProDEI) will host WIER’25 – Workshop on Informatics Engineering Research, the 20th edition of this annual event (formerly known as DSIE), which since 2006 has aimed to provide the first-year doctoral students, the organisers of the event, with an environment where they can present the concepts of Methodologies for Scientific Research applied to the articles submitted.

This year’s edition will open with the Keynote Talk “Computer Vision: from zero to hero“, by José Costa Pereira (DEI/FEUP lecturer).

António Augusto de Sousa and Rui Maranhão Abreu, the event’s steering committee and teachers of the ‘Methodologies for Scientific Research’ curriculum unit, see this as “a great opportunity for students to present and discuss their work in an informal setting, as a possible contribution to improving the content of their theses and putting into practice what they have learnt during the semester: the application of scientific methods to research work, the analysis and critical review of scientific articles, the writing of scientific texts, their oral presentation and the organisation of scientific meetings”.

All information about the speaker and the sessions can be found on the event’s website.

Entrance is free and registration is not required.

M.IA student gets a place on the podium of the country’s first quantum hackathon

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On the centenary of the publication of the works of Born, Heisenberg and Jordan (+info), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). The year-long global initiative will promote numerous initiatives aimed at raising public awareness of the importance of quantum science and its applications.

The PQHack 2025 competition, organised by the Quantum Science and Technology Centre (CiTeQ) and hosted by the Physics and Astronomy Department of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), took place on 8 and 9 February.

Over the course of a weekend, 39 participants in 12 teams competed to solve a set of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) challenges using Qadence, proposed by a team of experts.

‘SZS’, was the big winner of first quantum hackathon in the country, and it’s in this team that we find the Master’s student in Artificial Intelligence (M.IA) David Mesquita Scarin (first on the picture) who, together with Lucas Almeida (M:EF) and Carlos Felgueiras (University of Lisbon), won 1st place and a cash prize of 700 euros.

The other winning teams can be found on the event’s website.

PQHack is part of IQC25, an international hackathon circuit that will end with QuantathonV2, a championship that will take place from 10 to 12 October 2025 at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.

Foto: FCUP

DEI Talks | “Neuronflow: an event-driven processor architecture for low power AI at the edge” by Orlando Moreira (Snap Inc)

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The talk “Neuronflow: an event-driven processor architecture for low power AI at the edge” will be presented March the 6th, at 11:30, in room I-105, moderated by Pedro Diniz (DEI).

Abstract:

This presentation provides an in-depth overview of the GrAIcore Neural Processing Unit (NPU) architecture developed by Snap Inc. for Augmented Reality applications, emphasizing the role of sparsity in achieving significant power and performance improvements compared with traditional architectures. The discussion will focus on the necessity of redesigning traditional computer architectures to adopt an event-driven execution model, which is critical for harnessing the benefits of sparsity. Additionally, the talk will explore advanced training optimization techniques that enhance network activation sparsity, enabling the full potential of the event-driven multicore architecture to be realized. This holistic approach to architectural and algorithmic design is essential for leveraging the unique advantages of the GrAIcore NPU in real-world applications.

About the Speaker:

Orlando Moreira is Chief Computer Architect and Senior Manager at Snap Inc. in Eindhoven, Netherlands. His expertise encompasses computer architecture, edge AI, embedded systems, real-time systems, and data flow methodologies. Before his tenure at Snap Inc., Moreira held the position of Chief Architect at GrAI Matter Labs, where he was responsible for the compute architecture and software development kit (SDK) roadmaps.
Before, he worked for Philips Research, ST-Ericsson, Ericsson, and Intel (where he was group leader for programming and core tools – compiler, simulator, debugger and hw generation).
Throughout his career, Moreira has contributed peer-reviewed to the field of computer architecture, particularly in the areas of embedded and cyber-physical systems, as well as the field of real-time design, modeling, and analysis .
He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Eindhoven.