Category Archives: Events

DEI contributes to SPE 2026 with 50 activities in the field of Informatics Engineering

Posted on

The Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) had a strong and highly participative presence at SPE 2026 – Semana Profissão Engenharia, which took place from March 24 to 26 at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP).

Over the three days of SPE, DEI delivered a total of 50 activities, each lasting 30 minutes, involving a large number of students, faculty members, and visitors. Forty of these activities were integrated into two tracks exclusively dedicated to Informatics, allowing for direct and in‑depth contact with different areas of Informatics Engineering. The remaining ten activities were part of two “Future Society” tracks, developed in collaboration with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) and other research institutes, promoting an interdisciplinary approach to emerging technological challenges.

DEI’s activities were offered in a variety of formats, including mini‑workshops, demonstrations of projects developed within curricular units, and presentations delivered by student groups and research teams. In the mini‑workshops, participants had the opportunity to engage in hands‑on activities such as Python programming and programming with micro:bits, in an interactive and accessible environment.

Several DEI curricular units were represented in this edition, showcasing the work developed across different study cycles. From the 2nd year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Informatics and Computing Engineering (L.EIC), the curricular units Computational Logic (LC) and Software Technologies Development Laboratories (LDTS) took part. From the 3rd year of L.EIC, the units Web Application Bases Laboratories (LBAW), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Computer Graphics (CG) were represented. From the 1st year of the Master’s Degree in Informatics and Computing Engineering (M.EIC), the curricular unit Information Management Systems (SGI) participated.

The program also included demonstrations of DEI’s participation in the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge(BFMC), an international competition in the field of autonomous driving, highlighting the department’s involvement in projects with a strong practical, technological, and industry‑focused component.

In parallel, several student groups contributed with their own presentations, namely ACM FEUP, ARMIS.LAB, xSTF, NCGM, and IEEE UP Student Branch, reinforcing the central role of students in promoting the degree programs and research areas in Informatics.

In total, DEI’s participation involved more than 60 students, whose contribution was essential to the success of the activities and to interaction with secondary school students attending the event.

The organization of DEI’s participation was coordinated by DEI faculty members Carla Gonçalves, José Campos, Ricardo Cruz, and Thiago Silva, ensuring a well‑structured, diverse, and representative presence of the department throughout the event.

With this participation, DEI reinforced its commitment to the dissemination of Informatics Engineering, engagement with society, and the promotion of education, research, and innovation among future engineers.

DEI Talks | “Life Post Moore’s Law: The New Design Frontier” by Prof. Mark Horowitz (Stanford University)

Posted on

The talk “Life Post Moore’s Law: The New Design Frontier” will be given by Prof. Mark Horowitz (Stanford University) on March 27th, at 14:00, in room I-105. The session will be chaired by Prof. Pedro Diniz (DEI).

About the Talk:

“For over 50 years, information technology has relied upon Moore’s Law: providing, for the same cost, 2x the number of logic transistors that were possible a few years prior. For much of that time, the smaller devices also provided dramatic energy and performance improvement through Dennard Scaling, but that scaling ended over a decade ago. While technology scaling continues, per transistor cost is no longer scaling in the advanced nodes. In this post Moore’s Law reality, further price/performance improvement follows only from improving the efficiency of applications using innovative hardware and software techniques.

Unfortunately, this need for innovative system solutions runs smack into the enormous complexity of designing and debugging contemporary VLSI based hardware/software platforms; a task so large it has caused the industry to consolidate, moving it away from innovation. The result is a set of platforms aim at different computing markets. To overcome this challenge, we need to develop a new design approach and tools to enable small groups of application experts to selectively extend the performance of those successful platforms.

Like the ASIC revolution in the 1980s, the goal of this approach is to enable a new set of designers, then board level logic designers, now application experts, to leverage the power of customized silicon solutions. Like then, these tools won’t initially be useful for current chip designers, but over time will underly all designs. In the 1980s to provide access to logic designers, the key technologies were logic synthesis, simulation, and placement/routing of their designs to gate arrays and std cells. Today, the key is to realize you are creating an “app” for an existing platform, and not creating the system solution from scratch (which is both too expensive and error prone), and to leverage the fact that modern “chips” are made of many chiplets. The new approach must provide a design window familiar to application developers, with similar descriptive, performance tuning, and debug capabilities. These new tools will be tied to highly capable platforms that are used as the foundation, like the appStore model for mobile phones. This talk will try to convince you this might be possible, and where innovative design/tools are needed.”

About the Speaker:

“Professor Horowitz initially focused on designing high-performance digital systems by combining work in computer-aided design tools, circuit design, and system architecture. During this time, he built a number of early RISC microprocessors, and contributed to the design of early distributed shared memory multiprocessors. In 1990, Dr. Horowitz took leave from Stanford to help start Rambus Inc., a company designing high-bandwidth memory interface technology. After returning in 1991, his research group pioneered many innovations in high-speed link design, and many of today’s high speed link designs are designed by his former students or colleagues from Rambus.

In the 2000s he started a long collaboration with Prof. Levoy on computational photography, which included work that led to the Lytro camera, whose photographs could be refocused after they were captured. Dr. Horowitz’s current research interests are quite broad and span using EE and CS analysis methods to problems in neuro and molecular biology to creating new agile design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits. He remains interested in learning new things, and building interdisciplinary teams.”

YACC – the only Portuguese team to qualify for the final stage of the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge 2026

Posted on

The YACC team – Yet Another Careless Car has qualified for the final stage of the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge 2026, standing out as the only Portuguese team amongst the 22 selected for this decisive stage of the competition.

The 2026 edition proved to be particularly demanding, and was described by the organisers themselves as the most competitive ever. Of the 141 teams that applied, only 78 were admitted to the competition, 57 completed the qualifying round and just 22 secured a place in the final stage, which underscores the high standard achieved by the team from the Department of Informatics and Computing Engineering (DEI) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP).

The YACC team comprises students from the Bachelor’s Degree in Informatics and Computing Engineering (L.EIC) – Joana Azevedo Louro, Luís Miguel Costa Gonçalves, Luís Miguel Rosa Santos, Luís Wolffrom Barbosa and Leonor Silva Bidarra, under the mentorship of Bruno Lima, a lecturer at DEI. The initiative also involves Ricardo Cruz, a DEI lecturer as well, who has been developing work in the field of autonomous vehicles and who mentored the first team to reach this stage of the competition, “BeepLearning”, in 2022.

YACC’s qualification marks the third time that a team comprising members of FEUP’s DEI has reached the final stage of this competition (following “BeepLearning” in 2022 and “BadSeeds” in 2024), consolidating the institution’s presence in a highly demanding international technical and scientific context.

The final stage, which includes the Testing Days, Semi-Finals and Finals, will take place between 16 and 20 May in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where the teams will demonstrate the performance of their solutions in a competitive environment.

The Bosch Future Mobility Challenge is an international technical competition organised by the Bosch Engineering Center Cluj-Napoca, which challenges student teams to develop autonomous driving and connectivity algorithms for 1/10-scale vehicles. These vehicles operate in an environment simulating a miniature smart city, being tested in scenarios such as lane keeping, navigating junctions, interpreting road signs and interacting with other road users.

Further information on the team’s journey can be followed via their Instagram page, where it will also be possible to support the team in the race for the Audience Award, which is awarded based on audience interaction.

We wish YACC every success in this final phase, as well as a truly enriching experience, both technically and personally.

DEI Talks | “Accelerating ML for Science Applications” by Prof. Seda Ogrenci (Northwestern University)

Posted on

The talk “Accelerating ML for Science Applications” will be presented by Prof. Seda Ogrenci (McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University) on March the 12th, at 11:00, in room I-105. The session will be moderated by Tiago Carvalho (DEI).

About the Talk:

“Emerging open-source tools and methodologies targeting reconfigurable fabrics hold significant promise for lowering barriers to research, education, and innovation. There are exciting developments in diverse domains where such benefits are demonstrated. This talk will review active domains with needs and applications for real-time ultra low latency ML hardware and how open-source tools need to evolve to provide a multitude of features to enable design of hardware efficient and adaptive ML. As part of this discussion, examples of research directions in adaptive and resilient ML hardware synthesis flows developed in Dr. Ogrenci’s lab will presented.”

About the Speaker:

Seda Ogrenci is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and in the Department of Computer Science (CS). She is the Director of the Computer Engineering Division of ECE. She has received her PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California-Los Angeles. She is the co-author of over 140 peer reviewed publications and twelve patents on the subjects of Electronic Design Automation, Reconfigurable Computing, Thermal-Aware High Performance Computing, Computer Architecture, and Instrumentation for Real-Time ML for Experimental Sciences. She is the author of the book: Heat Management in Integrated Circuits: On-chip and system-level monitoring and cooling (Materials, Circuits and Devices). Seda Ogrenci serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design and ACM Transactions of Reconfigurable Technology and Systems.

PhD Defense in Informatics Engineering (ProDEI): ”Modular and Multi-Stage Semantic Perception System for Robotics”

Posted on

Candidate:
Bruno Georgevich Ferreira

Date, Time and Location:
27 February 2026, at 14:00, in Sala de Atos

President of the Jury:
Pedro Nuno Ferreira da Rosa da Cruz Diniz (PhD), Full Professor at the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Members:
João Alberto Fabro (PhD), Associate Professor at the Academic Department of Informatics (DAINF) of the Federal Technological University of Paraná, Brazil;
Rui Paulo Pinto da Rocha (PhD), Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra;
André Monteiro de Oliveira Restivo (PhD), Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto;
Armando Jorge Miranda de Sousa (PhD), Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (Supervisor).

The thesis was co-supervised by Luís Paulo Gonçalves dos Reis (PhD), Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics Engineering of the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

Abstract:

The evolution of autonomous robotics benefits largely from the capacity to construct rich, navigable, and semantic representations of the environment, even more so if shared with humans. While the advent of open-vocabulary scene graphs powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has revolutionized perception, these systems face critical hurdles: high rates of hallucinations (False Positives), a lack of topological spatial context, and operational fragility due to heavy reliance on cloud connectivity. This thesis proposes the Hybrid Inference Perception and Mapping System
(HIPaMS), framework adaptable to a target system, likely a robotic system that interacts with humans. The HIPaMS is a modular framework designed to bridge the gap between low-level perception and high-level agentic reasoning. A Proof of Concept (PoC) was designed to implement the HIPaMS. This PoC enhances the state-of-the-art ConceptGraphs semantic mapping process and introduces a refined interaction system through four main contributions. First, it introduces the Hybrid Adaptable Resource-Aware Inference Mechanism (HARAIM), which dynamically orchestrates internal models and settings based on runtime resource availability and optimization policies. This mechanism allows any optimization policy to adapt robotic system’s operation, possibly allowing zero downtime during network failures, graceful degradation and/or operational efficiency. Second, the semantic mapping pipeline is enhanced with rigorous False Positive filtering protocols, persona-based prompt engineering, and a broad collection of semantic information in an optimized manner during mapping. Third, a Room Semantic Segmentation Routine is proposed to provide topological information to the semantic map during interaction. This transforms unstructured, noisy detections into a hierarchically organized scene graph, anchoring objects within functional topological regions. Fourth, the robotic system now incorporates dynamic knowledge base via the Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Interaction System (HARBIS). This interface uses short- and long-term memory to understand complex natural language queries. It enables the robot to learn continuously from user interactions, address gaps in perception and knowledge, maintain temporal consistency, and acknowledge its limitations by proactively asking for clarification. Extensive validation was conducted across 30 diverse environments, involving a total of 3300 interactive requests (depend on semantic map quality). The tested PoC processed 110 user requests per environment, categorized into: direct (30), indirect (30), graceful failure (30), follow-up (10) and time consistency (10). An ablation study was also performed to identify the impact of specific framework and PoC components. The results show that the PoC reduces False Positive detections by ≈86%, elevating mapping precision from a baseline of ≈ 0.28 to ≈ 0.68. Although strict filtering reduces raw recall, the integration of HITL learning increased the success rate for complex query resolution to ≈ 0.81, compared to baseline values of ≈ 0.48 and ≈ 0.55. Furthermore, the HIPaMS PoC reduced cloud inference costs by up to ≈ 84% in mapping and over ≈ 95% in interaction tasks while ensuring system stability. The presented framework pave the way for increased robotic autonomy and efficiency. The presented PoC demonstrates superior performance, particularly for human-centered scenarios.

Keywords: Semantic Mapping; Open-Vocabulary Perception; Hybrid Inference Architecture; Adaptable Framework; Human-in-the-Loop; Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG); Topological Segmentation; Robot@VirtualHome; Vision-Language Models; Agentic AI; Operational Robustness.

Creativity Talks | “Future Foods – Foods for the Future” by Prof. António Vicente (U.Minho)

Posted on

The 18th Creativity Talk will be given by António Vicente, Professor at the University of Minho and a nationally and internationally renowned researcher for his immense scientific contribution in the fields of Biotechnology and Food Bioengineering. In the lecture “Future Foods – Foods for the Future”, we will discover how trends such as clean label, functional foods and alternative proteins, combined with technologies such as artificial intelligence and cellular agriculture, are transforming the way we eat and produce food.
An excellent opportunity to understand how we can improve the health of people and the planet, and be part of this change!

Online broadcast on 5 March at 17:30 on the Creativity Talks YouTube channel.

The moderator will be Prof. Cláudia Gomes Silva, from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering of the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

About the Talk:

“There has been a significant shift in the consumers’ preferences, acceptance and needs in the last ten years, which has been particularly strong in the last five years. The “top trends” are: Clean claims (e.g. preservatives free); Clean labels; Lifestyle enhancers (e.g. high energetic foods); Functional foods (e.g. with nutraceutical function); Minimally processed foods (e.g. using natural ingredients as much as possible) and the so-called “Green foods” (making use of the benefits of plants – e.g. replacement of animal protein by other protein sources).
Along with this shift, there are two major problems related with the food we eat: I) ensuring people’s food, health and wellbeing, and II) ensuring the health of our planet.
When answering to problem I), the future food needs to tackle malnutrition, reduce calorie density, reduce food digestibility, increase micronutrient bioavailability, control gut health, allow personalized nutrition and provide appropriate food for the elderly.
In order to answer to problem II), we need to make use a set of tools for the future: molecular biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robots & sensors, the so-called “Cellular agriculture” and search for alternative protein sources.
In this talk the latest developments made by our research group towards tackling some of these challenges are going to be presented, together with our vision on what still needs to be done and which partnerships are important to lead us to the future of foods, producing foods for the future.”

About the Speaker:

António Vicente graduated in Food Engineering from the Portuguese Catholic University in 1994, received his PhD in 1998 and did his Habilitation in 2010 in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Minho. He is Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, which he directed prior to his subsequent appointments as vice-Dean of the School of Engineering and Director of the Doctoral College of that University. Currently he serves as Dean of the School of Engineering.
António Vicente is a Senior Member and Specialist in Food Engineering by the Portuguese Engineers Association.
As a researcher, he has dedicated his work to the development of micro and nanotechnological systems for application in the Agrofood sector, to the evaluation of their behavior in dynamic in vitro digestion systems, and to the study of the influence of the application of electric fields in cells and biomolecules.
He has published >380 articles in international ISI WOS journals, >30 chapters in books of international circulation, >400 papers in congresses, 5 patents and edited 5 scientific books, yielding an h-index of 95. He won the Food and Nutrition Awards in 2015 and 2017 in the R&D category. During six years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023) he was distinguished as Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics and in the last five years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024) he has integrated the list of the top 2 % most cited researchers according to the list published by Stanford University. In 2021 he was awarded the Scientific Merit Award from the University of Minho and the Diploma of Scientific Merit from the School of Engineering of the University of Minho yearly since 2021.

DEI Talks | “The Geometry of Logic” by Prof. Cristina Videira Lopes (University of California)

Posted on

The talk entitled “The Geometry of Logic” will be presented by Prof. Cristina (Crista) Videira Lopes, from the University of California, next Wednesday, February the 25th, at 14:00, in room I-105. The session will be moderated by Prof. Rui Maranhão (DEI).

About the talk:

“Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit surprising reasoning capabilities, yet the internal mechanisms driving these behaviors remain opaque. We hypothesize that this emergence may be driven by soft stratification: the spontaneous (and inefficient) discovery of orthogonal subspaces that separate control flow from data flow. To explore this, we introduce the STRAT architecture (STratified Registers And Types), which imposes hard stratification by explicitly partitioning the embedding space.
We evaluate STRAT on algorithmic tasks requiring precise logical manipulation. Despite having no pre-programmed knowledge of those tasks, the model spontaneously discovers interpretable
geometric topologies (e.g., antipodal operator separation) to solve the tasks. These geometric constraints also yield extreme data efficiency: models converge to the correct logical rules of arithmetic from as few as N=10 training examples. These results suggest that the stratification of the embedding space is a promising geometric substrate for neural logic.”

About the Speaker:

Cristina (Crista) Videira Lopes is a Professor of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on programming and software engineering for large-scale data and systems. Early in her career, she was a founding member of the team at Xerox PARC that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming. Along with her research program, she is also a prolific software developer. Her open source contributions include being one of the core developers of OpenSimulator, a virtual world server. She is also a founder and consultant of Encitra, a company specializing in online virtual reality for early-stage sustainable urban redevelopment projects. Her book “Exercises in Programming Style” has gained rave reviews, including being chosen as “Notable Book” by the ACM Best of Computing reviews. She has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal. She is the recipient of several National Science Foundation grants, including a prestigious CAREER Award. She claims to be the only person in the world who is both an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Ohloh Kudos Rank 9.

The 23rd edition of U.Porto’s Mostra is on

Posted on

From today until Sunday, the Multiusos de Gondomar will host another edition of the U.Porto’s Mostra. Over the course of four days, visitors will be welcomed by students, lecturers and technical staff from the various faculties of the University of Porto, research centres, central services, museums and UPTEC.

Through dozens of stands, the most curious visitors will be able to try out numerous interactive activities and learn about the range of bachelor’s and master’s degree courses on offer.
Students thinking of applying for higher education, and their families, will have the opportunity to attend several information sessions, through conferences covering a variety of topics ranging from the transition from secondary to higher education to the social support available to them, as well as several information sessions.

The Informatics Engineering stand will be attended by several students from NIAEFEUP (Núcleo de Informática da Associação de Estudantes da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto), who will be ready to answer visitors’ questions about the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Informatics and Computing Engineering, and encouraging them to try out interactive games that allow interaction with the computer through Computer Vision.

All information about the Mostra and its programme can be found on the official website. Visitors can also watch the event live online.

PhD Defense in Informatics Engineering (ProDEI): ”Low-Resource Machine Translation for Emakhuwa: Transfer Learning, Data Augmentation, and Lexical Resource Integration”

Posted on

Candidate:
Felermino Dário Mário António Ali

Date, Time and Location:
20 February 2026, 14:00, Sala de Atos da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

President of the Jury:
Pedro Nuno Ferreira da Rosa da Cruz Diniz (PhD), Full Professor, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Members:
Maarit Tuulikki Koponen (PhD), Professor at the School of Humanities of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Eastern Finland (Finland);
Maria Luísa Torres Ribeiro Marques da Silva Coheur (PhD), Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade de Lisboa;
Sérgio Sobral Nunes (PhD), Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto;
Henrique Daniel de Avelar Lopes Cardoso (PhD), Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (Supervisor).

The thesis was co-supervised by Rui Manuel Sousa Silva (PhD), Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto.

Abstract:

“This research explores the underrepresentation of low-resource languages in the field of machine translation, with a specific focus on Emakhuwa, the most widely spoken local language in Mozambique. Despite having over 7 million native speakers, Emakhuwa remains underrepresented in both academia and technology due to a lack of digital resources and linguistic tools. To fill this gap, we have developed the first significant machine translation resources for the Portuguese–Emakhuwa language pair. Our contributions include the creation of a parallel corpus through the manual translation of journalistic texts, the digitisation of existing materials, and the translation of established machine translation evaluation benchmarks. We evaluated three central strategies to improve machine translation performance in this low-resource setting: (1) transfer learning using multilingual and Africa-centred models, (2) data augmentation through back-translation, and (3) integration of external linguistic resources such as loan glossaries and bilingual dictionaries. The results show that encoder-decoder models, particularly translation-optimised architectures such as NLLB and M2M-100, perform as well as or better than larger decoder-only models while maintaining computational efficiency. Back-translation offers modest improvements, and the integration of loanwords and dictionary resources, especially in the Portuguese-Emakhuwa direction, significantly improves translation quality, especially with the use of LLMs. This work lays the foundation for future research in NLP for underrepresented languages and demonstrates practical paths for the development of machine translation systems in resource-limited contexts.”

Habilitation Exams | “Fair Resource Sharing in Concurrent Workflow Scheduling for Heterogeneous Systems” by Prof. Jorge Manuel Gomes Barbosa

Posted on

Habilitation Exams in the field of Informatics Engineering

Requested by:
Prof. Dr. Jorge Manuel Gomes Barbosa

19 February 2026, at 14:30, in FEUP’s Sala de Atos 
Assessment of the curriculum and report on the course unit “Advanced Parallel Computing”

20 February 2026, at 10:00, in FEUP’s Sala de Atos
Discussion of the synthesis seminar entitled “Fair Resource Sharing in Concurrent Workflow Scheduling for heterogeneous systems”

Chair of the Jury:
Prof. Dr. Jaime dos Santos Cardoso, Full Professor and Vice-President of the Scientific Council of Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Members:
Prof. Dr. Alba Cristina Magalhaes Alves de Melo, Full Professor at the Departamento de Ciência da Computação do Instituto de Ciências Exatas da Universidade de Brasília, Brasil;
Prof. Dr. Pedro Petersen Moura Trancoso, Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden;
Prof. Dr. Leonel Augusto Pires Seabra de Sousa, Full Professor at the Departamento de Engenharia Eletrotécnica e de Computadores do Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade de Lisboa;
Prof. Dr. João Manuel Paiva Cardoso, Full Professor at the Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto;
Prof. Dr. Carlos Miguel Ferraz Baquero-Moreno, Full Professor at the Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.