Talk a Bit is back on January 28^th (Saturday), at the FEUP Auditorium, for its 11^th edition.

The conference is organized annually by the final year students of the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering of FEUP and is well known for the quality of its programme and the high number of participants.

This year’s theme will revolve around data, “Data. How it’s created, how it’s stored, how it’s streamed, how it’s processed” and will feature a number of experts who will bring a lot of material to be explored and discussed.

The event programme aims to promote learning, the discussion of ideas and social moments and among the list of speakers we can see João Silveira from Microsoft, Sónia Liquito from Spotify, João Gonçalves and José Costa from Critical Techworks, João Carvalho from Tandhem Esports, Liliana Ferreira from Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, Pedro Dias and Marco Sousa from Zero Zero, Tiago Matos from Jumpseller, (…), who will for sure contribute to another successful edition.

Pre-event (24 to 26 January), an hackaton will be hosted with great prizes for the winners.

All the information and the registration link can be seen here.

The Informatics Week (SINF), organized by Núcleo de Informática da Associação de Estudantes da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (NIAEFEUP), was created with the purpose of allowing students, regardless of their program, to develop skills in several areas of Informatics, promoting their interaction with the business world through social events.

The 2022 edition will take place between October 31st and November 2nd with numerous activities, including lectures and workshops, that will allow participants to get in touch with several technologies and concepts that are not part of the academic program, therefore focusing on technical skills, as well as a pitch, interview sessions and visits to companies, fostering their contact with top national and international companies.

This year the themes of Cybersecurity and Gaming and Interactivity will be in focus and all activities can be seen on the event’s website.

Within the framework of the European University Alliance for Global Health (EUGLOH), we are glad to host the visit of Stéphane Espié and Abderrahmane Boubezoul, visiting DEI during this week (17-21).

Our guests will deliver two seminars on Friday, October 21, at 9:00, in Room B 009. You are all invited!

 “Tools and methods for the understanding of road users behaviours”

By the Author:

“To be efficient and accepted, road safety counter-measures need to be defined thanks to scientific studies. The question is not only to imagine an optimal solution in the absolute, but to understand the real practices and, based on this knowledge, to design the measures (sensitivity campaigns, changes in Highway Code, changes in initial training curriculum or licence tests, infrastructure (re)design, vehicles homologations, etc.).

In our talk we will describe the tools and methods we promote and refined for decades to improve road safety, and their use in research projects. Our approach is systemic and is based on three pillars: instrumentation of vehicles for in-depth naturalistic studies, traffic modelling and simulation using a multi-agents system, and design of driving simulators to study driving behaviours. We will illustrate our approach using research projects we have conducted over these last years.

Stéphane ESPIÉ is a research director at the Gustave Eiffel University. He holds an Accreditation to Direct Research in Computer Science (HdR, Pierre et Marie Curie University, 2004). His main research areas are behavioural traffic simulation (MAS based), and the design of tools to study road user behaviours (driving/riding simulators and instrumented vehicles). He currently conducts his research in SATIE laboratory (Paris Saclay university) where he leads the MOSS (Methods and Tools for Signals and Systems) research group.

“Driving-Pattern Identification and Event Detection Based on an Un-supervised Learning Framework: Case of a Motorcycle-Riding Simulator”

By the Author:

“Analysis of human driving behavior aims to inspect drivers’ behavior in the real-world and in a virtual environment. The study of driving behaviors can be conducted in naturalistic situations or controlled experiments. Analyzing driving behaviors based on the data collected in naturalistic driving experiments or controlled experiments in the real-world or in a virtual environment is beneficial to fill in many of the knowledge gaps about driving behaviors and risk factors. I will present a multi-step framework for analyzing driving behavior on macroscopic and microscopic scales. The core step of this framework is based on unsupervised machine learning algorithms applied to driving-pattern identification and the detection of critical driving events using anomaly-detection algorithms. The detected events are interpreted and described by computing their feature importance using graphs centrality measures. This provides new insight into driving behavior by identifying the motives behind the driver’s actions.

Abderrahmane Boubezoul received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Mathematics from University Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseille III), France in 2008 and his Master’s degree in Virtual Reality and Complex Systems from Evry Val d’Essone University, France. Since 2008, he is a researcher at Gustave Eiffel University. His current work is about statistical signal processing and machine learning applied to road transport systems. He currently conducts his research in SATIE laboratory (Paris Saclay university) MOSS (Methods and Tools for Signals and Systems) research group.

The eighth session of the Creativity Talks will have as keynote speakers the distinguished Professors at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science Lenore Blum and Manuel Blum.

Lenore and Manuel Blum, recipients of the PAESMEM and Turing awards, respectively, will present at FEUP “A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Consciousness: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine” on September 29, at 18:00, in Room B032, and also streamed online via Youtube.

“We are Theoretical Computer Scientists. Theoretical Computer Science is a subarea of Mathematics that has tools, we claim, ideally suited to understanding consciousness. We have applied these tools to produce a model of consciousness that we call the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). Our model gives insight into what goes on in our head to cause us to feel conscious. It also suggests how machines may be constructed to be conscious.

A Turing Machine (TM) is a very simple device defined mathematically by Alan Turing. There is no way that anyone would or should consider a TM to be conscious. However, with the advent of fMRI in 1990, advances in Neuroscience, and the Global Neuronal Workspace Models of Baars, Changeaux, and Dehaene, we have defined a variant of TM, the CTM, that we argue gives insight into consciousness.

Lenore will present and explain our model of consciousness, the CTM. Manuel will discuss how and why the CTM experiences feelings of consciousness”, shares Prof. Blum.

To attend the lecture at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, please register HERE! Participation at the event is free of charge, but registration is compulsory. Online participation does not require any registration.

Talk link: https://youtu.be/V7BunRG_9-A

Lenore Blum has been passionate about mathematics since she was 10. She attributes that to having dropped out of school when she was 9 to wander the world, then hit the ground running when she returned and became fascinated with the Euclidean Algorithm. Her interests turned to non-standard models of mathematics, and of computation. As a graduate student at MIT, she showed how to use saturated model theory to get new results in differential algebra. Later, with Mike Shub and Steve Smale, she developed a foundational theory for computing and complexity over continuous domains such as the real or complex numbers. The theory generalizes the Turing-based theory (for discrete domains) and has been fundamental for computational mathematics. Lenore is internationally known for her work in increasing the participation of girls and women in STEM and is proud that CMU has gender parity in its undergraduate CS program. Lenore is currently president of the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science. Lenore Blum: lblum@cs.cmu.edu

Manuel Blum has been motivated to understand the mind/body problem since he was in second grade when his teacher told his mom she should not expect him to get past high school. As an undergrad at MIT, he spent a year studying Freud and then apprenticed himself to the great anti-Freud neurophysiologist Warren S. McCulloch, who became his intellectual mentor. When he told Warren (McCulloch) and Walter (Pitts) that he wanted to study consciousness, he was told in no uncertain terms that he was verboten to do so – and why. As a graduate student, he asked and got Marvin Minsky to be his thesis advisor. Manuel is one of the founders of complexity theory, a Turing Award winner, and has mentored many in the field who have chartered new directions ranging from computational learning, cryptography, zero knowledge, interactive proofs, proof checkers, and human computation. Manuel Blum: mblum@cs.cmu.edu

On July 12th, DEI Open Day 2022 will finally return to in loco format.

This event takes place annually and aims to be a showcase of the teaching and research activity of the Department of Informatics Engineering of FEUP, with the goal of strengthening the collaboration of DEI with companies and its connection to the community.

Exploring this year’s theme, “Undergraduate + Masters to train the computer engineers of the future“, themes such as the role of undergraduate degrees and masters in the comprehensive training of Computer Engineers will be addressed in a joint reflection between teachers and guests from industry.

There will also be an opportunity to learn about ongoing projects in the DEI laboratories and, after lunch, a visit to the stands of these laboratories and the π Projects Fair (projects of final-year students of L.EIC undergraduate course).

+ info: programme

With the preparation of the 3rd edition of the M.Sc. on Data Science and Engineering (https://dei.fe.up.pt/mdse/) well under way, it is time to look back at what was accomplished so far and also to project the future. This will be done as part of the 2022 MDSE Sunset Session, on the 2nd July (Saturday), in room B032, in a relaxed environment but focused on a very important topic: Ethics and Responsability in AI.

The program will feature two keynote talks, by Ana Costa e Silva (Mercer) and Pedro Saleiro (Feedzai), as well as a panel discussion including Inês de Matos Pinto (S&D Group @ European Parliament), Inês Sousa (Fraunhofer Portugal) and Peter van der Putten (Pegasystems & U. Leiden), moderated by Eugénio Oliveira (FEUP). During the event MDSE students will also present some of their projects.

The event is targeted both to companies, looking for talent in Data Science, as well as prospect students, looking for an advanced education on Data Science.

Participation is free but requires registration here.

 Program

14:30 – Opening – João Mendes Moreira – Director of the M.Sc. on Data Science and Engineering (MDSE)

14:40 – Ana Costa e Silva – Global Chief of Data Science @ Mercer, TBA – introduced by António Pedro Aguiar

15:10 – Pedro Saleiro – Director of AI Research @ Feedzai, challenges in the development of responsible AI research/solutions in Industry – introduced by José Luís Borges

15:40 – MDSE Student Showcase – introduced by Ana Aguiar

• Cláudia Pinheiro: AI-based cancer characterization using semi-supervised learning algorithms
• Diogo Queirós: Reconciling prediction in the regression setting: an application to Portuguese breweries’ market share prediction
• Nuno Gaspar: Prediction of Shell Finite-Element Stresses using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)
• Rafael Guedes: Data, machine vision and reinforcement learning for explainable and safe autonomous driving of platooning vehicles
• Wagner Ceulin: Predicting customer purchasing behavior of a self-care online store
• João Pedro Pêgo: Predicting candidate engagement in a job matchmaking site

16:30 – Coffee Break

17:10 – Panel discussion – moderated by Eugénio de Oliveira – Emeritus Professor @ FEUP

• Inês de Matos Pinto– Legal and digital affairs advisor to the S&D Group @ European Parliament
• Inês Sousa– Head of Intelligent Systems @ Fraunhofer Portugal
• Peter van der Putten– Director AI Lab @ Pegasystems and Researcher @ U. Leiden

18:20 – Closing João Mendes Moreira – Director of the MDSE

18.30 – Sunset Drinks & Networking

19.30 – End of the event

We are very grateful to our partner for their support