Category Archives: Highlights

IEEE Portugal Awards 2022

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IEEE UP Student Branch is once again one of the winners of the IEEE Regional Exemplary Student Branch Award.

Every year the IEEE Portugal Section awards the members that have stood out the most for their valuable contribution to its activities and mission. These awards measure and recognise the impact of its members during the previous year. In the 2022 edition the IEEE Student Branch of the University of Porto receives the IEEE Regional Exemplary Student Branch Award, a recognition that has been repeated due to the consistent dedication of its constituents.

Through the numerous activities it promotes, this student group was recognized as having an exemplary performance, offering its members and the community where they are inserted, numerous opportunities for development of technical skills and personal development through its various groups: Computer Society, Robotics and Automation Society, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society and Women in Engineering.

The current President of the student group, Manuel Cerqueira da Silva, tells us that “as a member that contributed to the achievement of this award and as current president I feel an enormous pride in seeing our work recognised. For me, receiving this award is special because it is proof that with our commitment, even in the most difficult moments, we managed to maintain the level of excellence. Thus, I intend to continue this project, strengthening the connection with other nuclei and associations of the University of Porto in order to reach higher levels and contribute to the student community.”

It is also with great pride that Guilherme Barcelos, responsible for the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, received the news: “When I found out that we received the award for another year in a row I was very happy, but at the same time I felt that this was expected. Our core has always maintained its level of excellence since many years, we went through the pandemic and we are still here strong and full of energy to do even more. So with the work done by the boards, plus the commitment of our members, this award becomes well deserved. As a member for years, it makes me very happy to see our cluster shine and bring out the best in all of engineering!”

In addition to this group recognition, several other awards were given this year, namely to computer and computer engineering graduates, José Miguel Simões with the Outstanding Student Member Award, in recognition of exemplary performance as Student Section Representative, and Pedro Simeão Carvalho, with the Special Recognition Award, in recognition of exemplary performance as Member of the IEEE Portugal Section Executive Committee from 2016 to 2021.

José Miguel Simões, recent M.EIC graduate, winner of the Outstanding Student Member Award, shares what seems to be the general feeling of those who are part of this group:

“I usually say that joining IEEE was the best decision of my entire university life. It’s not a lie. I know it more and more. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t done it. In IEEE, the goal was never the awards. The goal was never to be better than the others, but always to be better than myself, always to help those who were, and are, with me to reach their highest peak. The goal has always been personal overcoming, combined with providing a multitude of activities to an entire academic community.”

+ More info on the activities of this nucleus at: https://ieee.fe.up.pt/

A Portuguese alumni from ProDEI is part of the voting committee of the International Award Watts S Humphrey

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Isabel Margarido, PhD from ProDEI who graduated in 2016, is part of the Watts S Humphrey Software Quality Award voting committee, given by the SEI and the IEEE Computer Society.

The invitation came from the SEI – CMU (part of the Department of Defense of the USA) in recognition of Isabel’s value as a Scientist, and the Research that she conducted in collaboration with the organisation, while doing her PhD. On a recent visit to DEI, Isabel told us to be a great honour to be part of the committee, as it has limited places, and be among great minds in Software Engineering around the world, some of them who actually had met the Honorary Dr Humphrey in person.

This important award for the Software Engineering community recognises organisations which implemented exceptional improvements that led to better software Quality that are significant, measured, sustained and shared:

Watts S. Humphrey Software Process Achievement Award (cmu.edu)

Among the other responsibilities of the voting committee, Isabel did proactive work giving several talks to groups concerned with Software and Quality Improvements in the USA, Portugal and Spain, and her last talk at the Software Excellence Alliance (USA) can be watched here.

DEI Talks | “Clustering Healthcare Data” by Prof. Pasi Fränti

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Pasi Fränti received his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Turku, in 1991 and 1994 in Science. Since 2000, he has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of Eastern Finland. He has published in 99 journals and 175 peer review conference papers. Pasi Fränti is the head of the Machine Learning research group. His current research interests include clustering algorithms, location-based services, machine learning, web and text mining, and optimization of health care services. He has supervised 30 PhD graduates and is currently supervising nine more.

 “Clustering Healthcare Data” will be presented November 7, at 11:00, in room I125 – participation is  free, all are welcome.

 Abstract: Clustering can a powerful tool in analyzing healthcare data. We show how clustering based on k-means and its variants can be used to extract new insight from various data with the aim to better optimize the health care system. We first show that simple variants of k-means and random swap algorithms can provide highly accurate clustering results. We demonstrate how k-means can be applied to categorical data, sets, and graphs. We model health care records of individual patients as a set of diagnoses. These can be used to cluster patients, and also create co-occurence graph of diagnoses depending on how often the same pair of diseases are diagnosed in the record of the same patient. Taking into account the order of the diagnoses, we can construct a predictor for the likely forthcoming diseases. We also provide a clustering algorithm to optimize the location of health care systems based on patient locations. As a case study, we consider coronary heart disease patients and analyze in what way the optimization of the locations can affect the expected time to reach the hospital within the given time. All the results can provide additional statistical information to healthcare planners and also medical doctors at the operational level to guide their efforts to provide better healthcare services.

Ana Paula Rocha takes office as vice-president of the Pedagogic Council of FEUP

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DEI’s Associate Professor, Ana Paula Cunha da Rocha, took office as vice-president of the Pedagogical Council of FEUP, last October 28th, before a room full of elements of the FEUP community that with their presence supported the new team that now starts a 4 year mandate [2022-2026]. At her side were also sworn in the other elements of the FEUP Executive Council, Prof. Renato Natal Jorge, as sub-director, Prof. Jaime Cardoso, as vice-president of the Scientific Council and Prof. Ana Sofia Guimarães, as member with Complementary Directive Functions.

The day before, the new Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Prof. Rui Calçada, took office in the Main Hall of the Rectory of U.Porto.

“Confessing himself “grateful” for “being able to give back to the faculty everything it has provided me over more than 30 years”, the new dean promised “energy to achieve the strategic objectives” defined for the next four years. Objectives that cross “the central areas of the institution’s mission [teaching, research and development, economic and social valorization of knowledge]” and that aim to “contribute so that all FEUP people feel happy in the house they have chosen””, can be read at FEUP’s Linkedin page.

Habilitation Exams: ”Coordination and Machine Learning in Multi-Robot Systems”

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Habilitation exams in the field of Computing Engineering

Requested by:

Luís Paulo Gonçalves dos Reis, PhD

 

10th November 2022, 14h30, Sala de Atos FEUP

Assessment of the curriculum and the report on the syllabus, contents and methods of theoretical and practical teaching of the subjects of the course unit “Intelligent Robotics”

 

11th November 2022, 14h30, Sala de Atos FEUP

Discussion of the seminar entitled “Coordination and Machine Learning in Multi-Robot Systems”

 

President of the Jury:

João Bernardo de Sena Esteves Falcão e Cunha, PhD, Full Professor, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Members:

Ana Maria Severino de Almeida e Paiva, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Engineering Department, Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade de Lisboa;

Luís Miguel Parreira e Correia, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Department, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa;

Paulo Jorge Freitas de Oliveira Novais, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Department, Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho;

João Manuel Portela da Gama, PhD, Full Professor, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto;

Rui Filipe Lima Maranhão de Abreu, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Engineering Department, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

Habilitation Exams: ”Artificial Transportation Systems: Concepts, Advances, and Challenges”

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Habilitation exams in the field of Computing Engineering

Requested by:

Rosaldo José Fernandes Rossetti, PhD

 

27th October 2022, 14h30, Sala de Atos FEUP

Assessment of the curriculum and the report on the syllabus, contents and methods of theoretical and practical teaching of the subjects of the course unit “Modelling and Simulation

 

28th October 2022, 14h30, Sala de Atos FEUP

Discussion of the seminar entitled “Artificial Transportation Systems: Concepts, Advances, and Challenges”

 

President of the Jury:

João Manuel Paiva Cardoso, PhD, Full Professor, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Members:

Urbano José Carreira Nunes, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Electronics and Computer Enginnering, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra;

Luís Miguel Parreira e Correia, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Department, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa;

Paulo Jorge Freitas de Oliveira Novais, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Department, Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho;

Eugénio da Costa Oliveira, Emeritus Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, and Emeritus Professor Universidade do Porto;

Pedro Nuno Ferreira da Rosa da Cruz Diniz, PhD, Full Professor, Informatics Engineering Department, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

 

Informatics Week [31-2]

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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.

DEI Talks | “Tools and methods for the understanding of road users behaviours” by Prof. Stéphane Espié and “Driving-Pattern Identification and Event Detection Based on an Unsupervised Learning Framework: Case of a Motorcycle-Riding Simulator” by Prof. Abderrahmane Boubezoul

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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.

Creativity Talks 08 – “A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Consciousness: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine” by Lenore and Manuel Blum

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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

PhD Defense in Informatics Engineering: “Incentive Mechanisms and Policy Evaluation on Open Multi-Agent Systems: Towards Social-Aware Transportation Systems”

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Candidate:
Zafeiris Kokkinogenis

Date, time and place
23rd September, 14:30, Sala de Atos FEUP

 

President of the Jury:

Carlos Manuel Milheiro de Oliveira Pinto Soares, PhD, Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

 

Members:

Alberto Fernandez Gil, PhD,  Associate Professor, Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Arquitectura de Computadores, Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos y Estadística e Investigación Operativa, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos;

Sandra Maria Monteiro de Melo, PhD, Main Researcher of the Business Unit INTELI – Policy & Intelligence for Sustainability, CEiiA – Centre of Engineering and Product Development;

Pedro José Ramos Moreira de Campos, PhD, Assistant Professor, Agrupamento Científico de Matemática e Sistemas de Informação, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto;

Rosaldo José Fernandes Rossetti, PhD, Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (Supervisor);

Ana Paula Cunha da Rocha, PhD, Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

 

Abstract

Generally speaking, a large-scale socio-technical system is formed up of individual entities that are distributed along with the system’s space and act asynchronously in their decision making processes. Each of the individuals bears its own goals and tends to behave rather “selfishly” and “greedily” to maximise self-welfare utilities. However, this characteristic will generally affect negatively the global efficiency and the designed (expected) emergent behavior of the system. Indeed, private road transport imposes negative externalities on society, such as road capacity restrictions, accidents, congestion, etc. An efficient mobility model must take into account the real costs of transport, and its regulatory framework will need to produce the conditions for people to make sustainable transport choices. Economic theories offer two types of instruments for addressing the problem of transport externalities: command-and-control and incentive-based policies.

Command-and-control policies are government regulations which force users to change their behavior. In that sense, recent approaches to optimise the traffic network throughput and reduce traffic congestion basically rely on “road pricing”. However, this approach ends up penalising the user and creating social inequalities as it imposes a tax to be paid. Only those who are insensitive to the price will benefit. Also, a population may not be responsive to the defined penalties, and thus, the regulation may not be efficient.

On the other hand, an approach that has gained the community’s attention is based on the implementation and design of incentive schemes in public policy. Incentives are seen as those external measures that try to motivate a behavior change towards the objective of the system. It appears to be a “fairer” vision, as it does not discriminate the user but rather tries to bring the society into equilibrium.

The domain area on which this PhD thesis is focused concerns open and competitive multiagent systems, such as the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the electricity markets. This thesis intends to address the issue of whether or not incentive-centred designs can favour the emergence of social-aware behavior in agents that have selfish tendencies for a (global) optimal evolution of a socio-technical system. Traditional transport planning tools using the four-step model combined with standard economic appraisal methods are not able to provide such analysis. Instead, a multi-agent system (MAS) social simulations can be used as it is argued in the literature of complex systems.

Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Incentive Mechanisms, Resource Markets, Policy Evaluation, Traffic Simulation.