Category Archives: Highlights

Creativity Talk 19 | “The Human Connection: The Essential Compass to Innovating Technologies That Matter” by Daniela Damian

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The nineteenth session of the Creativity Talks took place on September 21, 2026, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) and featured Daniela Damian, Professor and ECS-CAPI Chair in Inclusive Science, Technology and Engineering (Lero Parnas Scholar) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, as the keynote speaker. The session, moderated by Rui Maranhão, Full Professor at DEI, focused on the topic “The Human Connection: The Essential Compass to Innovating Technologies That Matter”.

In her presentation, Daniela Damian reflected on the growing importance of understanding users and their experiences in a world increasingly shaped by digital technologies and artificial intelligence. She highlighted that, although user-centered approaches are widely recognized in software engineering, human connection remains essential for developing inclusive technologies with meaningful impact. Drawing on several software engineering projects addressing societal challenges, she emphasized the importance of skills such as relationship-building, authentic empathy, perspective-taking, and cultural sensitivity, arguing that these competencies are fundamental to ensuring that technological innovation remains guided by dignity, equity, and human needs.

About the Speaker

Daniela Damian is a Professor of Software Engineering and the ECS-CAPI Chair in Inclusive Science, Technology, and Engineering at the University of Victoria. Over the years, together with her students, she has led empirical research on the human and social aspects of requirements engineering and software development, with a particular focus on teamwork, remote communication, and collaboration. She is the founder and Director of the INSPIRE:STEM for Social Impact Program at the University of Victoria, where diverse teams engage in community-driven, experiential-learning science and engineering projects with societal impact.

Daniela Damian has served as Program Chair for major Software Engineering conferences and was, among others, Co-Chair of the inaugural Conference on Software Engineering in Society (2014), RE 2019, and ICSE 2022. She has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.

Her achievements have been recognized through several awards, including the 2019 Faculty of Engineering Teaching Award and the 2020 Provost’s REACH Award for Excellence in Teaching for Experiential Learning. In 2019, she received the Royal Society of New Zealand Catalyst: International Leader Award, and in 2024, she became a Lero Parnas Fellow. An ACM Distinguished Speaker, she was recently honored with the 2026 SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award.

Further information about her work and research can be found at danieladamian.ca, including her TEDxVictoria talk on the role of empathy in designing technology for a more diverse and compassionate world.

Free Software Festival 2026

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The Free Software Festival 2026 will take place on 26 September at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP).

Organised by ANSOL (National Association for Free Software), the event will run from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and is part of the celebrations for Software Freedom Day.

With free admission and open to the entire community, the event aims to promote free and open-source software as a means of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and civic participation. The programme will feature short presentations, networking opportunities, and informal discussion sessions among participants.

The opening session is scheduled for 10:00 a.m.. Among the presentations already announced are “apt install comunidade”, focusing on dependency issues and critical bugs, presented by André Barbosa of Wikimedia Portugal, and “Which Side Are We On? Technopolitics, Free Software and What Lies Ahead”, presented by Ricardo Lafuente from D3.

During the afternoon, there will be spontaneous lightning talks, consisting of three-minute presentations by participants, as well as a session celebrating 25 Years of ANSOL, presented by Rúben Mendes. The programme will conclude with the unconference “Free Conversations”, designed to encourage community participation, followed by a social gathering at a venue yet to be announced.

Although participation is free, ANSOL requests that interested attendees complete the registration form in advance. Registration will help the organisers prepare the logistical arrangements for the event, including lunch and participant reception.

This year’s edition is once again supported by the Department of Informatics Engineering of FEUP.

PhD Thesis Defence in Digital Media (PDMD) | “Augmented Reality Adoption in Complex Manufacturing Systems: A Human-Centred Informational Approach”

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Candidate:
Filipa Rente Ramalho

Date, Time and Location:
21 July 2026, at 14:30, Sala Professor Joaquim Sarmento (G129), DECG, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

President of the Jury:
António Fernando Vasconcelos Cunha Castro Coelho (PhD), Associate Professor with Habilitation, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

Members:

Gregorio Jean Varvakis Rados (PhD), Full Professor, Departamento de Engenharia do Conhecimento, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil;

Paulo José Osório Rupino da Cunha (PhD), Associate Professor with Habilitation, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra;

Paula Cristina Gonçalves Dias Urze (PhD), Associate Professor with Habilitation, Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa;

Américo Lopes de Azevedo (PhD), Full Professor, Departamento de Engenharia e Gestão Industrial, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto;

António Manuel Lucas Soares (PhD), Associate Professor, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

Abstract:

The ongoing digital transformation of industry has increased the complexity of manufacturing systems and intensified the informational nature of shop-floor work. Operators and frontline leaders increasingly operate in highly variable and demanding environments where performance depends not only on physical task execution but also on the ability to interpret and act upon heterogeneous information streams distributed across multiple systems and representations, under time pressure, safety constraints, and strong accountability for quality outcomes. In this context, Augmented Reality (AR) has been explored as an information mediation technology capable of delivering digital content at the point of work and reducing the friction associated with consulting screens, documentation, and supervisory support. However, despite extensive experimentation and a growing body of prototypes and pilots, AR adoption remains uneven and is often confined to isolated initiatives that fail to mature into scalable operational systems.

This thesis investigates AR adoption in complex manufacturing systems as a socio-technical and informational phenomenon, arguing that AR’s practical value depends on the informational conditions it can reliably sustain at the point of action: relevance, consistency, timeliness, and trustworthiness of mediated information. The research problem addressed is the lack of a consolidated, human-centred approach capable of explaining and supporting sustained AR adoption beyond technological maturity, explicitly incorporating mechanisms for structuring, governing, and maintaining AR content throughout its lifecycle.

The main objective is to understand how digital information management models and immersive technologies can be combined to create powerful cognitive tools that support worker action, learning, and collaboration on the shop floor. Specifically, the thesis aims to: (i) identify the key enablers and barriers influencing AR adoption in manufacturing; and (ii) derive essential requirements for effective and adoptable AR systems, while proposing an information management meta-model that enhances shop-floor communication and long-term sustainability of AR-enabled solutions.

The study follows a Design Science Research paradigm, integrating multi-site empirical evidence and longitudinal evaluation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted across multiple industrial organisations, complemented by participatory workshops and an automotive industrial use case involving the development and evaluation of an AR solution for in-line quality inspection. Qualitative data were analysed through systematic coding and thematic synthesis, ensuring traceability between empirical evidence, analytical interpretations, and the proposed artefacts.

The thesis delivers three main contributions: (1) a consolidated adoption model structuring AR enablers and barriers across technological, human, organisational, and informational dimensions; (2) a requirements catalogue for adoptable AR systems in complex manufacturing environments; and (3) a PPR-grounded information management meta-model, anchored in processes, products, people, and skills, formalising entities, relationships, and contextual integrity rules for content creation, validation, updating, and maintenance. Overall, the results show that AR programmes should be treated as information engineering and governance programmes, a critical condition to overcome the “pilot ceiling” and enable sustained adoption at scale.

Keywords: Augmented Reality; Human-Centred Manufacturing; Information Management; Technology Adoption.

DEI Talks | “The Cognitive and Human Factors of Formal Methods” by Prof. Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown University)

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The talk entitled “The Cognitive and Human Factors of Formal Methods” will be given on 23 July at 11:00 am in room B025, moderated by Prof. Alexandra Mendes (DEI).

About the Talk:

“As formal methods improve in expressiveness and power, they create new opportunities for non-expert adoption. In principle, formal tools are now powerful enough to enable developers to scalably validate realistic systems artifacts without extensive formal training. However, realizing this potential for adoption requires attention to not only the technical but also the human side—which has received extraordinarily little attention from formal-methods research.
This talk presents some of our efforts to address this paucity. We apply ideas from cognitive science, human-factors research, and education theory to improve the usability of formal methods. Along the way, we find misconceptions suffered by users, how technically appealing designs that experts may value may fail to help, and how our tools may even mislead users.”

About the Speaker:

Shriram Krishnamurthi is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. With collaborators and students, he has created several influential systems like DrRacket, Margrave, Flapjax, LambdaJS, Flowlog, and Pyret. He has also written multiple widely-used books. He also co-directs the Bootstrap integrated computing outreach program. For his work he has received SIGPLAN’s Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, SIGPLAN’s Software Award (jointly), SIGSOFT’s Influential Educator Award, SIGPLAN’s Distinguished Educator Award (jointly), and Brown’s Wriston and Philip J. Bray teaching awards. He has authored over twenty papers recognized for honors by program committees. He has an honorary doctorate from the Università della Svizzera Italiana.

DEI Talks | “On the State of Client-Side Web Vulnerabilities: DOM-XSS and JavaScript Libraries” by Prof. Limin Jia

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The talk entitled “On the State of Client-Side Web Vulnerabilities: DOM-XSS and JavaScript Libraries” will be given on 24 July at 2:30 pm in room B025, moderated by Prof. Alexandra Mendes (DEI).

About the Talk:

“Client-side web vulnerabilities continue to pose significant security risks. In this talk, I will present two research efforts that provide a broader view of the modern web attack surface. First, I will introduce SWIPE, a system for large-scale detection of DOM-based cross-site scripting (DOM-XSS). SWIPE combines interaction-based fuzzing with dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) to systematically explore event-driven behaviors and automatically synthesize URL parameters and fragments. This enables the discovery of vulnerabilities that traditional static or non-interactive techniques miss, significantly improving detection coverage. Second, I will present LIBINSPECTORJS, an end-to-end pipeline for identifying vulnerable JavaScript libraries and assessing their exploitability in practice. Our initial results show that vulnerable libraries are widespread, but not all instances lead to exploitable conditions.”

About the Speaker:

Limin Jia is a Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of CyLab, Carnegie Mellon’s computer security and privacy institute. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2008. Her research is in the intersection of programming languages, formal methods, and computer security. She is particularly interested in applying formal methods to analyzing the security guarantees of software systems and to developing mechanisms to make software systems more secure.

DEI Students Honoured with Ordem dos Engenheiros – Região Norte Master’s Awards

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Three master’s graduates from the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) have been distinguished in the 2nd edition of the Master’s Awards of the Ordem dos Engenheiros – Região Norte (OERN), an initiative that recognises the academic excellence of the top Engineering master’s students from public higher education institutions in Northern Portugal.

The award ceremony took place on 2 July, bringing together students, academic representatives, partner companies and OERN board members. In this edition, 52 merit awards, each worth €1,000, were granted from a total of 88 applications covering several engineering disciplines.

Among the award recipients were Sofia Vieira Pinto and Pedro Madureira, from the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering (M.EIC), and João Viterbo Vieira, from the Master in Data Science and Engineering (MECD), in recognition of the work developed in their master’s dissertations:

Specification-Driven Test Generation for Fault Localisation in Dafny – Sofia Vieira Pinto

Although formal verification provides mathematical proof that software is free from errors, fixing faults detected during the development of formally verified software remains a complex task that discourages many programmers. This project aims to support the debugging process by exploring fault localisation methodologies for the Dafny programming language. The work resulted in the development of DSpec2Test, a novel tool that automatically generates test cases from formal specifications describing the expected behaviour of a system. In addition, a plugin was created to map the exact execution path of each test within the source code. Based on this information, the research compares traditional fault localisation algorithms with an Artificial Intelligence model to determine which approach is more effective in identifying faulty lines of code. By simplifying fault localisation, this project seeks to reduce debugging effort and move towards a future where reliable software development becomes the norm rather than the exception. This work is part of the VeriFixer project (https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.15557.PEX). The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Alexandra Mendes (DEI).

Towards Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving – Pedro Madureira

Developed in collaboration with Bosch Portugal, this dissertation proposes a new approach to improving the safety of autonomous vehicles by replacing traditional visual detection systems, which can only recognise predefined obstacles, with an open-vocabulary model for 3D object detection. Using LiDAR sensor data combined with natural language-based Artificial Intelligence, the proposed system is capable of identifying and locating previously unseen objects on the road through simple textual descriptions, without requiring additional training. Designed to handle the challenges and noise of complex outdoor environments, this technology has the potential to reduce development costs while providing a far more flexible, intelligent and reliable perception system for autonomous driving. The work was supervised by Prof. Luís Filipe Teixeira (DEI).

Human Guidance in Self-Evolving Multi-Agent AI Systems – João Viterbo Vieira

This dissertation explores a new generation of Artificial Intelligence systems composed of multiple agents capable of evolving and autonomously adapting their behaviour over time. The research investigates how human-in-the-loop approaches and steering techniques, through prompts, contextual information and reinforcement learning, can be used to guide such systems safely and effectively. Through a practical case study, the dissertation compares the performance and behaviour of AI agents under different levels of human intervention, contributing to the development of more robust, transparent and human-aligned Artificial Intelligence systems. The dissertation was supervised by Prof. António Pedro Aguiar (DEEC).

Recognising Academic Excellence

Created to recognise academic achievement, encourage advanced education and strengthen ties between higher education institutions and industry, the OERN Master’s Awards annually distinguish students who have completed their degrees with outstanding academic performance.

During the opening session, OERN President Bento Aires highlighted the importance of directing these awards towards master’s students, underlining the relevance of advanced qualifications for the engineering profession.

DEI congratulates the three award-winning graduates and their supervisors on this important distinction, which reflects the quality of the education and research developed within their master’s programmes.

More information and photographs from the ceremony are available in the OERN news article: https://www.oern.pt/noticias/oern-distingue-52-estudantes-na-2-a-edicao-dos-premios-de-mestrado/

 

Applications are now open for the 5th Edition of Prof. Dr Raul Vidal/Deloitte Award

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Applications are now open for the 5th Edition of the Prof. Raul Vidal / Deloitte Award, with the application period running until 31 August 2026.

Students enrolled in the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering and the Master in Software Engineering may submit their applications until the aforementioned date.

This award aims to annually distinguish a recent graduate from these study programmes who has demonstrated excellence through their academic achievements, the quality and innovation of work carried out in the field of Software Engineering, and participation in social and community-oriented initiatives, which constitute a distinctive criterion of this award.

The Award was established by Deloitte, with the support of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), through the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI), with the purpose of honouring Professor Emeritus Raul Vidal. This distinction recognises the Professor’s remarkable contribution to the development of education and research in the field of Computer Science, as well as his fundamental role in enhancing FEUP’s national and international reputation and in educating highly qualified professionals for the labour market.

All information regarding the application process, eligibility conditions and the award regulations can be found at: https://dei.fe.up.pt/pt/premio-prof-doutor-raul-vidal/

DEI team takes part in the development of AMALIA

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A faculty member and four students from the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) took part in the development of AMALIA, the latest and largest large language model specifically designed for the Portuguese language and culture, which was publicly unveiled on 1 July.

The DEI team comprised Sérgio Nunes, Associate Professor and researcher at INESC TEC; Luís Relvas and José Isidro, students in the Master’s in Informatics and Computing Engineering (M.EIC); Rodrigo Batista, a student in the Master’s in Artificial Intelligence (M.IA); and José Evans, a student in the Master’s in Data Engineering and Data Science (MECD). Their participation formed part of the University of Porto’s contribution to the Media domain, which brought together members from FCUP, FEUP, and FLUP, in collaboration with INESC TEC and the University of Beira Interior.

AMALIA is a language model built from the ground up for the Portuguese linguistic and cultural context. Developed over 18 months with an investment of €5.5 million, AMALIA differs from general-purpose assistants such as ChatGPT in that it was conceived as an open-source foundation model (available on Hugging Face and GitHub), intended to power specific applications built on proprietary datasets rather than to be used directly by the general public. As the model is publicly available and accompanied by a model card containing information on its characteristics and training data, the wider community will be able to benefit from and contribute to its future improvement.

The project supports Portugal’s vision and ambitions for Artificial Intelligence (AI) by directly addressing the following objectives:

Promotion of the Portuguese language,
Enabling national companies, the public administration and other organisations to express themselves correctly in European Portuguese.

To preserve Portugal’s cultural heritage,
by recording and preserving proverbs, idioms, cultural references and knowledge about national figures and monuments.

Sovereignty over citizens’ data,
Enabling the latest advances in AI to be applied to areas such as public administration, whilst ensuring that confidential data does not leave the country.

Promoção da investigação e inovação em IA,
Estimulando a criação de um ecossistema de I&D colaborativo com vários centros de investigação e contribuindo para avançar o conhecimento nacional na fronteira da IA.

Promoting research and innovation in AI,
encouraging the creation of a collaborative R&D ecosystem involving various research centres and helping to advance national knowledge at the cutting edge of AI.

AMALIA is expected to support a range of public administration applications. The gov.pt portal will be among its first use cases. Additional applications are planned in the fields of education, culture, museums, media, and science. While it would be technically feasible to develop a general-purpose chatbot based on the model, creating a competitor to commercially available conversational AI assistants is not one of the objectives of the AMALIA project.

Many questions may arise, but the good news is that they can all be answered on this page.

 

DEI Talks | “Trustworthy AI Under Constraints: From Small Language Models to Adaptive Antibiotic Treatment” by Vi Ngoc-Nha Tran (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

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The talk entitled “Trustworthy AI Under Constraints: From Small Language Models to Adaptive Antibiotic Treatment” will be given on 14 July at 4:00 pm in room B001, moderated by Prof. Gil Gonçalves (DEI).

About the Talk:

“This talk presents two current research directions in trustworthy and efficient AI systems for sensitive domains. The first part focuses on small language models as a practical alternative to large language models in settings where cost, energy use, privacy, local deployment, and governance are important. I will present our recent work on privacy risks in chatbots built on small language models, showing that standard template-based evaluations can underestimate personally identifiable information leakage. Our results motivate a broader view of reliability, where prompts, role formatting, decoding choices, and deployment settings are treated as part of the AI system itself.
The second part introduces OptiRegi, a project that uses reinforcement learning to study optimized dynamic antibiotic dosing regimens. The goal is to explore how treatment decisions can adapt over time while balancing bacterial killing, toxicity, resistance development, and changing infection dynamics. Together, these two projects highlight a common theme: building AI systems that remain trustworthy under real-world constraints, from privacy and deployment challenges in small language models to safe and adaptive treatment optimization.”

About the Speaker:

Dr. Vi Ngoc-Nha Tran is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and a member of the steering group of NORA.startup, the innovation network of the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UiT, was a visiting scholar at Rutgers University, USA, and received an Erasmus Mundus scholarship for a European M.Sc. in Software Engineering. Her research spans machine learning, health technology, high-performance computing, and energy-efficient computing. She currently leads two projects as principal investigator: a UiT-funded project on trustworthy small language models for regulated domains, and OptiRegi, a Research Council of Norway-funded project on optimized dynamic antibiotic dosing using reinforcement learning.

DEI Open Day 2026 looks at the challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Organizations

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The Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) will hold, on July 14, the 2026 edition of DEI Open Day, an annual event that brings together companies, institutions and the academic community to showcase the department’s teaching, research and innovation activities. This year’s meeting will focus on the theme “Transformation with Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Paths for the Future“. Throughout the day, the organizers aim to launch a broad debate on the challenges posed by AI adoption in public and private organizations, seeking to identify paths toward sustainable digital transformation and the role that Informatics Engineering can play in that process.

Opening and international keynote

The program starts at 09:00 with the reception of participants, followed at 9:30 by the opening session, featuring remarks from Rui Calçada, Director of FEUP, and João Paiva Cardoso, Director of DEI. The opening talk will be delivered by Cátia S. Silva, Associate Professor at the University of Florida, under the title “From Models to AI Systems: AI Engineering for Digital Transformation“. The researcher will discuss the shift from a model-development-centered AI to an approach oriented toward AI systems engineering, addressing how recent advances in foundation models are expanding the skills required of AI engineers — from systems integration to data engineering, computing infrastructure, and human-system interaction. Cátia Silva coordinates master’s programs in AI Systems and Applied Data Science at the U.S. university and has received several awards for her teaching work, including the UF Undergraduate Teacher of the Year and the UF Rising Star Award, both in 2025.

Panel brings together industry, justice, and public administration

Between 10:30 and 12:00, a discussion papel dedicated to the event’s central theme will take place, moderated by Ana Paula Rocha, Vice-President of FEUP’s Pedagogical Council. Representatives from different sectors will gibe their contribute:

Diogo Pernes, Lead Research Scientist at OutSystems;
Nuno Fonseca, Board Member of IGFEJ – Instituto de Gestão Financeira e Equipamentos da Justiça (Portugal’s Institute for Financial Management and Justice Infrastructure);
Nuno Paiva, Head of Data Science, B2C & SME at NOS;
Rodrigo Passos, City Councillor at the Porto City Council;
Sofia Gomes, Director of Data Engineering at Feedzai.

The diversity of profiles, spanning corporate digital transformation, justice system modernization, innovation in public administration, and the implementation of data and AI solutions in a global context, is expected to fuel a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of AI adoption in both the public and private sectors.

Afternoon dedicated to ways of collaborating with DEI

After the event’s official photograph (12:15) and lunch, the afternoon is reserved for individual sessions on possible ways to collaborate with DEI, namely master’s dissertations across the department’s various master’s programs, the Integrative Project of the Bachelor’s in Informatics and Computing Engineering (L.EIC), the Project Management Laboratory (LGP), FEUP Prime and DoRPE, and opportunities related to the department’s student groups.

Through this initiative, DEI aims not only to present the current state of its scientific and pedagogical activity, but also to open the door to new partnerships with companies and institutions interested in collaborating on projects across various areas of informatics engineering.

DEI Talk by Vi Ngoc-Nha Tran – UiT- The Arctic University of Norway

Also as part of the Open Day, we will be hosting a lecture by Vi Ngoc-Nha Tran, Associate Professor at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, on the topic: “Trustworthy AI Under Constraints: From Small Language Models to Adaptive Antibiotic Treatment”.
Full details of the lecture can be found here.