Category Archives: Highlights

PhD Defense in Informatics Engineering : ”Highly reconfigurable smart component system”

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Candidate
Luís Carlos de Sousa Moreira Neto

Date, Time and Place 
January 31, 14:15, Sala de Atos FEUP

President of the Jury
Carlos Miguel Ferraz Baquero-Moreno, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto.

Members
Julio Luis Medina Pasaje, PhD, Associate Professor, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática y Electrónica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Cantabria, Espanha;
António Eduardo Vitória do Espírito Santo, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade da Beira Interior;
Pedro Nuno Ferreira da Rosa da Cruz Diniz, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto;
Luis Miguel Pinho de Almeida, Associate Professor with Habilitation, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto;
Gil Manuel Magalhães de Andrade Gonçalves, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto (Supervisor).

Abstract:
“Across all sectors of our society, efficiency is an increasingly paramount concern for a sustainable world. While the significance of efficiency spans all levels, it is at a large scale where the impacts of efficient practices are most prominently noticed. Industrial activities are an example of how efficiency traduces in visible results. It doesn’t require extensive reasoning to recognize that everyday increasingly affordable goods we consume are a direct outcome of these efficiency demands. The market is demanding new services and business models that center the end user in the product design. In the near future, consumers will be able to customize a product on-line, place a production order, and see it delivered, all in the same day. This remarkable possibility arises from of a combination of efficiency and flexibility within the production processes. Several names have been used to describe the same fundamental paradigm in both academic and industrial contexts: Factories of the Future, Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, all remounting to the same technological advent. This concept has far-reaching implications, extending its influence across multiple technological domains, presenting a wealth of research opportunities and driving the need for innovative technologies. This thesis delves into two technological domains related with this new paradigm and tackles one key problem in either domain. Within the Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) domain, it addresses the problem of establishing a unified network of industrial assets where software and its connections to other assets are clearly discernible and recognized. On the Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) domain, it addresses the fast pace at which the production lines will have to reconfigure, in particular, how software will have to reconfigure in parallel with the production lines and the ease with which new software can be developed and deployed to meet emerging challenges. A solution to both problems emerges from the field of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), where this thesis drew inspiration to develop an innovative Smart Component with enhanced software reconfiguration and deployment capabilities. The proposed system exploits using Linux, a general-purpose operating system, as the component runtime environment (RTE). A combination of shared memory for efficient component communication and parallel and reconfigurable computing properties for enhanced throughput allows the proposed system to meet established application performance standards while maintaining a high degree of flexibility and reusability. The Smart Component’s flexibility is demonstrated through the implementation of two component models. The IEC 61499 component model, designed to model event-driven distributed applications for industrial system monitoring and control, and the Smart Object Self-Description (SOSD), developed by the author to describe software components, their interconnections, and their associations with industrial assets. The IEC 61499 implementation was directly compared to existing RTEs, outperforming them in real-world use cases and equaling the performance of one RTE in a literature benchmark. Additional benchmarks to assess the Smart Component’s reconfiguration performance and simplified software component development method were proposed in this thesis. The effectiveness of the SOSD implementation was validated through its application in a real-world use case, furnishing other CPPS nodes with context regarding the origin of the collected data and the software components responsible for its processing. By using Linux as the RTE, a software layer traditionally dedicated to manage components was deemed unnecessary, due to the system’s ability to execute applications conforming to relevant performance standards, while showing superior software flexibility, and even outperforming existing RTEs which employ the traditional approach. Many runtime environments for software components exist, but few allow the deployment of components built in more than one programming language, and none – to the best of the author’s knowledge – allow the development of components in any language – provided that language is at least able to read and write to files. The simplicity of developing regular software program for Linux and converting it into a software component is a promising feature that should benefit the development of industrial control and monitoring applications by bringing along the benefits of multiple high-level programming languages.”

DEI TALKS | “Analyzing and Modeling Intelligent Systems Users’ Behavior in Digital Society” by Prof. Humberto Marques-Neto

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“Information systems are ever-increasingly intelligent and present in the daily lives of people and companies, facilitating and modifying the performance of various activities. In addition to handling each system’s intrinsic data, data from its users’ interactions can contribute to identifying, modeling, and analyzing people’s behavior patterns. The data analysis from the usage of web systems and mobile applications and, in particular, from online social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok (obviously respecting the privacy of users) can contribute to the understanding of some dynamics and specific behaviors of human beings.

In this talk, I will present how our research group has done the characterization, analysis, and modeling of the behavior of users of intelligent information systems, more specifically, users of online social networks and information systems that make information available in open data portals, to induce the development of new software that use machine learning and artificial intelligent algorithms. The information systems user behavior, together with patterns of social interaction and human mobility in urban centers, in addition to subsidizing decisions and policies of government agencies and institutions responsible for urban planning, could foster and even target software developers interested in creating innovative software with the potential to improve people’s lives in a digital and connected society.”

“Analyzing and Modeling Intelligent Systems Users’ Behavior in Digital Society” will be presented January 25, at 14:00, room B006, moderated by Prof. Gil Gonçalves (DEI).

Short Bio:
“Prof. Humberto T. Marques-Neto is a researcher and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC Minas) in Belo Horizonte – Brazil. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the PUC Minas, a Master’s in Information Science, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from the Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG. In the last few years, he has published some papers on the characterization and modeling of large-scale distributed system user behavior, online social network analysis and modeling, computing systems for mobile devices, and software engineering. He also coordinates (at PUC Minas) the Center of Technological Innovation and PUCTec, a Hub for Innovation and Business with about 30 startups. Since last August, he has been spending a one-year sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa.”

PhD Defense in Informatics (MAP-i): ”Artificial Intelligence Methods for Automated Difficulty and Power Balance in Games”

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Candidate
Simão Paulo Rato Alves Reis

Date, Time and Place
January 11, 14:00, Sala de Atos FEUP

President of the Jury
Carlos Miguel Ferraz Baquero-Moreno, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, University of Porto

Members
João Alberto Fabro, PhD, Associate Professor, Departamento Acadêmico de Informática, Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Brasil;
Rui Filipe Fernandes Prada, PhD, Associate  Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa;
Pétia Georgieva Georgieva, PhD, Associate Professor with Habilitation, Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Universidade de Aveiro (representative of the MAP-i Scientific Committee);
Luís Paulo Gonçalves dos Reis, PhD, Associate Professor with Habilitation, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto (Supervisor);
Henrique Daniel de Avelar Lopes Cardoso, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto.

The thesis was co-supervised by Doutor Nuno Lau, Associate Professor at the University of Aveiro.

Abstract:
“This thesis studies the balance problem in game development, notably in two-player games. Specifically, we aim to study the viability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an assisting tool to fix game properties. We split our research into two paths: Power Balance, where the aim is to adjust game strategies, so they become effective as winning tools; Difficulty Balance, where the objective is to adjust game attributes on the fly so that weaker players or players at a disadvantage can compete with stronger players or players in advantage. Both domains require tuning the game, but they mainly differ in the timing and in their aim, one deals with the imbalance in game design, while the other deals with inequality in player skills. For Power Balance, our methodology was to define a full meta-game balance ecosystem based on the Pokémon video game franchise and develop an AI competition where the multiple associated tasks (battling, team prediction and assembly, and meta-game balance) are present and can be tested in a common ground. To balance the meta-game, we follow an adversarial model where team builders aim to narrow the use of optimal Pokémon while balancer agents aim to incentive the maximum of Pokémon as possible to be selected by team builders. This results in agents being able to play, build effective teams, and being able to tune the Pokémon roster over time. We discuss how our models can be extended to other video game domains. For Difficulty Balance, we propose a Multiplayer Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment framework where a Game Master (GM) agent is trained and embedded into a game, depending on the game state it will deploy handicap mechanisms. The training regime follows a specific pipeline. To generalize advantage situations, parameterized perturbations on the actions of a reference player are used to emulate several degrees of playing skill, and the advantage for each player is used to draw curves which are evaluated as a reward for the GM. This results in the GM being able to optimize game design criteria and create opportunities for the player behind to recover. We show there are suited AI tools for each task, and it is reasonable to think of power balance and difficulty as separate problems, where both can be automatically assisted and eased. Both further augment our overall comprehension of the automated game balance field.”

M.EIC students distinguished with an E-REDES Merit Scholarship

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The 2nd edition of the E-REDES Top Women Scholarship brought us good news with five students from the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering being awarded one of the 30 scholarships.

 Ana Matilde Guedes Perez da Silva Barra, Catarina Oliveira Pires, Eunice Juliana Freitas Amorim, Margarida Assis Ferreira and Mariana Mirra Monteiro, the distinguished students, in addition to the merit scholarship worth 2000€ will have access to a Mentoring Programme with customized support from an E-REDES mentor, through which the students will learn more about the activities and opportunities offered by the energy sector.

Motivation for the sector, getting closer to the business environment, stimulating networking between mentors and E-REDES mentors, are some of the objectives of this mentoring programme offered to all the winners which runs along the academic year.

 The E-REDES Top Women Scholarship is a scholarship programme designed to reward young women graduating with master’s degrees in the fields of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with the aim of encouraging an increase in the number of women opting for the technology sector, where gender imbalances still persist.

 “We are committed to promoting full participation and equal opportunities in our organisation, but also to supporting and extending to other technological areas,” can be read  website.

 In the 1st edition of this programme, which took place in 2022, Ana Inês Oliveira de Barros and Diana Cristina Amaral de Freitas, who have recently graduated from M.EIC, were also on the list of winners. Remember them here.

Photo: DR

DEI TALKS| “Aprendizado colaborativo em redes neuronais artificiais” by Prof. Areolino de Almeida Neto

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“Any task that cannot be carried out by a single agent requires the interaction of multiple agents aligned with the solution to the problem. Teamwork usually requires coordination between the members so that there are no conflicts and the result is more efficient. In the field of artificial learning, when one element is unable to fully learn the solution to a problem, it requires the participation of other “intelligent” elements to fully learn the solution. In this way, a collaborative learning system is presented, in which intelligent agents learn to collaborate with each other in order to achieve complete learning in a self-coordinated way (without a coordinator) and without the occurrence of conflicts between the intelligent elements. Specifically, it involves inserting other neural networks or other intermediate layers into an ANN in order to collaborate with the learning already acquired and thus add new knowledge to the system.”

This is how Prof. Areolino de Almeida Neto describes his presentation entitled “Collaborative learning in artificial neural networks”, which will take place on 15 November at 14:30, room B033.

The talk will be moderated by Prof Carlos Soares (DEI).

Short Bio

Areolino de Almeida Neto holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) in 1990, a Master’s degree in Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering from the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA) in 1998 and a PhD in Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering from ITA / Universität Hannover (2004). He has experience in Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics and Computer Science, with an emphasis on Mechatronic Systems and Artificial Intelligence, working mainly on the following topics: neural networks, reinforcement learning, mobile robotics and manipulator robotics. Since 2015, he has been working as Coordinator of the Aerospace Engineering WG of the Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation (SECTI) of Maranhão, Brazil. He has been a permanent member of the Postgraduate Programme in Computer Science at UFMA since 2010, which has allowed him to publish several scientific articles on neural networks and reinforcement learning, and a book on multiple self-coordinating neural networks.

DEI TALKS | “Research projects and cooperation opportunities with São Paulo – Brazil” by Prof. Alessandro Santiago dos Santos

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This presentation, which will take place on November 6, at 14:30, room I-105 (DEEC), will cover the main lines of research at the Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas, São Paulo, Brazil, with a focus on projects related to Smart Cities and ICTs. Opportunities for collaboration in these areas will also be explored.

The talk will be moderated by Prof. Rosaldo Rossetti (DEI).

“Alessandro Santiago dos Santos, Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas of the state of São Paulo (IPT), working in Brazilian Technological Research and Development for over 20 years, with digital transformation studies and projects. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon, investigating issues related to smart, resilient and sustainable cities. In Brazil, he is the Business Development Manager of IPT’s digital technologies unit; coordinator and professor of the Professional Master’s in Applied Computing at IPT, and was a member of the contingency committee for dealing with the Coronavirus in São Paulo, working on the Intelligent Monitoring System, which supported the government in dealing with the pandemic. He holds a PhD in Transport Engineering and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of São Paulo, and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Mato Grosso. Awards, academic and business recognitions are part of his professional career, including managerial experience in companies such as SENAC, IBM and IPT. Projects, consultancy and research in areas such as: Intelligent Transport Systems, Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, Smart and Sustainable Cities. International cooperation with Europe on R&D projects in IT and Transport, as well as advising the World Economic Forum on the data policy platform at the Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution (C4IR Brasil).”

Inter-University Programming Marathon 2023 (MIUP)

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On October 21, 2023, the Inter-University Programming Marathon 2023 (MIUP) took place at the Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Coimbra. MIUP is a programming competition aimed at university students and has been held annually since 2001. It provides an excellent opportunity for students to test their problem-solving skills and, beyond the competitive aspect, MIUP also allows students and professors from Portuguese universities to get together and exchange experiences. In this competition, teams of three are challenged to solve various problems using the C, C++, Java and Python languages.

In this edition, 6 students from the Bachelor in Informatics and Computing Engineering (L.EIC) and 1 from the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering (M.EIC) participated on the competition. Unlike in previous years, teams from the Faculty of Engineering (FEUP) and the Faculty of Sciences (FCUP) competed as University of Porto, result of the growing collaboration between DEI and DCC. There was even a mixed team and another that included an element from another faculty, ICBAS.

This year, 3 teams from the University of Porto had the privilege of achieving the distinction of reaching the top-6:
1st place – 2 students from MCC and 1 from ICBAS 🥇 gold medal
4th place – 1 student from LCC, 1 from MCC and 1 from L.EIC 🥉 bronze medal
6th place – 1 student from M.EIC and 2 from L.EIC 🥉 bronze medal

More information about MIUP 2023 can be found on the page of the event and the teams’ final results here.

MEDINFOR VI – A Medicina na Era da Informação

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On October 18, 19 and 20, 2023, the International Colloquium MEDINFOR VI – A Medicina na Era da Informação, a scientific meeting promoted by the University of Porto and the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia (FMB), organized by FLUP/CITCEM, the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICBAS) and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) was hosted by FLUP. The Colloquium was attended by renowned professors and researchers from various countries in the fields of Information Science, Health Sciences, Computer Science and Culture.

The 4 main topics of this edition – Information Management in Health Systems, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Scientific and Medical-Cultural Communication and Dissemination, Memory, Identity and Heritage, promoted interdisciplinarity between Medicine and Information Science, the main objective of this event.

On the second day of the meeting, *Eugénio da Costa Oliveira, Emeritus Professor at the University of Porto/ Full Professor at DEI/FEUP, participated, alongside Mariana Pais (FMUP) and Rui Sousa e Silva (FLUP), in the round table “Artificial Intelligence in Health: the impact of Large Language Models“, moderated by Ricardo Cruz Correia (FMUP).

The discussion in this and the other panels under theme II, “AI in Medicine“, sought to answer and clarify some questions about the promising application of AI in Medicine, such as: “What is the value of the doctor in this changing panorama of the information and A.I. world? “; “What is the role of AI in medicine and the ethical principles in designing algorithms?”; “What is the relevance of AI in medical information?”; “What is the correlation of images with the clinical context and their integration with the status of biomarkers, molecular information and other biological and pharmacological informational data?”, among others.

The perspective conveyed by Professor Eugénio Oliveira is included in his initial presentation and can be read here.

* Short CV

The results of THEIA validate the success of the U.Porto-Bosch scientific partnership

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Bosch and the University of Porto (U.Porto) presented the results of THEIA (Automated Perception Driving) project, which aims to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles. The project was presented on September 26 at Alfândega do Porto and counted with the presence of the Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Elvira Fortunato, and partner institutions.

The research carried out under THEIA focused on improving the capabilities of autonomous vehicle sensors, in particular LiDAR sensors, allowing vehicles to perceive their external environment even in adverse conditions. In addition, the project also addressed the efficiency of perception algorithms and data security.

The consortium between Bosch and U.Porto represented an investment of more than 28 million euros and involved Bosch employees and researchers from the University of Porto at the Faculty of Engineering (DEEC and DEI) and the Faculty of Sciences (DCC). DEI researchers were involved in tasks related to accurate and efficient perception, developing methods based on computer vision and artificial intelligence. This collaboration has also resulted in the publication of several scientific papers and master’s dissertations by students from M.EIC (Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering) and other programs in which DEI is involved.

Photo: U.Porto

U.Porto students – the grand winners of the Sogrape Impact Hack

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“Reinventing the wine sector, through innovation, for a positive impact!” was the motto of the first edition of the Sogrape Impact Hack, a Hackaton organised by Sogrape that took place at Casa Ferreirinha on September 21st.

There were 12 hours of competition in which the 110 participants were divided into teams of 4 to 6 and, through collective intelligence and expert mentoring, came up with “concrete and creative solutions with the aim of contributing to the construction of a more impactful and sustainable world, focused on attracting new consumers, creating new products and implementing sustainable practices”.

The three winning teams, formed by students from the University of Porto, stood out for the innovative solutions they presented and were awarded a cash prize, 20% of which went to non-profit, non-governmental organisations selected by the teams themselves.

The “Techrocks” team, made up of Francisca Osório, Filipe Ferreira, Mário Branco (L.EIC) and Silvia Rocha (Alumna M.EIC), won the first place with their idea for an application that allows personalised recommendations using AI algorithms.

The “S4U” team took 2nd place with “Iniciativa Zero”, which focussed on creating a brand of innovative, low-alcohol products aimed at younger consumers. The team included Inês Arinto, João Gomes, Pedro Pinheiro and Matilde Ribeiro, former and current students on the Management Master’s programme at the Faculty of Economics.

“For the WINe”, a team made up of Dinis Sousa (M.EIC), Gonçalo Barros, Maria Helena Matos, Miguel Tomás Rodrigues (L.EIC) and Rodrigo Sousa, came 3rd with an app that rewards customers with discounts, prizes and privileged access to new products by sharing information and purchase history.

With the success of this first edition stays the promise of a return next year.

Photo: Sogrape