“This talk is an exploratory tour through this brave new world, and its consequences to our field and to Computer Science (CS) education,” anticipates the speaker of a presentation on a topic that due to the advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in “Large Language Models (LLMs)”, mediately exposed by ChatGPT, promises to revolutionise software development.

“The End of Programming (as we know it)” will be presented by Prof. Cristina Videira Lopes, with moderation by Prof. João Paulo Fernandes, on March 23, 18:00, room B035, with online broadcasting via Youtube.

By the speaker: “For the past 80 years, “programming” meant translating a high-level, semi-formal specification of a desired effect from natural language into computer instructions, using an artificial programming language. Mastering these translations requires domain knowledge of algorithms and data structures, talent, and years of practice. Large Language Models (LLMs) are disrupting the very notion of “programming.” The disruption is profound, and at two levels: (1) LLMs are capable of doing those translations automatically, and (2) many of the desired effects can be obtained without the use of algorithms or data structures. This talk is an exploratory tour through this brave new world, and its consequences to our field and to CS education.”

Short-Bio:

Cristina (Crista) Lopes is a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine, with research interests in Programming Languages, Software Engineering, and Distributed Virtual Environments. She is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. She is the recipient of the 2016 Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest for her work in the OpenSimulator virtual world platform. Her book “Exercises in Programming Style” has gained rave reviews, including being chosen as “Notable Book” by the ACM Best of Computing reviews. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~lopes/

“Computational Inaesthetics: Expanding the Boundaries of Artistic Research and Computational Aesthetics” will be presented on Friday, march 24^th, at 14:30, room I-105, moderated by Prof. António Coelho from DEI.

By the author:

“The increasing use of digital technologies in artistic practice, coupled with the recent emergence of AI, has led to a growing intersection and mutual influence between two related fields: artistic research and computational aesthetics. Artistic research involves using artistic practices to generate new insights and understandings about the world and reflect critically on the process of creating art. In contrast, computational aesthetics involves the theory, practice, and implementation of aesthetics within the domain of computing, and in its most formal version relies on mathematical and computational methods to generate and evaluate art.

However, there has been criticism of computational aesthetics for failing to account for the subjective and non-algorithmic nature of aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, this presentation proposes a practical framework that seeks to resolve this critique by highlighting an expanded view of computational aesthetics, which the presenter terms Computational Inaesthetics.

Through the discussion of basic concepts and principles of artistic research and computational aesthetics, and through the analysis of a selection of artworks by the presenter, the presentation explores the ways in which these fields can inform and enhance each other. Furthermore, the presentation provides an overview of the artistic contents and theoretical underpinnings of the presenter’s artistic research PhD project.

Overall, this presentation showcases the exciting potential of bringing together artistic research and computational aesthetics to expand our understanding of aesthetics, art, creativity, and the role of technology and computation in society.”

Martinus Suijkerbuijk is an artist, designer and engineer that currently is working towards completing his artistic research PhD at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway. His artistic research is focused on the concept of Computational Aesthetics, which he explores through the use of AI empowered Artificial Aesthetic Agents (AAA) in virtual environments. His diverse background has enabled him to present his research and work at cultural institutions such as ZKM and MetaMorf, as well as technology conferences like CHI 2018 and Philips Trend Event.

“Driving Simulators for the Study of Road Users’ Behaviour” will be presented on tuesday, march 7^th, at 17:15, room B012.

“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 behaviors. 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 behavioral traffic simulation (MAS based), and the design of tools to study road user behaviors (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.

“Jan N. van Rijn holds a tenured position as assistant professor at Leiden University (ada.liacs.nl), where he works in the computer science department (LIACS) and Automated Design of Algorithms cluster (ADA).

His research interests include artificial intelligence, automated machine learning (AutoML) and meta-learning.

He obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2016 at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University (the Netherlands).

During his PhD, he developed OpenML.org, an open science platform for machine learning, enabling sharing of machine learning results.

He made several funded research visits to the University of Waikato (New Zealand) and the University of Porto (Portugal).

After obtaining his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Machine Learning lab at the University of Freiburg (Germany), headed by Prof. Dr. Frank Hutter, after which he moved to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the City of New York (USA). His research aim is to democratize access to machine learning and artificial intelligence across societal institutions, by developing knowledge and tools that support domain experts.

He is one of the authors of the book `Metalearning: Applications to Automated Machine Learning and Data Mining’ (published by Springer).”

”AutoML and Meta-learning for Neural Network Robustness Verification” will be presented january the 25th, at 14:45, room B006 – free entrance, all are welcome.

Abstract: Artificial intelligence is being increasingly integrated in modern society, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to medicine development. However, artificial intelligence models (in particular neural networks) have been notoriously known for being susceptible for various forms of attacks, including adversarial attacks. In a bid to make these models more trustworthy, the field of neural network robustness verification aims to determine to which degree a given network is susceptible to such an attack. This is a very time consuming task, that can greatly benefit from the various advances that the Automated Machine Learning and meta-learning community have made.

In this talk, it will be explained the basis of automated machine learning and meta-learning, and the speaker will talk about their research on applying this to robustness verification. He will also explain how the community can further engage in this endevour towards trustworthy artificial intelligence.

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.

Professor Delsings research profile can be entitled “Internet of Thing Services and Systems”, with applications to automation in large and complex industry and society systems. Addressing design, engineering, and deployment of System of Systems (SoS) capable of collaborative automation, Prof. Delsing and his EISLAB group has participated in important EU projects like SocradesIMC-AESOP, Arrowhead and Productive4.0 project.

“Efficient Engineering of Systems of Systems” will be presented July the 26th, at 10:00, room I-105.

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

“Delsing has a long standing in ultrasound sensor technology in particularly applied to flow measurement. His present research profile can be entitled “Internet of Thing Services and Systems”, with applications to automation in large and complex industry and society systems. The approach is based on Internet of Things (IoT) and the design engineering, and deployment of System of Systems (SoS) capable of collaborative automation. The integration and manufacturing of necessary electronics is a of key interest. Prof. Delsing and his EISLAB group has been a partner of several large EU projects in the field, e.g. Socrades and IMC-AESOP and ESIS. Currently he is the coordinator of the very large ARTEMIS project Arrowhead,  with 78 partners and a budget of 69M€.

Delsing has been supervisor for 37 students receiving the PhD degree, with some 45+ students in total for the EISLAB group. His list of publications can be found at: https://scholar.google.se/citations?user=_XLRuYAAAAAJ&hl=sv

Delsing is highly involved in the innovations systems related to automation and embedded systems. At the European level he is steering board member of ARTEMIS, board member of ProcessIT.EU. At national (Sweden) level he is board member of ProcessIT Innovations and ESIS. From 1998 – 2015 he was the chairman of ITF (Instrument Tekniska Föreningen/Instrument Society of Sweden) with about 1.000 automation engineers as members.”

Bio

“Prof. Jerker Delsing received the M.Sc. in Engineering Physics at Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden 1982. In 1988 he received the PhD. degree in Electrical Measurement at the Lund University. During 1985 – 1988 he worked part time at Alfa-Laval – SattControl (now ABB) with development of sensors and measurement technology. In 1994 he got the docent degree (associate prof) in Heat and Power Engineering. Early 1995 he was appointed full professor in Industrial Electronics at Luleå University of Technology where he currently is working as the scientific head of EISLAB, http://www.ltu.se/eislab. For the period 2004-2006 he also served as Dean of the engineering faculty at Luleå University of Technology.”

Source: https://www.routledge.com/

“From building installations, through archaeology to precision agriculture ” will be presented July the 13th, room B019 , at 15:00.

Abstract:

 The GGGJ research group celebrates its 25th anniversary working in two areas, Computer Graphics and Geomatics. The projects that have been awarded lately are also in these lines of research.

The so-called project: “Computer Graphics tool for 3D and 4D data management. Applying VR & AR techniques to Urban Infrastructures and Archaeology” (2018-2021) completed in December 2021, is oriented to 4D models hidden or disappeared for the view.

New projects now active are focused on Precision Agriculture, mostly oriented to the olive grove. The last one granted by the Spanish Ministry (180,000 euros) is entitled:” 3D/4D tools for the generation of digital twins of rural environments. Applications” starts in September and has a duration of 3 years.

Bios:

Francisco Feito, graduated in Mathematics (specializing in Pure Mathematics) in 1977, at the Complutense University of Madrid. After 12 years in pre-university teaching, he joined the University of Granada (Jaen Campus). In 1993 (already constituted the University of Jaen) he was elected Director of the Department of Computer Science (which included, and still includes, the areas of Computer Languages and Systems, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and Computer Architecture and Technology). In 1997 he was appointed General Director of Curriculum and Quality of the University of Jaén and in 1999 Vice-Rector of Research and International Relations (until 2002). Subsequently he was again Director of the department from 2004 to 2008. He has been a member of the faculty and of several University committees.

Areas of interest: Geometric Modeling; Solid Modeling; Algorithms in Computer Graphics; Geomatics; Computational Geometry; Spatial Information Systems; Geographic Information Systems; Precision Agriculture in the Olive Grove; Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality; Simulation; Smart City; Digital Twin- Digital Twin.

Lidia. M. Ortega received the BSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Granada (Spain), and the PhD degree from the University of Seville. She has been an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at University of Jaén teaching at the High Polytechnics Institute since the 90s. Her research work focuses on computational Geometry applied to Computer Graphic, 3D-GIS, Spatial databases, Geomatics and Agriculture precision.

Marco Dorigo is the proponent of the well-known “Ant Colony Optimization” meta-heuristic optimization algorithm and a leading researcher in the field of swarm robotics, which allows groups of individually very simple agents/robots to obtain group intelligence that allows coordinating large groups of autonomous agents/robots without relying on any external infrastructure or any form of centralized control. This approach is very promising for performing tasks that are too difficult or dangerous for humans using very simple and inexpensive sets of agents/robots.

 ”Mergeable Nervous System for Robot Swarms” will be presented June 29, at 16:00, in room I-105.

 Abstract:

Typically, robot swarms coordinate through self-organization. With the proposal of the mergeable nervous system concept, we study how self-organization can be made more powerful as a tool to coordinate the activities of a robot swarm by injecting some components of hierarchical control. In the presentation, I will give a brief overview of the mergeable nervous systems concept and then illustrate the first steps we have made in implementing it in a heterogeneous swarm composed of drones and ground robots.

Bio:

Marco Dorigo received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. In 1993, he was a NATO-CNR Fellow, and from 1994 to 1996, a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1996, he has been a tenured Researcher of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the ULB. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems. Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the AAAI, EurAI, and IEEE. He was awarded numerous international prizes among which the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2015, and the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award, awarded in 2016.

Markos Konstantakis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication at Aegean University, in the field of Augmented Reality, entitled: «Augmented Cultural User Experience – ACUX». He receives a Master’s Degree in “Specialization in Information Systems, Networks and Telecommunications”, from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the Hellenic Open University ( HOU ). Markos completed a Degree and a Master’s Degree in Marine Mechanical Engineer NTUA (National Technical University of Athens). Since November 2013 he is a Research Fellow – Lecturer for the implementation of the Act «Supplementary Program Distance Learning e-learning», University of Athens, teaching and writing program notes: «Network Engineer», «Matlab» and «Digital Culture». Since September 2016 is working as a Research Assistant for the implementation of projects regarding cultural tourism, conservation of arts and digital culture. His research includes the technologies of Virtual and Augmented Reality, Ubiquitous Computing, Digital Culture, User Experience, Cultural Heritage, Prototyping, Human-Computer Interaction, the Internet of Things and Serious Games.

 Join us on the 6th of June, at 14:00, in room I-105 of FEUP, for the presentation of “Digital Culture and Cultural User experience”.

 Abstract:

The immense interest in academia and the cultural industry has been to augment users’ participation during their interaction with cultural artefacts by making them an actor in their own cultural experience. Cultural User eXperience (CUX) has gained momentum in recent years, and a factor that affects CUX is the cultural background and profile of the individual user. Users have their own cultural characteristics and preferences, they learn and interact differently with a particular artefact, and finally, they obtain a unique cultural experience.

CUX is an essential consideration that should be acknowledged and implemented when initiating the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. It is beyond the usability of a cultural product or system. It includes both pragmatic and hedonic user factors that could influence a user’s positive experience when interacting with the system or product, leading to the effectiveness of CH activities. The diversity of visitors to cultural spaces is one of their unique attributes and is becoming a significant challenge for these venues to meet their visitors’ needs. How can they address the variety of interests and needs of all their visitors? Therefore, it is necessary to know visitors’ expectations when visiting cultural spaces.

The cultural tourists of today (at least in developed countries) travel more than the tourists of the past, and it is possible that the tourists of tomorrow will travel even more often, increasing the level of cultural user experience. Therefore, travelling, which was considered a ”luxury good” in the past, is an integral part of people’s lives nowadays. Also, tourists do not leave their previous experiences, motivations, preconceptions, and attitudes behind when they travel, the same way they leave their coats in the cloakroom upon entering a museum. Furthermore, the effects of a journey are not limited to the time spent at the destination. Tourists connect information and construct meaning before travelling to a place and continue to do so months or even years after their journey.

It is indisputable that cultural tourism destinations require detailed categorization of their visitors and their underlying motivations since not every person is motivated by the exact reasons for learning, experimenting, or self-exploring. Because of this assumption that cultural tourists are not alike, most of the literature in cultural tourism follows a clustering approach, emphasizing determining the typology of the cultural tourists.

Amongst the abundance of tools available for interaction design, user typologies have been claimed to be “the most effective and fundamental”. By creating a concrete image of the user, designers gain insight into the elements a User Interface (UI) should have and how the user is likely to respond to those elements.

Furthermore, during the past years, cultural interactive experiences are produced in an increased pace to bring back the lost fiction, as well as the functional and ritual nature of the cultural objects. To date, there are various technologies available in cultural environments to support cultural exhibitions directly or indirectly (augmented reality, digital storytelling, serious games, linked open data, context awareness), and every technology used makes an impact on the exhibition or the visitors.