On 7 October, Tiago Azevedo, a Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science and Technology and Research Fellow at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, will be the guest speaker of the DEI Talks series, presenting “Graph-Based Approaches to Biological Systems: Applications in Neuroimaging and Molecular Networks.” The session will take place in room B006 at 14:30 and will be moderated by Professor Rosaldo Rossetti (DEI).

An alumnus of DEI-FEUP, Tiago completed his Integrated Master’s Degree in Informatics and Computing Engineering in 2015 under the supervision of Professor Rosaldo Rossetti. Following his studies in Porto, he continued his academic journey at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD and currently conducts his research. This will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the career path of a former DEI student who is now contributing to advances in artificial intelligence applied to some of the most significant challenges in health and biology.

About the DEI Talk:

“Biological systems can be represented as networks in which nodes correspond to brain regions, genes, or proteins, and edges capture functional, statistical, or potentially causal relationships. In this talk, I will discuss how graph-based methods can be used to model such systems, focusing first on a deep graph neural network architecture for learning spatio-temporal dynamics from resting-state functional MRI data.
I will then turn to molecular networks, briefly discussing previous work on multilayer modelling of the human transcriptome (i.e., gene expression). The main focus will then be my current work on causal discovery and stability analysis in high-dimensional proteomic data, motivated by Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, I will describe how traditional causal graph estimation and consensus analysis can be used to identify molecular relationships and communities that are robust to variation in the data.”

About the Speaker:

“Tiago Azevedo is a research associate at the Department of Computer Science and Technology and a research fellow at Hughes Hall, at the University of Cambridge, where he broadly likes to research applications of artificial intelligence in the medical and biological domains.
His current position, funded under the Sustaining Innovation Postdocs (SIPD) programme by Astex Pharmaceuticals, centres on applying machine learning to better understand Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, uncovering biologically grounded patient subtypes by integrating multi-modal data. Prior to his current focus on Parkinson’s disease, Tiago worked on cancer models using Raman spectroscopy histology data as part of CHARM, one of the first ever European Innovation Council Transition Challenges projects funded by the EU. He also spent over a year as a senior research scientist at Arm, working on efficient probabilistic machine learning and graph neural networks.”

The twentieth session of the Creativity Talks will feature Denise de Souza Fleith, Full Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Brasília, as the keynote speaker.

The session will focus on “Creativity in Education: Are We Prepared for the Future?”. The presentation will be delivered in Portuguese and will take place online on October 8, 2026, at 17:30, moderated by Manuel Firmino Torres, Assistant Professor at FEUP’s Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI).

Learning to think and act creatively has become a fundamental requirement for personal, academic, and professional development in contemporary society. To address the challenges of the 21st century and prepare new generations for an increasingly complex and unpredictable future, it is essential that students see themselves as active participants in their own learning and believe in their capacity to contribute to collective well-being and the construction of a fairer and more sustainable society. This presentation aims to discuss the role of creativity in educational contexts in light of theoretical models, empirical evidence, and pedagogical practices grounded in scientific research. It seeks to examine the relationship between creativity and teaching and learning processes, identifying factors that foster or inhibit the expression of creative potential, as well as pedagogical practices and classroom climate characteristics that promote creativity among students and teachers. It is important to emphasize that creativity is not limited to inspiration or an innate gift; rather, it is a complex and dynamic phenomenon resulting from the interaction of personal, social, cultural, and historical factors. From this perspective, promoting creativity in education involves creating learning environments that value curiosity, autonomy, critical thinking, collaboration, and creative problem-solving, thereby better preparing individuals for the challenges of both the present and the future.

About the Speaker:

“Denise de Souza Fleith is a psychologist and holds a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Connecticut. She completed postdoctoral studies at the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth in England and at the University of Minho in Portugal. She is a Full Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Brasília, a researcher with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and a member of the Scientific and Technical Committee of the National Science for Education Network. She is a Fellow of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation and served as President of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children (2021-2025).”

Watch on the CT’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f30JR_nHrDA

Schedule: Google Calendar

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.

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.

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.

The talk entitled “Natural and artificial trust for decision-making in human-machine teamwork” will be given on 25 June at 11:00, in room B011.

About the Talk:

“Human-machine teams count on both humans and artificial agents to work together collaboratively. In human-human teams, we use trust to make decisions, such as which teammate should do which task, based on what we believe might be successful. Our prediction of task success is based on our beliefs of others’ trustworthiness, which can be divided into several dimensions, e.g., competence, willingness, external factors, etc.

As artificial teammates’ autonomy increases, the variation of interdependences in human-machine teams increases too. As such, team members need to consider the different possibilities to achieve task success as a team, making the best use of human-machine collaboration. It is then important that all members involved, both humans and machines, have the necessary beliefs of trust and trustworthiness to make decisions that ensure the team’s goal and mitigate possible risks. By formalising trust and trustworthiness beliefs, we can increase the transparency of decisions, either made by humans or machines.

In this talk, I will go over notions of trust, trustworthiness, interdependence and coactive design, all in the context of decision-making in human-machine teams. I will present some of our multidisciplinary research which allow us to increase our (and the machine’s) understandability of the human teammate when collaborating with a machine and, consequently, make the machine teammate more understandable to the human.”

About the Speaker:

Carolina Centeio Jorge is a Senior Data Scientist at Glintt Next in Portugal. She completed her PhD in the Interactive Intelligence group at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), where she researched mental models and trust in human-AI teams, and was a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan. Carolina has been actively involved in academic service and research communities, including co-founding the MultiTTrust workshop series and serving on TU Delft’s Integrity Board. Having lived in Tokyo, Barcelona, and Delft, she values multidisciplinary and multicultural environments. Today, she combines her research background with industry practice, focusing on customer intelligence.

Entrance is free, no registration required.

The talk entitled “Fifty Years of the Algorithm Selection Problem: John Rice’s Enduring Legacy” will be given on 27 May at 11:00 am in room B008, moderated by Prof. Carlos Soares (DEI).

About the Talk:

“The seminal paper “The Algorithm Selection Problem” by John Rice was published 50 years ago. This paper formalizes the problem of selecting the best algorithm for a given problem, which is important in Machine Learning, Optimization and many areas of Computer Science. In this talk, I discuss the paper, its impact and challenges it raises which are still open today.”

About the Speaker:

Kate Smith-Miles AO FAA is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Capability) and a Melbourne Laureate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Melbourne. She is also Director of the ARC Training Centre in Optimisation Technologies, Integrated Methodologies, and Applications (OPTIMA). She has previously held a five year Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council with a Georgina Sweet Award, and has held positions as President of the Australian Mathematical Society (2016-2018), a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts (2017-2019), and Associate Dean (Enterprise and Innovation) in the University’s Faculty of Science (2019-2023). Prior to joining The University of Melbourne in September 2017, she was Professor of Applied Mathematics at Monash University, where she was also Head of the School of Mathematical Sciences (2009-2014), and inaugural Director of the Monash Academy for Cross & Interdisciplinary Mathematical Applications (MAXIMA) from 2013-2017. She was also previously Head of the School of Engineering and Information Technology at Deakin University (2006-2009) with a Chair in Engineering. She obtained her first Professorship in Information Technology at Monash University, where she worked from 1996-2006. Professorships in three disciplines (mathematics, engineering, and information technology) have given her an interdisciplinary breadth reflected in much of her research.

The talk entitled “The 2025 Turing Award: Secret Key Sharing Using Quantum Mechanics” will take place on June 3rd at 14:30, in room B004 . The session will be moderated by Prof. Ana Paiva (DEI).

About the Talk:

The 2025 Turing Award was awarded this year to Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard for their work in quantum cryptography. In their 1984 paper, they introduced the famous BB84 protocol, showing how two parties can securely share a cryptographic key. The security of this protocol is guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics themselves.
In this talk, the speaker will explain this protocol and its significance. No advanced knowledge of quantum mechanics is required.

About the Speaker:

Sagar Silva Pratapsi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) at FEUP. His research focuses on quantum computing and quantum information, particularly on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, quantum system control, and related algorithms.
He completed his PhD at Instituto Superior Técnico in 2024 and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra until 2026, where he taught courses in quantum computing and quantum information. He was also a visiting research student at the University of California, Berkeley in 2024, funded by the Luso-American Development Foundation, and a visiting student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore in 2023, supported by a doctoral fellowship from the “la Caixa” Foundation.
Before his PhD, he worked as a Research Analyst at the European Central Bank. He has received several distinctions, including a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation’s New Talents in Mathematics Programme, and is a medalist in the International Physics Olympiad.