“The acquisition of features for patient diagnostics, treatment planing and monitoring purposes is costly. Moreover, when patients with chronic diseases are called to used mobile health apps, they are also called to interact with the app in a regular way; the willingness to do so may wane with time. In this talk, we see forms of missingness in data collected in a clinic for treatment planning and in data collected with an app for monitoring. Then, we discuss methods that iteratively build up a minimal feature subspace for treatment outcome prediction, and neighbourhood-based methods that build up a minimal data space for patient condition monitoring. The methods have been applied on clinical data of tinnitus patients and on mhealth data of patients with tinnitus or diabetes. The results demonstrate that small subsets of features are often adequate for prediction.”

“Temporal mining on systematically sparse medical data” will be presented July 22, 15:30, room B012. The talk will be moderated by João Moreira (DEI).

Myra Spiliopoulou is Professor of Business Information Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany. Her main research is on mining temporal complex data and extracting predictive patterns from evolving objects. One of the core application areas for her research, and a constant source of inspiration is health: her work encompasses methods and findings from observational medical data, from clinical studies, from digital health solutions, and from experiments on understanding the process of human and animal learning. She is involved as (senior) reviewer in major conferences on data mining and knowledge discovery, as Action Editor in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal of Springer Nature, as Special Editor for survey papers in the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (JDSA) and as Editorial Board Member for the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Journal. In 2016, 2019 and 2023, she served as a PC Chair of the IEEE Int. Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS). In 2024, she serves as senior reviewer for KDD 2024. She also serves as one of the Journal Track Chairs for ECML PKDD 2024, responsible for the submissions to the Machine Learning Journal. In May 2023, she received the Distinguished Service Contributions Award for the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).

“The talk will discuss Concept Relevance Propagation (CRP) and Prototypical Concept Explanation (PCX), two next-generation Explainable AI (XAI) methods, which explain individual predictions of an AI model in terms of human understandable concepts and allow to systematically investigate global model behaviors. Furthermore, the talk will present the potential of these novel methods to provide deep insights into the representation and reasoning processes of LLMs.”

 “Towards Next-Generation Explainable AI” will be presented July 16, 15:50, in room B032, moderated by Prof. Henrique Lopes Cardoso (DEI).

“Wojciech Samek is a professor in the EECS Department at the Technical University of Berlin and is jointly heading the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), Berlin, Germany. He is Fellow at the BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundation of Learning and Data as well as the ELLIS Unit Berlin. He has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and has received multiple best paper awards for his work in the field of XAI.”

What is the point of play and games when the climate catastrophe is looming? In this talk the speaker will explore the interconnections between the culture that led us to the climate catastrophe, and will reflect about the future of play and games after the end of a world.

“Games and Play and the End of a World” will be presented June 20, at 10:30, in room B011, moderated by Prof. António Coelho (DEI).

“Miguel Sicart is a Professor at the Center for Digital Play (digitalplay.itu.dk), IT University of Copenhagen. He has been researching games and play since the early 2000s, focusing on the intersection of games, ethics, and play. He is the author of, among others, Play Matters and Playing Software (The MIT Press, 2014, 2023). He is currently working on ridiculous software and the poetics of roguelikes.”

“Natural language inference (recognizing textual entailment task in the past) belongs to the most prominent tasks in current NLP, it is a keystone of natural language understanding. NLI can be stated as a classification task whether a given hypothesis can be inferred from a  given premise. In this talk, we are going introduce a large variety of tasks accompanied by illustrative examples and review corresponding state-of-the-art results. This talk may serve as starting point for anyone who want to apply new approaches and models to investigate these not so much known tasks (as well as apply them in downstream applications).”

“A Survey of Tasks Derived from or Related to Natural Language Inference” will be presented February 23, at 17:00, room I 025, moderated by Prof. Carlos Soares (DEI).

“Martin Víta graduated at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague in the field of discrete models and algorithms. Later, he obtained PhD degree at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno in natural language processing. Currently, he serves as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, Prague University of Economics and Business where he teaches mathematics and text analytics. He is also a researcher at Czech Academy of Sciences where he focuses in ML and text mining topics.”

When building complex systems, it can be all too easy to primarily focus on features and overlook software qualities, specifically those related to the architecture. Pressure to adapt to and shape the market requires organizations to add new features, accommodate new interactions, and have new teams work on adapting the software. Some believe that by simply following Agile practices—starting as fast as possible, keeping code clean, and having lots of tests—a good architecture will magically emerge. While an architecture will emerge, if there is not enough attention paid to the architecture and the code, technical debt, and design problems will creep in until it becomes muddy, making it hard to deliver new features quickly and reliably. Sometimes a straightforward software architecture that starts out small when communication is easy can support guided, incremental architectural changes and can gradually evolve with its environment, remaining fit for its purposes. Other times it is not so simple: the initial software architecture can be poorly suited for supporting required changes, or the accumulation of suboptimal architectural decisions (also known as architectural technical debt) can be too severe. It is essential to have a sustainable architecture that can evolve through the project life-cycle. Sustainable architecture requires ongoing attention, especially when there are evolving priorities, a lot of technical risks, and many dependencies. This will be a roundtable spirited discussion by invited panelists and participants discussing architectural considerations for designing systems, specifically on architectures for building excellent software.

“Architectures for building Extraordinary Software” will be presented February 7, 15:00-16:15, in room B033 and will be moderated by Carlos Duarte (DEI).

Short Bios:

 “Joseph (Joe) Yoder is a research collaborator at IME/USP, president and a fellow of the Hillside Group (www.hillside.net), a group dedicated to improving the quality of software development, and is a founder and principal of the Refactory (www.refactory.com), a company focused on software architecture, design, implementation, consulting, and mentoring on all facets of software development. He is best known as an author of the “Big Ball of Mud” pattern, illuminating fallacies in software architecture. Joe is also a co-author of “A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game”; which includes 94 patterns and 2 pattern languages about getting the most out of Scrum. Joe teaches and mentors developers on agile and lean practices, architecture, flexible systems, clean design, patterns, refactoring, and testing. Joe has presented many tutorials and talks, arranged workshops, given keynotes, and helped organize leading international agile and technical conferences. Joe believes software is still too hard to change and wants to do something about this. Recently, the ACM recognized Joe as a Distinguished Member in the category of “Outstanding Engineering Contributions to Computing” and the Hillside Group awarded Joe as a Hillside Fellow.”

“Graziela Simone Tonin has worked in the technology market for over 19 years in Brazil and abroad. Ph.D. in Computer Science. She received the US IBM World Award and the Women of Value Award. Graziela mentors and worked in several national entrepreneurship and innovation programs, such as Innovativa Brasil. Ambassador of Clube Bora Fazer, an entrepreneurship community. She works as a professor at Insper Institution, a Teacher of Executive Education and customized programs for C-Levels, and also is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering program. She led the Women In Tech Project and co-leader in the Gender Front of the Diversity Committee at Insper. Graziela leads volunteer projects throughout Brazil through the Grupo Mulheres do Brasil. In addition, she is part of a worldwide research project that analyzes initiatives aimed at women in software engineering.”

“Neil Harrison is a professor and former head of the Department of Computer Science at Utah Valley University, USA. He led the department for seven years, in which he directed the creation of three new baccalaureate programs and two new emphases within the BS in Computer Science program. He oversaw the rollout of a graduate program. He led the accreditation of the software engineering program, and the re-accreditation of the computer science program.

Dr. Harrison is the author of over twenty-five widely cited articles in the areas of software patterns, software architecture, and software engineering and organizations. He is the co-author of the book, “Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.” He has been a leader in the software patterns movement and is the namesake of the “Neil Harrison Shepherding Award”, which is awarded annually at patterns conferences. He has been an invited speaker and keynote speaker at conferences, including Agile Portugal. Dr. Harrison holds a PhD from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), an MS from Purdue University and a BS from Brigham Young University, all in computer science.”

“Filipe Correia is a professor of Software Engineering at the University of Porto / FEUP and a researcher at INESC TEC. In the past, he played other roles, from software architect to coach, to developer.His research interests tend to revolve around software design, architecture, agility, and DevOps. In the last few years, his work has been focusing on microservice-based architectures and the highly maintainable and flexible systems they allow to create, and on strategies to improve the Developer Experience across the software development lifecycle. You can find more information on Filipe’s website.”

“Carlos Duarte (Moderador) is a software engineer and researcher at INESC TEC. He is also a PhD student at FEUP’s ProDEI, and an invited assistant lecturer at FEUP (software engineering course). He previously worked at DevScope. His research interests revolve around software architecture, more specifically architectural erosion and evolution. Currently, he is researching the relationship between architectural erosion and technical debt, and how software visualization techniques can help identify and prevent erosion from affecting software systems. His Master thesis focused on improving the refactoring experience in IDEs, allowing the creation of custom refactoring tools by describing detection and transformation patterns using a DSL. The thesis won the 2022 Vestas award for best Master thesis in informatics engineering at FEUP.”

“This talk proposes to have a conversation about the trends in conceptual modelling languages used for the design and analysis of real-time and embedded systems in the context of the ever changing industrial environments but never changing business demands”.

“Let’s discuss about Models and Languages for embedded systems in Industry 4.0” will be presented February 1, at 11:00, room I-105, moderated by Prof. Gil Gonçalves (DEI).

Short Bio:
“Julio Medina is Associate Professor at Universidad de Cantabria, Spain. His main research areas include the modeling of real-time distributed systems for schedulability analysis and dependability, standards and languages for the representation of such models, and their usage for modular and component-based development software engineering strategies. He contributes to the OMG in the standardization of languages like SysML, MARTE, UCM, UTP, among others.”

“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.”

“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.

By the author:

“To support both Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing workloads, new processors have introduced hardware acceleration for matrix multiplication. Examples include the Matrix Multiply Assist (MMA) in the IBM POWER10 and the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) in the Intel Sapphire Rapids microarchitecture for Xeon servers. This talk describes how, in a collaboration between the University of Alberta, the University of Campinas, and IBM, we developed compiler technology to support such accelerators. An initial solution delivered a robust pattern matcher for General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) computation operating at the LLVM intermediate representation that allows the replacement of the computation with an invocation of a high-performance library. A later solution delivered a compiler-only path for code generation by adapting the layered approach used in numerical libraries to the compiler code-generation process. Finally, a modular and automated general strategy for data packing, which can be applied to multiple algorithms, was developed for the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLRI).”

“From Numerical Libraries, To Efficient Matrix Multiplication Compiler-Only Code Generation, To a Modular Automated General Packing Data Transformation” will be presented July 17, at 11:30, room B006, moderated by Prof. Pedro Diniz (DEI) and co-organized by DEI Talks and the University of Porto – Faculty of Engineering ACM Student Chapter.

“J. Nelson Amaral, a Computing Science professor at the University of Alberta with a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin, has published in optimizing compilers and high-performance computing. Scientific community service includes general chair for the 23rd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques in 2014, for the International Conference on Performance Engineering in 2020, and for the International Conference on Parallel Processing in 2020. Accolades include ACM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Faculty Fellow, IBM Faculty Awards, IBM CAS “Team of the Year”, awards for excellence in teaching, the University of Alberta Graduate-Student Association Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision, an University of Alberta Award for Outstanding Mentorship in Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities, and a recent University of Alberta 2020 COVID-19 Remote Teaching Award.”

https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/