The lecture “Design and AI Innovation” will be presented on October 24, at 11:00, in INESC TEC’s Auditorium B.

Abstract:

“As early as 2011, Marc Andreesen identified that the world was facing a broad technological and economic shift in which software companies were poised to command much of the world’s economy. Now, 13 years later, the emergence of computing, data, and AI have impacted all industries. In this talk, I will examine how AI is changing my discipline, design, but also how design is changing AI. I will reflect on these ideas along with the emergence and rapid growth of generative AI and Large Language Models. I will identify new spaces for product innovation that utilize the most fruitful elements of the practice of design and AI as a design material.”

 Bio:

Jodi Forlizzi is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the School of Computer Science. Jodi has advocated for design research in all forms, mentoring peers, colleagues, and students in its structure and execution, and today it is an important part of the HCI community. Jodi studies the ethical impacts of human interaction with AI systems in front-line service industries including healthcare and hospitality. She also develops methods and tools to ensure that product developers can mitigate ethical harms and bias during product development. Jodi is an ACM SIGCHI Fellow and recently received its Lifetime Research Award. She recently testified to the US Senate in one an AI Innovation Briefing and is a central advisor to the AFL-CIO Tech Institute regarding technology research.

“Historically, the run time of implicit mechanics has been dominated by the time required to solve a large sparse linear system. The default solver is a multifrontal sparse matrix factorization, which will reliably solve ill conditioned, indefinite problems. The multifrontal method turns a sparse matrix factorization into a directed acyclic graph of smaller, dense “frontal” matrix factorizations, and these can be accelerated using Graphics Processing Units. As the number of processors used grows into the thousands, reordering the sparse matrix to reduce the storage and operations required to factor it, is the emerging computational bottleneck. Reordering is NP-complete, and in computational mechanics the preferred heuristic is nested dissection, i.e., recursive graph partitioning. Finding a balanced min cut is NP-hard, and classical codes such as ParMetis have limited parallel scaling. This talk will also discuss on-going work to explore a new generation of specialized devices for solving optimization problems. These include the D-Wave adiabatic quantum annealer, so called Silicon annealers produced by Fujitsu and Toshiba, the LightSolver Laser Processing Unit. The Digital Annealer is a dedicated chip that uses non-von Neumann architecture to minimize data movement in solving combinatorial optimization problems.”

“Accelerating Implicit Mechanics” will be presented October 10, at 15:00, room Vasco Sá (L119) – Sala de Atos do Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica.

“Dr. Robert F. Lucas received his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1980, 1983, and 1988 respectively. He is currently an Ansys Fellow where he is responsible for the default multifrontal linear solver used in LS-DYNA and MAPDL. Previously, he was the Operational Director of the University of Southern California (USC) – Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center. Before joining USC, he was the Head of the High-Performance Computing Research Department in the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and before that the Deputy Director of DARPA’s Information Technology Office. From 1988 to 1998 he was a member of the research staff of the Institute for Defense Analyses’s Center for Computing Sciences. From 1979 to 1984 he was a member of the Technical Staff of the Hughes Aircraft Company.”

Note: This talk is preceded by another talk, geared towards Mechanical Engineering and focusing on the use of ANSYS/LS-DYNA for modeling and simulation, by the same speaker at 14:00, in the same room, entitled “An Industrial Grand Challenge”. You are all welcome.

“Machine learning (ML), particularly deep learning, is being used everywhere. However, not always is used well, ethically and scientifically. In this talk we first do a deep dive in the limitations of supervised ML and data, its key component. We cover small data, datification, bias, predictive optimization issues, evaluating success instead of harm, and pseudoscience, among other problems.  The last part is about our own limitations using ML, including different types of human incompetence: cognitive biases, unethical applications, no administrative competence, copyright violations, misinformation, and the impact on mental health. In the final part we discuss regulation on the use of AI and responsible AI principles, that can mitigate the problems outlined above.”

“The Limitations of Data, Machine Learning & Us” will be presented September 10, at 11:00, room B032. Free entry but registration required here.

“Ricardo Baeza-Yates is the Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University, as well as part-time professor at the Dept. of Computer Science of University of Chile. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected for the ACM Council. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his areas of expertise are responsible AI, web search and data mining plus data science and algorithms in general.”

“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.”