Category Archives: Uncategorized

Creativity Talks | “Future Foods – Foods for the Future” by Prof. António Vicente (U.Minho)

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The 18th Creativity Talk will be given by António Vicente, Professor at the University of Minho and a nationally and internationally renowned researcher for his immense scientific contribution in the fields of Biotechnology and Food Bioengineering. In the lecture “Future Foods – Foods for the Future”, we will discover how trends such as clean label, functional foods and alternative proteins, combined with technologies such as artificial intelligence and cellular agriculture, are transforming the way we eat and produce food.
An excellent opportunity to understand how we can improve the health of people and the planet, and be part of this change!

Online broadcast on 5 March at 17:30 on the Creativity Talks YouTube channel.

The moderator will be Prof. Cláudia Gomes Silva, from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering of the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto.

About the Talk:

“There has been a significant shift in the consumers’ preferences, acceptance and needs in the last ten years, which has been particularly strong in the last five years. The “top trends” are: Clean claims (e.g. preservatives free); Clean labels; Lifestyle enhancers (e.g. high energetic foods); Functional foods (e.g. with nutraceutical function); Minimally processed foods (e.g. using natural ingredients as much as possible) and the so-called “Green foods” (making use of the benefits of plants – e.g. replacement of animal protein by other protein sources).
Along with this shift, there are two major problems related with the food we eat: I) ensuring people’s food, health and wellbeing, and II) ensuring the health of our planet.
When answering to problem I), the future food needs to tackle malnutrition, reduce calorie density, reduce food digestibility, increase micronutrient bioavailability, control gut health, allow personalized nutrition and provide appropriate food for the elderly.
In order to answer to problem II), we need to make use a set of tools for the future: molecular biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robots & sensors, the so-called “Cellular agriculture” and search for alternative protein sources.
In this talk the latest developments made by our research group towards tackling some of these challenges are going to be presented, together with our vision on what still needs to be done and which partnerships are important to lead us to the future of foods, producing foods for the future.”

About the Speaker:

António Vicente graduated in Food Engineering from the Portuguese Catholic University in 1994, received his PhD in 1998 and did his Habilitation in 2010 in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Minho. He is Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, which he directed prior to his subsequent appointments as vice-Dean of the School of Engineering and Director of the Doctoral College of that University. Currently he serves as Dean of the School of Engineering.
António Vicente is a Senior Member and Specialist in Food Engineering by the Portuguese Engineers Association.
As a researcher, he has dedicated his work to the development of micro and nanotechnological systems for application in the Agrofood sector, to the evaluation of their behavior in dynamic in vitro digestion systems, and to the study of the influence of the application of electric fields in cells and biomolecules.
He has published >380 articles in international ISI WOS journals, >30 chapters in books of international circulation, >400 papers in congresses, 5 patents and edited 5 scientific books, yielding an h-index of 95. He won the Food and Nutrition Awards in 2015 and 2017 in the R&D category. During six years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023) he was distinguished as Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics and in the last five years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024) he has integrated the list of the top 2 % most cited researchers according to the list published by Stanford University. In 2021 he was awarded the Scientific Merit Award from the University of Minho and the Diploma of Scientific Merit from the School of Engineering of the University of Minho yearly since 2021.

PhD Defense in Informatics Engineering “A Live Environment for Continuous Software Inspection and Refactoring”

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Candidate:
Sara Filipa Couto Fernandes

Date, Time and Location:
May the 5th, at 14:00, in Sala de Atos of the Faculdade de Engenharia of Universidade do Porto

President of the Jury:
Rui Filipe Lima Maranhão de Abreu, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto

Members:
Fabio Palomba, PhD, Assistant Professor of Software Engineering (SeSa) Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Salerno, Itália;
António Manuel Ferreira Rito da Silva, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa;
João Carlos Pascoal Faria, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto;
Ademar Manuel Teixeira de Aguiar, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto (Supervisor).

This thesis was co-supervised by André Monteiro de Oliveira Restivo, PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the Faculdade de Engenharia of Universidade do Porto.

Abstract:

“Writing software is hard; reviewing, changing, or adapting old software is even more challenging. A bad design can quickly lead to rotting software, with each modification heading to a rigid and fragile codebase. Evolution may become extremely costly if we do not refactor code at the right time. Often, developers choose to refactor too late when most symptoms are already impossible to ignore. They check their source code, looking for code smells and the most appropriate refactorings, trying to bring sanity into their design. They then realize they need help from specialized, overly complex, and hard to use tools. If only they tended to refactor their code sooner, they might have gained more peace of mind earlier. In this process of writing and evolving code, changing hats from coding to refactoring should be done often, if not constantly. We argued that a live refactoring environment, which presents refactorings in real-time, would help developers be continually aware of possible refactoring opportunities, making it easier to apply them earlier and faster when the codebase is still under control. We developed such a live environment by considering and evaluating in real-time several code-quality metrics, detecting smells, providing feedback, and presenting possible refactoring candidates unobtrusively and elegantly to the developers — all without leaving the comfort of their development environment. By enhancing an existing IDE with live refactoring capabilities, we showed that we can help developers understand, adapt, and maintain their systems in a more controlled and prompt fashion, allowing them to produce better code faster. The following contributions resulted from this work: (i) an extensive analysis of the state-of-theart on the main topics of our project, (ii) a live refactoring environment capable of continuously inspecting code to detect, suggest, and apply refactorings, (iii) an empirical validation using different approaches that helped us gathering data that allowed to confirm our hypothesis, and (iv) a set of scientific publications validating all the work done. While our work presents significant contributions, there are areas for further exploration. We could enhance specific aspects of our Live Refactoring Environment, including broader refactoring support or reducing processing time for complex code. Moreover, future work could also involve predicting the impact of refactorings on quality metrics and enhancing usability, including tests with color-blind users.”

Workshop “Design for Health and Wellness”

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Dates:  25th – 29th June, 09:30 – 12:30 & 14:30 – 16:30

Design is no longer the result of a flash of inspiration, exceptions notwithstanding. To respond to the real needs of people, the designer combines intuition and technical skill to empathize with users, navigate ambiguity, and make users’ latent needs tangible. To do that, the designer has to consider aspects such as functionality, aesthetics, human factors, world views, social implications, production, sustainability, and product life cycles.

This workshop provides an opportunity to answer this call. We will focus on Health and Wellness because of its deep connection with both the functional and emotional needs of users, but the tools explored should be generally applicable. Through a study of the human-centered process, we will develop methods to realize a week-long design project framed by user needs and their context. This will include an immersive experience of lectures, hands-on workshops, fieldwork and, potentially, field-trips. Although the class projects will focus on design solutions for Health and Wellness, at the end of the workshop participants should be able to apply user research methods, ideation, rapid prototyping, product design methods, interaction design, and storytelling to solve real world design problems.

José Colucci is the Director of Research & Development of the Design Institute for Health (DIH). Before joining the DIH, José was a Sr. Director and Associated Partner at IDEO, where he worked for 16 years, Vice-President of Research & Development of ITI, developer of high-resolution, pen-based computer interfaces in Canada; and prior to that, he was the General Manager of the Medical Engineering Division at FUNBEC – Brazil’s largest manufacturer of medical electronics for cardiology.

José has a BS in mechanical engineering, an MS in Industrial Design and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a guest lecturer at Harvard, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Olin School of Engineering. Currently he also has a part-time teaching appointment at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Tickets: Students: 25€;  Academia: 100€; Other professionals: 150€.

More info and registration: https://mil.up.pt/summerinstitute/design-for-health-and-wellness/

Huub job vacancies

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HUUB is a startup that manages the supply chain of international brands, which has customers in Germany, Iceland and the United Kingdom. We focus on optimizing physical flow from an end-to-end perspective. We operate from the supplier, whether in Portugal, China or Turkey (production centers we work with at the moment), and the customer of the brand, be it a retailer (big like the department stores of the Selfridges chain, for example, or small chains of boutiques) or end customer (we also set up ecommerce operations, whether from a physical or technological point of view). We currently ship orders to more than 50 countries. All the stock of these brands goes through our warehouse here in Porto. In addition to this physical operation component, we also have a technological component. We are currently in a final stage of testing our product, a platform that will allow brands to manage their business also from an end-to-end perspective, integrating the different sales channels, allowing visibility over the entire chain and collaboration between the main entities that enter the business process: brand, HUUB, supplier and customer.

More information on Huub: link.

Some of our current clients: Noe & Zoe,  Iglo + Indi, Marques e Almeida e Filius Feez.

We are currently recruiting in the technology area.

Oportunity requirements