Category: Highlights

Ana Paiva, INESC-ID researcher at the Interactive Intelligent Systems (IIS) Group has recently been invited as keynote speaker in two major conferences, UMAP 2018 (User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization) and AAMAS 2018 (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) which took place, respectively, in Singapore and Stockholm.

The presentations are the results of her most recent work that focuses on the affective and social elements present in the interactions between humans and robots more specifically on how to engineer natural and positive relationships with social robots.

Both conferences are of high relevance in their fields with some of the most prestigious researchers: AAMAS  in the area of agents and multiagent systems and UMAP on user modelling, adaptation and personalization.

Spearheaded by INESC-ID Researchers Joaquim Jorge and Alfredo Ferreira from VIMMI GROUP,  SMI 2018 (Shape Modeling International Symposium) took place early June in Lisbon and successfully reached the goals of gathering a wide community of researchers, developers, practitioners, students in academia and industry, towards a new mathematical theories and novel computational techniques for modeling, simulating, and processing digital shape representations.

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program,  launched almost 12 years ago, is entering a new phase and aims to create a new generation of “innovative cities” in Portugal with 20 millions euros available until 2023.

Rodrigo Rodrigues, one of the two new programme directors and researcher at INESC-ID, talks about  funding and expectations for the next five years.

https://www.dn.pt/vida-e-futuro/interior/uma-dificuldade-nas-nossas-universidades-e-a-falta-de-financiamento-9574558.html

The annual meeting of Portuguese researchers Ciência 2018 was held July 2nd, 3rd and 4th, at the Lisbon Congress Center.

This meeting  aims promoting a broad debate on the main topics and challenges of the scientific agenda beyond the world of research. The meeting main goal, therefore, is to stimulate not just the participation but also the interaction between researchers, the business sector and the general public.

INESC-ID researchers Mário Silva,  Susana Vinga, Pedro Carvalho and João Pedro Barreto  made their communications in the areas of technology in healthcare, renewable energies and smart cities.

Isabel Trancoso was the guest speakers on Session 4: “New frontiers of the digital age in Europe and the world – Novas fronteiras da era digital na Europa e no Mundo” .

João Madeiras Pereira, Mário Rui Gomes, Alfredo Ferreira, researchers at INESC-ID,  António Fernando Coelho (FEUP) and João Brisson (IST),  published in May 2018, the book “Introdução à Computação Gráfica “.

This work presents the bases and concepts that allow to understand and apply the various phases of the development of a graphic application. By linking the underlying theoretical principles to Computer Graphics with practical and concrete situations, this book is not only a theoretical reference for university content, but also a practical guide for professionals interested in improving the efficiency and quality of their subjects.

Published by FCA, the book is available on Amazon, FCA and Wook.

https://www.fca.pt/en/catalogue/computer-science/design-multimedia/introducao-a-computacao-grafica/

The Joint TPDL / Dublin Core 2018 Doctoral Consortium, is a collaboration of the TPDL 2018 and Dublin Core 2018 conferences, which will be held in Porto, Portugal, on September 10th 2018.

The purpose of JTDC 2018 is to provide to doctoral students a friendly and lively atmosphere for sharing research ideas and experience with peers, and receive constructive feedback from senior researchers and scholars.JTDC 2018 follows an important TPDL tradition that aims at giving next generation researchers a chance to present their work to the digital libraries community, this year also extended to the Dublin Core community!

All accepted submissions will be invited for publication in a special issue of the Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries:http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/current

Important Dates:

• June 01, 2018 – Submissions deadline (submissions by email to jlb@tecnico.ulisboa.pt)
• June 08, 2018 – Notifications of acceptance
• June 22, 2018 – Camera-ready short-papers
• September, 10, 2018 – JTDC 2018 workshop session

Luís Cruz and Rui Abreu, both researchers at INESC-ID (in the Information and Decision Support Systems research area) won a Best Paper Award at the XXI Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering SET Track, with the paper “Using Automatic Refactoring to Improve Energy Efficiency of Android Apps”.

The winning article consider that  the ever-growing popularity of mobile phones has brought additional challenges to the software development life-cycle. Mobile applications (apps, for short) ought to provide the same set of features as conventional software, with limited resources: such as, limited processing capabilities, storage, screen and, not less important, power source. Although energy efficiency is a valuable requirement, developers often lack knowledge of best practices. In this paper, we study whether or not automatic refactoring can aid developers ship energy efficient apps. We leverage a tool, Leafactor, with five energy code smells that tend to go unnoticed. We use Leafactor to analyze code smells in 140 free and open source apps. As a result, we detected and fixed code smells in 45 apps, from which 40% have successfully merged our changes into the official repository.

The main objective of this leading research forum on Software Engineering (SE) in Ibero-America is to promote high-quality scientific research in Ibero-American countries, thus supporting the researchers in this community in publishing and discussing their work. In addition, the conference fosters collaboration and cross-fertilization among software academics, students, and industry.

The Conference took place at  Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, between 23rd and 27th of April.

The paper titled “Software-Defined Data Services: Interoperable and Network-Aware Big Data Executions”, received a Best Paper Award at IEEE SDS 2018 (International Conference on Software Defined Systems). Pradeeban Kathiravelu and  Luís Veiga, researchers at INESC-ID,  co-wrote the paper with Peter Van Roy (UCLouvain).

In this paper,  authors present Software-Defined Data Services (SDDS), extending the data services with the SDN paradigm. They present the design of an SDDS orchestration framework for network-aware big data executions in data centers, then evaluate the performance of SDDS through microbenchmarks on a prototype implementation. By extending SDN beyond data centers, they can deploy SDDS in broader execution environments.

The objective of SDS 2018 is to provide a forum for scientists, engineers, and researchers to discuss and exchange new ideas, novel results and experience on all aspects of Software Defined Systems.

The IEEE SDS 2018 was held in Barcelona between 23rd and 26th of April.