Category: News

Our Human Language Technologies researcher Luísa Coheur recently took part in a roundtable discussion at Pavilhão do Conhecimento for the International Day of Mathematics, celebrated each year on Pi Day: March 14 — i.e., 3.14.

Accompanied by colleagues from ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics & Management, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa and University of Coimbra, Professor Coheur spoke about the maths present in our everyday lives and its role in the computations behind language processing.

More details on this year’s celebrations at Pavilhão do Conhecimento can be found here.

Ana Paiva has been featured in Ciência Viva’s Mulheres na Ciência (“Women in Science”).

Now in its fourth edition, the 2023 volume of Mulheres na Ciência gathers 101 portraits of researchers across fields of knowledge in a beautifully edited book featuring photographic portraits by Alípio Padilha, Ana Brígida, Diana Tinoco and Rodrigo Cabrita. This is not the first time that an INESC-ID researcher is featured in Mulheres na Ciência. The book’s third edition, in 2021, listed Inês Lynce, INESC-ID’s president, amongst its 101 luminaries.

A researcher within the INESC-ID Artificial Intelligence for People and Society Research Area and Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (as well as the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute), in Mulheres na Ciência Professor Paiva highlights how her early passions drove her to a career in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what she aspires AI’s societal contributions to be.

Mulheres na Ciência is published to mark International Women’s Day. You can also (re)watch the book’s launch ceremony, featuring rountables and an intervention by Elvira Fortunato, the current Portuguese Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education.

Arlindo Oliveira — INESC-D researcher, President of INESC and Distinguished Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico — participated in a radio program for the Portuguese radio network Rádio Renascença where he spoke on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and one of its newest outputs, ChatGPT.

An AI-based chatbot developed by the American AI research laboratory OpenAI, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its sophisticated query and text-writing capabilities, the latter of which have raised a wave of ethical questions on authorship and the rights and wrongs of the potentials of AI.

Have a listen to Professor Oliveira’s answers on the computational nature of ChatGPT and its reach here.

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program (CMU Portugal), supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), will have an OPEN CALL between February 15 and March 31, 2023, under the “Affiliated Ph.D. Programs”. This initiative is addressed to students who wish to study at a Portuguese University with a research period at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) up to one year.

The 12 scholarships available for the 2023/2024 academic year will be granted in the following CMU Portugal selected research areas:

• Computer Science,
• Electrical and Computer Engineering,
• Engineering and Public Policy,
• Human-Computer Interaction,
• Language Technologies,
• Robotics,
• Software Engineering.

The grants are available on a competitive basis and will fully support the tuition fees at Portuguese universities, plus provide a monthly stipend for up to 4 years. Financial support will also be guaranteed during the research period at CMU. After the successful Ph.D. conclusion, the candidates will be awarded their Ph.D. degree by the Portuguese Host Institution.

To apply please visit the “Admissions and Scholarships” page on the CMU Portugal Program, where you will find the online form to submit your application.

The admissions period will be open from February 15 at 12:00 (GMT) to March 31, 2023 at 12:00 (GMT).

The CMU Portugal Coordination Office will host on March 2nd at 2pm (Lisbon time) an Info Session to clarify all doubts about this Call. To attend please fill in this online form.

Inês Lynce, National Director at Portugal of the CMU Portugal Program, is the current President of INESC-ID.

The February 2023 issue of NEWS-ID — the INESC-ID Newsletter — is out! You can read it here.

Containing recent news from our researchers and their projects, open positions and some extra bits of content, our monthly newsletter is a great one-stop spot for great content on computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

You can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.

Ana Paiva has been elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

A researcher within the INESC-ID Artificial Intelligence for People and Society Research Area and Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (as well as the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute), Professor Paiva is one of eleven distinguished researchers honoured with the 2023 AAAI Fellowship, joining an international select list that ranges from Northwestern, Duke and Tufts to Tsinghua University and the University of Alberta.

AAAI Fellows are selected by the Fellows Selection Committee from nominations made by the AAAI membership, and invariably, according to the very nature of this honour, are researchers who have “achieved unusual distinction in the field.” On bestowing Professor Paiva with this distinction, AAAI framed the Professor’s induction “For contributions to the development of embodied agents with social intelligence and their applications.”

AAAI has been a bastion for the advancement of artificial intelligence since its founding in 1979, promoting research in AI while upholding its ethical and responsible uses. Aside from doing important work on the public understanding of artificial intelligence, AAAI has elected its Fellows since 1990, recognizing researchers “who have made significant, sustained contributions — usually over at least a ten-year period — to the field of artificial intelligence.”

AAAI will celebrate the newly elected Fellows at the awards ceremony during AAAI-23, the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, taking place 7-14 February 2023 in Washington, D.C., USA.

We congratulate Professor Paiva for this well-deserved honor!

The 2023 INESC Brussels HUB Winter Meeting took place over the past two days, 30 and 31 January 2023, at Instituto Superior Técnico.

Co-organized with Science Business (a network that strives to bridge industry, research and policy nationally and at the EU level), the 2023 HUB Winter Meeting covered a wide range of funding and policy touchstones vital for researchers from the five INESC institutions: from the opportunities brought by the Digital Europe Programme to best practices for success in Horizon Europe.

Simon Pickard, Science Business Network Director, was present at the meeting and spoke on the plethora of services and opportunities from this network available to INESC researchers, and what a closer relationship with Science Business might mean for our community.

The biannual HUB meetings are also an invaluable chance for its Management Committee — including its Directors and Policy and Operations Board members — to meet and discuss the goings-on and future of the HUB’s vital work in Brussels, positioning INESC as a European reference through the societal and economic impact its research and innovation work entails.

A detailed programme for this year’s Winter meeting is available at the INESC Brussels Hub website.

Nuno Lopes is one of the winners of the 2022 HiPEAC Tech Transfer Awards.

Lopes — a Researcher at the High Performance Computing Architectures and Systems (HPCAS) Research Area — was awarded this distinction for Alive2, an automatic compiler verification tool. On winning the award, Lopes commented “The effort that goes from publishing a scientific article to putting a tool in the hands of engineers so that they can use it on a daily basis is huge. We made that effort with our work in the area of ​​compiler verification [by developing] the first and only translation validation tool for an industrial compiler (LLVM).”

Now on its eighth edition, the HiPEAC Technology Transfer Awards seek to celebrate disruptive technologies reaching the market. “Obviously, it is very nice to receive this award in recognition of our scientific work and technology transfer. LLVM itself is used by dozens of companies to compile C++, Swift, Rust, etc. We all use code produced by LLVM on a daily basis without even knowing it. Alive2 (our tool) is also used by most companies that develop LLVM. We are very happy to be able to contribute to making the software ecosystem a little more secure,” Lopes concluded.

A major European network for computer architecture and compilation researchers, HiPEAC (High Performance Embedded Architecture and Compilation) is currently the biggest of its kind in Europe, counting with over 2,000 specialists amongst its ranks.

The January 2023 issue of NEWS-ID — the INESC-ID Newsletter — is out! You can read it here.

Containing recent news from our researchers and their projects, open positions and some extra bits of content, our monthly newsletter is a great one-stop spot for great content on computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

You can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.