Category: News

The International Internship Program at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, is back. A new call for 2022 is open.

The internship activities should extend for a period of 2 to 6 months. A scholarship of about 171,000 yen per month is granted. However, the costs to travel to Tokyo are not included.

Candidates should contact Prof. Rui Prada (rui.prada@gaips.inesc-id.pt) and send him the application form, a detailed CV (grades included), and a motivation letter by October 21st. Candidates need to contact potential supervisors at NII by email, for the topics they want, beforehand. This email exchange is needed in the application process as well.

You can find more information, including the list of topics and the application form on this webpage.

Both MSc and PhD students are eligible.

The September 2022 issue of NEWS-ID — the INESC-ID Newsletter — is out!

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.

The 2022 INESC-ID Annual Meeting took place yesterday, 12 September 2022, in the beautiful and inspiring setting of Sociedade Portuguesa de Geografia — a not coincidental space that has witnessed many a discussion of exploration and discovery.

During a day packed full of activities, INESC-ID researchers reviewed and discussed the inner workings of the institute, all the great things that have been accomplished and many of the exciting projects about to start and soon to come across the multitudinous Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering scopes of the institute.

Reviews of the institute’s main achievements by the Board of Directors and the Board of the Scientific Council, a round-table on the research work carried out under the four INESC-ID Thematic Lines, a session on the work of the support offices and a discussion on the INESC system were complemented by an extraordinary talk by this year’s invited speaker: Mónica Bettencourt-Dias, the Director of Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência. In her talk “Best practices at IGC” Bettencourt-Dias shared invaluable insight into the IGC’s modus operandi and values, its ethos and the multitude of programs that stimulate its great science and the world-renowned scientific training of its researchers.

Such a great day of sharing ideas and research, and such a great year of exciting technology!

Arlindo Oliveira — Distinguished Professor at Técnico, INESC-D researcher and Coordinator of the institute’s Life and Health Technology Thematic Line, as well as President of INESC — has written on the “Vencer o Adamastor” Award for the newspaper Público.

In his piece, published on 05 September, Professor Oliveira discusses how INESC and Público decided to create this award and recognize innovative work by young scientists, developed in Portugal, in the fields of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), including electrical engineering and computation.

Vencer o Adamastor will be awarded to the candidate who demonstrates not only a clear ability to produce high quality scientific work, a vision for future scientific and technological developments in their respective area of ​​research, as well as the potential to make a significant contribution to the future scientific development of the country, as a researcher, a scientist, a teacher and a future leader.

More details on the award are available here and the its regulations here, with an application deadline of 31 October 2022.

INESC-ID has been awarded $300K by the USA Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to investigate human-robot interactions. The funded project — “Trustworthy Ad Hoc Teamwork” — officially starts today, 01 September 2022, and will be funded for two years.

This project is led at INESC-ID by Alberto Sardinha, researcher in the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society Research Area and Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico. Alberto explained: “Trust is an essential element for effective cooperation between humans and robots. However, to the best of our knowledge, no research work has analyzed trust between robots and humans within ad hoc teamwork scenarios or created tailored algorithms for trustworthy ad hoc teamwork.”

“Trustworthy Ad Hoc Teamwork” investigates how to create an autonomous agent that can efficiently and robustly collaborate with previously unknown teammates. The project plans to achieve this through novel ad hoc teamwork algorithms to build trust within human-robot interactions and by addressing a vital question: How can a robot learn to cooperate with unknown human teammates in complex domains while fostering trust development, whereby the robot does not have any pre-coordination protocol and must learn to cooperate on the fly?

By implementing a combination of sensors (networked within the environment – e.g., microphones, wall-mounted cameras – and the robot’s on-board sensors – e.g., lasers, cameras, RFID readers), an ad hoc robot (containing a combination of perception, decision and execution modules) and output modalities (different components or hardware that support the robot’s behavior or actions), this project aims to answer a series of additional unfolding queries: How can a robot learn, in a trustworthy way, the cooperative task in the absence of a reward signal and without full observability of states and actions? How to tailor the ad hoc teamwork algorithms in order to increase a human’s trust in robots? How can the multimodal capabilities of a robotic teammate (e.g., speech recognition and synthesis, recognition of people and intentions, social robot expression) provide valuable information to facilitate the development of trust within ad hoc teamwork scenarios?

“Trustworthy Ad Hoc Teamwork” is Alberto Sardinha’s third research project on this topic. The first project (Ad Hoc Teams: Ad Hoc Teams With Humans And Robots) was also funded by the AFOSR and the second (HOTSPOT: Human-robOt TeamS without PrecoOrdinaTion) by FCT. Trust and Influence is one of AFOSR’s interdisciplinary basic research funding portfolios, fitting the scope of the current grant.

Led by INESC-ID, “Trustworthy Ad Hoc Teamwork” will count with the additional participation of PUC-Rio (Brazil).

The 21st edition of the EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2022) started today at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), taking place until 02 September.

The EPIA conference promotes research in all areas of AI, covering both theoretical/foundational issues and applications, and the scientific exchange among researchers, engineers and practitioners in related disciplines. This year’s keynote addresses include João Gama’s Current Trends in Learning from Data Streams (University of Porto), Luc De Raedt’s From Probabilistic Logics to Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (KU Leuven) and Iryna Gurevych’s Comment – Link – Revise: Towards a General Framework for Modelling Interconnected Texts (Technical University of Darmstadt).

The 2022 edition of EPIA was put together by an international body of researchers that includes Program Chair Ana Paiva (INESC-ID researcher in the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society (AIPS) Research Area and Full Professor at IST) and Local Organisers Alberto Sardinha  (INESC-ID AIPS researcher and Assistant Professor at IST) and Bruno Martins (INESC-ID researcher in the Human Language Technologies Research Area and Associate Professor at IST).

A well-established European conference, EPIA 2022 is hosted, as in previous editions, with the patronage of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA). INESC-ID is one of the supporters of this conference.