Category: News

The project “Disruptive SDN secure communications for European Defence” (DISCRETION) was one of the 26 projects selected by the European Commission under the 2020 call of the European Defence Industrial Development Programme (EDIDP).

The DISCRETION proposal, in which Professors Ricardo Chaves, researcher at INESC-ID, and Paulo Mateus, researcher at IT, participate by Instituto Superior Técnico, was even ranked first in the topic of “Cyber ​​situational awareness and defense capabilities, defense networks and technologies for secure communication and information sharing” of the EDIDP 2020 call for proposals (EDIDP-CSAMN-2020).

The “DISCRETION” project aims at integrating and combining the technologies of software defined network (SDN) and quantum key distribution. This combined with legacy optical networks will build a highly secure, scalable and resilient network control architecture for advanced tactical operation services and create a degree of autonomy for European defence forces.

Compared with the traditional approach, where the network configuration and management interfaces are typically proprietary and tied to a specific manufacturer, SDN represents a revolution that supports further network evolution, opening it to potentially disruptive technologies like Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and quantum technologies in general. This technology will reinforce the European Defence’s autonomy in secure communications and will enable European armed forces to also use Radio Spectrum for military activities.

The members of the consortium are Deimos (coordinator), Instituto Superior Técnico, Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), Altice Labs, Adyta Lda, Telefonica Investigación y Desarrollo S.A.U, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH and Nextworks.

The Técnico team is composed of professors Ricardo Chaves (INESC-ID researcher) and Paulo Mateus (IT researcher). “This project is an important step towards greater collaboration between industry, academia and the government for the improvement of Cybersecurity at national and European level”, stresses professor Ricardo Chaves, coordinator of the “DISCRETION” project at Técnico. Professor Paulo Mateus highlights the importance of the project, once “it allows the participation of Instituto Superior Técnico in the modernization of national and European defence” and “promotes cooperation between IST mathematicians and engineers”.

Experience shows the potential of the project

An application of these technologies was demonstrated in Lisbon on 30th June, with an experimental test supported by the General Staff of the Portuguese Armed Forces (EMGFA), and the National Security Office (GNS). Some of the Portuguese partners in DISCRETION – Deimos, IT, Instituto Superior Técnico and AlticeLabs – have set-up a pioneer experiment, consisting in the interchange of messages between two Portuguese Defence facilities (5km apart from each other) using a quasi-quantum link and fiber optics.

According to General Rocha, from EMGFA “this experiment allowed to demonstrate the national capabilities of the Portuguese industry, academia and defence internationally, and to start DISCRETION in a perfect time”. Admiral Gameiro Marques, Head of the Cybersecurity group – National Security Office, highlighted “the development of projects of this nature will enable Portugal – and Europe – to have its own technology in these areas, including encryption machines and the respective cryptographic key production processes”.

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Adapted from Instituto Superior Técnico

A group of researchers from INESC-ID, in partnership with Unbabel, are one of the winning teams of the Shared Task “Sentence End and Punctuation Prediction” at SwissText2021.

“This was a very competitive and in the end we are really pleased to be one of the winning teams! For our team this was the icing on the cake, after 1 year of collaboration on the topic of Automatic Rich Transcription (ART)”, mentioned Ricardo Rei, one of the INESC-ID researchers involved.

7 teams participated, with the “Unbabel-INESC-ID” team taking first place, along with 2 other teams.

The goal of the shared task was to build models for identifying the end of a sentence by detecting an appropriate position for putting an appropriate punctuation mark. Specifically, we offer the following subtasks:

Subtask 1 (fully unpunctuated sentences-full stop detection): Given the textual content of an utterance where the full stops are fully removed, correctly detect the end of sentences by placing a full stop in appropriate positions.

Subtask 2 (fully unpunctuated sentences- full punctuation marks): Given the textual content of an utterance where all punctuation marks are fully removed, correctly predict all punctuation marks.

Due to the extremely close results of the first three solutions, the evaluators decided to announce the first three high-performing systems as the joint shared task winners.

“We tried to look at the results from different angles, but couldn’t find any decisive criteria to select a single winner based on the scores. Congratulations to the HTW+t2k, Onpoint, and Unbabel-INESC-ID teams for their fine works” mentioned the organizers Don Tuggener and Ahmad Aghaebrahimian.

The Unbabel-INESC-ID team is made up of researchers Ricardo Rei, Nuno Guerreiro, Luisa Coheur and Fernando Batista.

IEEE recently elevated José Teixeira de Sousa to Senior Member of the organization, an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

“Being elevated to Senior Member means recognition for more than 30 years dedicated to Electrical and Computer Engineering. During this long period of time, I have done quite a few things. Still, I highlight my early contributions to Integrated Circuit Yield Theory (fraction of chips fabricated without defects). Later, my work on reconfigurable hardware (making circuits by electrically programming them) gave rise to 4 international patents and 3 startup companies. I am thankful to many people, but especially to João Paulo Teixeira, who introduced me to Electronics, to Thomas Williams (IBM) and Vishwani Agrawal (Bell Labs) for joint work on Defect Level modelling, to Miron Abramovici (Bell Labs) for being my scientific mentor and dear friend, and finally to my co-worker Horácio Neto (INESC-ID) who is a Chess and Life Grandmaster.”, mentioned the researcher.

José Teixeira de Sousa is a researcher at the  High Performance Computing Architectures and Systems (HPCAS) at INESC-ID and Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico.

According to IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, “Senior Membership is an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession”.

“It’s an honor for me to receive such a recognition from IEEE. The area of human language technologies and speech processing, in which I have been involved for more than 15 years, presents very interesting challenges and applications. I hope this recognition can contribute to promote this area among students, among the local scientific community and also to promote the work we do in INESC-ID and Técnico. I’m very happy to be able to continue contributing every day”, mentioned Alberto Abad.

A recognition to the researcher of his peers for technical and professional excellence.

Alberto Abad is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and researcher at INESC-ID. He is the coordinator of the Human Language Technologies laboratory at INESC-ID and the executive coordinator of the scientific area of Programming Methodology and Technology at DEI. He is also an ISCA member and he has been recently elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior member in recognition for his significant contributions.

Alberto Abad has developed his research career in the area of human language technologies for more than 15 years. His research interests include robust speech recognition, speaker and language characterization, applied machine learning, health-care applications, and privacy-preserving speech processing and machine learning.

During these years, Alberto Abad has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences and scientific journals of the field. He has been Principal Investigator of FCT funded project VITHEA and INESC-ID representative in the DIRHA European project, Biovisualspeech CMU-Portugal project, and TAPAS ITN. He has also been team member in various Spanish and Portuguese national and international projects, and team leader in international technological evaluation challenges achieving excellent results. He has supervised and co-supervised more than 20 MSc thesis and 1 PhD thesis and lectured in courses at both Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and IST on a variety of topics, including signal processing, machine learning, programming principles, object oriented programming and compilers. Alberto Abad has been actively involved in research community activities, including conference organization, and closely collaborated with local industry and start-up companies.

The 2021 Sasada Prize has been awarded to the INESC-ID researcher António Menezes Leitão. António is a senior researcher of the Graphics and Interaction Group at INESC-ID and Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico.

“I had very good teachers but one of them changed my life: Prof. João Pavão Martins became my mentor and he inspired me to follow his example. Just like he did to me, I have challenged my students to become members of my research group and I have tried to be a good mentor. This prize, honoring Prof. Tsuyoshi Sasada, is thus very meaningful to me, as it tells me that I succeeded in that mission. Obviously, the merit also goes to my students. Through their dedication and friendship, they made it very easy to be a mentor”, mentioned António Menezes Leitão about this recognition.

From 2019, the Sasada Prize follows the discontinued Sasada Award (awarded from 2007 until 2016), which was instituted in the memory of Prof. Tsuyoshi Sasada (1941-2005), former Professor of Osaka University, co-founder and Fellow of CAADRIA, a prolific researcher and teacher from whose lab over 200 students have graduated, and better known as “Tee” in the community.

The recipient of this prize is recognized for his sustained record of contributions and their mentoring of others in the research community, demonstrating a significant and lasting impact on computer aided design research. Nominations are called from across the world and this year a rich set was received.

In making its award, the committee was impressed by the focus of António’s research, the quality of his contributions and, in particular, with the significant number of his research students whom he has supported to attend research conferences widely as they establish themselves in the research community. The committee members can recall the high quality of papers and presentations in these sessions over the years.

“My work is focused on the development of theories, techniques, and tools that support architects and engineers in the exploration of algorithmic approaches. These approaches can considerably improve the design process and promote the search for better-performing design solutions but require a significant shift in the way we think about design problems. Throughout the years, I have invited students of architecture, engineering, and computer science to help me advance these ideas and, together, we have been producing a lot of interesting research. The Sasada Prize is the recognition, from the CAADRIA community, that this collaboration has been successful and that my students are now part of a new generation of researchers”, add the INESC-ID Researcher.

The committee has heard from a number of these students who consistently report that he is a committed teacher that is highly sought after and that he is a valued mentor. He has established the research group Algorithm Design for Architecture that welcomes participation from students and young researchers that has developed a strong community committed to design and computation research.

The awarding committee was composed by Atsuko Kaga (Osaka University), Candy Herr (CAADRIA President) and Tom Kvan (CAADRIA Fellow).