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Geometry Friends is a 2-player cooperative puzzle-platformer game, developed within the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society (AIPS) Research Area at INESC-ID, where two players control two characters — a circle and a rectangle — with distinct characteristics, that try to collect some diamonds in a set of levels as fast as possible. The game promotes collaboration between the two players and presents challenging coordinated control of the characters in a simulated physics environment. If you’re curious, you can see two agents in action here.

Geometry Friends raises interesting problems for Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. For example, to successfully solve a Geometry Friends level, players need to: deal with coordination at different layers, from motion control (e.g. achieving perfect timing) to level resolution (e.g. devising shared plans); deal with limited actuation situated in a simulated physics environment (with gravity and friction); solve platform (skill) based puzzles, which involves discovering the proper order to collect the diamonds and identifying the points where collaboration is needed; do all the above in real-time!

The competition is held at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI/ECAI’2022) and the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG’2022). You can compete in the following tracks in the IJCAI-ECAI 2022 competition: Rectangle Track GF-IJCAI-ECAI 2022, Circle Track GF-IJCAI-ECAI 2022, and Cooperation Track GF-IJCAI-ECAI 2022. For the CoG 2022 competition, you can participate in these tracks: GF-CoG 2022 – Rectangle Track, GF-CoG 2022 – Circle Track and GF-CoG 2022 – Cooperation Track. The IJCAI-ECAI 2022 competition ends on July 22, 2022, and the CoG 2022 competition ends on August 19, 2022.

Further details are available here.

Today, 05 May, we celebrate World Password Day. As Security and Privacy is one of the main research foci at INESC-ID, and one of the institute’s major Thematic Lines, we wanted to give our contribution to improving the strength and performance of everyone’s passwords.

Miguel Correia — researcher within the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) INESC-ID Research Area and Strategic Coordinator of the Security and Privacy Thematic Line — suggests using “strings of at least 10 characters that do not appear in a dictionary as passwords, mixing letters, digits and signs”.

“The two main problems with textual passwords are [that] most people choose predictable passwords (even the ones they think they don’t) and [that] most people reuse passwords between different services” commented João Ferreira, INESC-ID researcher within the Automated Reasoning and Software Reliability (ARSR) Research Area. João Ferreira is also one of the Principal Investigators of the PassCert Project (which aims to “build an open-source, proof-of-concept [password manager] that through the use of formal verification, is guaranteed to satisfy properties on data storage and password generation”), a CMU Portugal Exploratory Research Project.

From the perspective of a user creating an efficient password, João Ferreira has a few suggestions:

• Use at least 12 characters, using at least two or three different classes (between lowercase, uppercase, digits and symbols);
• Characters must appear in unpredictable positions — i.e., avoid putting capital letters at the beginning of the password and numbers/digits at the end of the password;
• Avoid using dictionary words or familiar expressions (e.g. sayings, parts of song lyrics, etc.);
• Do not use patterns like “1234” or “abcd” or keyboard patterns like “qwerty” or “cvbnm” or acronyms like “SCP”, “SLB” or “FCP”;
• Ensure the chosen password does not appear in any known “data breaches” (e.g., use something like Pwned Passwords).

Happy World Password Day!

All those interested in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing are invited to attend the 12th Lisbon Machine Learning School – LxMLS 2022, 24-29 July 2022, in-person at Instituto Superior Técnico.

LxMLS 2022 will cover a range of machine learning topics important in solving natural language processing problems and is organized by INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Instituto de Telecomunicações, the Lisbon ELLIS Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS), Unbabel, and Zendesk. Two of LxMLS’ organizers are INESC-ID affiliated researchers: Fernando Batista and Bruno Martins.

The application deadline in on 15 May 2022. Further details are available here.

This past week, April 26-29, the INESC-ID Olissipo team received some of the members of the ETH Zürich team, including Professor Niko Beerenwinkel (in addition to members from the Inria team Professors Marie-France Sagot and Ariel Silber). This Staff Exchange included scientific presentations by both teams – covering computational biology topics from cancer and evolutionary genomics to machine learning and transcriptomics– as well as teamwork sessions and space to reflect on the future directions of this project.

Coordinated by Susana Vinga – INESC-ID researcher and member of its Board of Directors, as well as Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico – OLISSIPO is a Twinning project, funded by the European Commission within Horizon 2020, that aims to enhance the competences in Computational Biology at INESC-ID and to create an international pole of excellence in multi-disciplinary science in Portugal.

The Olissipo consortium is composed of four research institutions: INESC-ID, ETH Zurich, EMBL and Inria.

Today, 28 April 2022, INESC-ID is celebrating the International Girls in ICT Day 2022 by engaging hundreds of students with fun activities on Artificial Intelligence.

Set at Pavilhão Casal Vistoso in Areeiro, Lisbon, 9th to 12h grade students from across the country were mobilized in engineering and technology lab sessions from numerous companies, as well as research institutes affiliated with Instituto Superior Técnico, amongst them INESC-ID. At the INESC-ID space, students were invited to play with Geometry Friends (a two player cooperative puzzle platformer computer game) and Treme-treme (a didactic videogame on seismic risk), activities that were facilitated by Inês Lobo and Inês Batina, students from the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society Research Area at INESC-ID.

The yearly International Girls in ICT Day draws attention to the critical need for more girls and women in Information and Communication Technologies, with initiatives bringing students and professionals together around the world.

Treme-treme — an educational game that engages children aged 7 to 9 years-old with seismic risk — is now live at Quake, the newly inaugurated Lisbon-based experience on the 1755 great Lisbon earthquake. An immersive mix of technology and art, Quake was brought together, amongst others, by seismologists, historians and theater specialists.

Developed by the Department of Civil Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico (including by INESC-ID researchers Rui Prada and Pedro Santos), Dreamstudios and Flaidisaine© (under the European project UPStrat-MAFA – “Urban disaster Prevention Strategies using MAcroseismic Fields and FAult Sources), Treme-treme teaches children how to behave during an earthquake, including building an emergency kit and learning to recognize the spots at home, school and work that are particularly dangerous during such an event.

Quake and Treme-treme also have been featured in Time Out. As the magazine invites, “Imagine yourself sitting on a pew in a city church, on November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day, minutes before the earth began to shake. Suddenly, everything collapses, the flames flare up,” adding that “In fact, you can stop imagining.” Now you can experience the event and tragedy that remade Lisbon and inspired poets of the sublime such as Voltaire. And Treme-treme is an integral part of that.