Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute: Conducts research and provides graduate training

The Executive Vice President and Provost of Carnegie Mellon University, Mark Kamlet, will be in Madeira on July 23 to sign a protocol with the University of Madeira to establish the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (MADEIRA-ITI). This initiative is the result of the successful dual degree professional master’s program in human computer interaction under the Carnegie MellonPortugal Partnership.

The Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (MADEIRA-ITI) will be an innovation institute as defined by the statutes of the University of Madeira and established as an associated independent non-profit R&D organization whose founding members are the University of Madeira, Madeira Tecnopolo SA, and Carnegie Mellon University. The goals will be to conduct research and provide graduate training in the domain of human-computer interaction, contributing to the development of the field. MADEIRA-ITI also aims to support collaborations with other research and higher education institutions and companies, including consulting services.

“Promote Madeira as a Living Lab for open innovation of companies.”

MADEIRA-ITI builds on the vision of the Carnegie MellonPortugal Partnership to consolidate a strategic plan that:
1. Enables the University of Madeira to create the first innovation institute in the strategic area of information and communication technologies by pursuing a distinctive theme around interactive technologies – including Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and its industrial applications;
2. Creates the conditions to take the current Masters in HCI program into a sustainable model that leverages the quality standards of Carnegie Mellon professional graduate education, providing the program with the necessary agile administrative support while maintaining the fundamental relationship with high-quality research and industry involvement;
3. Promotes the regional government’s goal of changing the economic development model of Madeira, leveraging the attraction of talent and industry involvement in key distinctive areas like HCI, thus generating critical mass to attract industry and develop new innovative services in Madeira;
4. Enables the development of new professional programs required to bring Madeira into the international landscape of interactive technologies while reassuring the quality standards of the small-class model of the MHCI. Areas of particular relevance currently being pursued are entertainment (with synergies for tourism) and service design (with synergies with the international business center);
5. Incorporates a new thematic area of Human-Computer Interaction in the network of Associated Laboratories accredited by FCT, thus contributing to the consolidation of critical mass at the national level in particular for emerging and non-traditional interdisciplinary areas in Portugal, like HCI, and promote Madeira as a Living Lab for open innovation of companies in Europe and elsewhere.

The ceremony will be held on July 23 at 20 p.m. at the University of Madeira. Present at the ceremony will be José Manuel Nunes Castanheira da Costa, Rector of the University of Madeira, Mark Kamlet, Provost of Carnegie Mellon University, José Fonseca de Moura, Director of ICTI@Carnegie Mellon, and Carnegie MellonPortugal Partnership, Nuno Nunes, Scientific Director of ICTI@Portugal, and members of national and regional government.

First Annual Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Partnership Conference

More than 200 members of the academic and business communities attended the first annual conference of the Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Partnership “Economy 3.0: Re-boot and Re-connect.”

The First Annual Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Partnership Conference, sponsored by the oundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and held at the Palácio da Bolsa in Porto on June 22, enjoyed the presence of the Prime Minister of Portugal, the Minister of Science Technology and Higher Education, the State Secretary for Science, Technology and Higher Education, and the President of FCT.

The Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Partnership Conference’s welcome address was given by José Marques dos Santos, Rector of the University of Porto, who announced that the change of management of universities will promote their autonomy. The University of Porto was among the first to attain the status of Foundation in Portugal.

João Barros, National Director of ICTI@Portugal, emphasized the importance of a wide scientific debate about the role of ICT in shaping a new economic model following the current financial crisis. To this end, the leadership of the Partnership prepared a provisional strategic plan that is currently under discussion among scientists and industry professionals in Portugal and at Carnegie Mellon. This document shall be the basis for a new call for research project proposals that will open in the coming weeks. In the strategic plan, ICT focus areas are proposed in which Portugal can develop comparative advantages. These areas include: Next Generation Networks for High-Quality Trusted Services; Software Engineering for Large Scale Dependable Systems; Cyber-Physical Systems for Ambient Intelligence and Human-Centric Community; and Applied Mathematics. Public Policy and Entrepreneurship in High-Growth Areas appear as important complementary fields.

Professor Barros noted that "Portugal already has, in these areas, research groups with international impact and dynamic companies with the capacity to transform the results of basic research in high-tech products with added value." Examples include Portugal Telecom, Nokia Siemens Networks, Novabase, as well as BioDevices, Critical Software, Ndrive or OutSystems. At the end of the speech, João Barros affirmed that it is important to create space for a new generation of leaders, both in academia and in business, and ended by stating that: "This is the time for us to make a difference."

The keynote speaker at the Conference was Marvin Sirbu, Professor of Engineering & Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Sirbu’s speech was a response to the question, “How can ICT help?’ His answer touched upon major problems of our times such as global warming, energy efficiency and self reliance, environmental preservation, infrastructure lifetime, aging population and global competition, showing the many areas that ICT impacts.

“The Carnegie Mellon|Portugal partnership aims to create new models for interdisciplinary and international collaboration, new academic centers of excellence, and also new models for academy / industry collaboration.”
Marvin Sirbu

For Marvin Sirbu to go from invention to innovation is a very important step because "it is not enough to do good science & engineering." The key is that "ideas must be translated into products and services." For this to occur, "we need a better understanding of the ecology of innovation.” Mariano Gago, Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education, said that science in Portugal is characterized by a "culture of seriousness." This is the area in which young professionals are most internationalized" because “their worth comes from the recognition of the best, and that must happen on the world stage.”

The opening session of Annual Conference ended with José Sócrates, Prime-Minister of Portugal, who emphasized the importance of this partnership for the development of the country. He said that science "was the only sector that always had an increase in public investment.”

The investment in science, which was 1.2 percent of GDP, was the only item of the state budget that always had a positive and significant progress in terms of national public investment." In his view, the international partnerships gives the universities the opportunity to compete in the global arena of knowledge.

The aim is to increase the number of scientists working in Portugal to "six researchers for every 1,000 people,” thus matching the European average. On the other hand, it was shown that between 2005 and 2007 the number of companies engaged in research and development has doubled. The Portuguese Prime-Minister still had time to give one more relevant figure:
"Portugal is one of the European countries that have the largest number of women in research - about 44 percent of scientists are women."



More informations and photos at http://www.cmuportugal.org/conference2009/

Newsletter of the Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Program (#02 and #03)

COLAB Mathematics Summer School and Workshop 2009

Kinetics and statistical methods for complex particle systems.

The Colab Mathematics Summer School is a yearly event that aims at bringing together Ph.D. students and junior faculty with well known experts in the several areas of mathematics.
This is two-week summer program to be held this coming July 2009 in Lisbon, Portugal. The week of July 13 to 17 will feature a summer school for graduate students and postdocs, with lectures by E. Carlen, P. Degond, I. Gamba, M. Katsoulakis and R. Pego. The following week of July 20 to 24 will hold a workshop featuring lectures on recent progress in this field.

This program is a University of Texas at Austin-Universities in Portugal initiative http://www.math.ist.utl.pt/~dgomes/austin and is also supported by the ICTI Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program partnership, CIM and CMAF.

The themes of this program are analytical, numerical, and probabilistic issues related to dynamical properties of complex systems, with connection to natural and social sciences. In addition to the particle systems underlying classical kinetic theory, examples of such systems that have been studied recently include statistical modeling of rapid granular flows, coalescence-breakage models for jet-bubble flows, mixtures undergoing chemical reactions, swarming behavior in social animals, traffic networks (e.g., vehicular traffic on highways, TCP traffic on the internet, traffic of goods on supply chains), and economic models related to information sharing in large populations, as well as applications to climate modeling via stochastic methods.

Invited workshop speakers: (* to be confirmed)
Juan Acebron (Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa),
Eli Ben Naim, (Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA) (2 hour lecture)
Marzia Bisi (Parma, Italy),
Maria C. Carvalho (Lisbon, Portugal)
Fabio Chalub (Lisbon, Portugal)
Isabelle Choquet * (University West, Trollhattan, Sweden) Anabela Cruzeiro (GFM and Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal)
Miguel Escobedo (Universidad del Pais Vasco, Spain)
Ester Gabetta (Universita di Pavia, Italy)
Wilfrid Gangbo (Gatech, USA)
Diogo Gomes (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Patricia Goncalves (Lisbon)
Michael Loss (Gatech)
Sylvie Meleard *(Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France)
Stephane Mischler (Dauphine, Paris, France)
Clement Mouhot (Dauphine, Paris)
Filipe Oliveira (New University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Maria Joao Oliveira (CMAF and Universidade Aberta, Portugal)
Eugenio Regazzini (Pavia, Italy)
Christian Ringhofer*, (Arizona State University, USA)
Lisa Santos (Portugal)
Dejan Slepcev (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Ana Jacinta Soares (Univerdidade de Minho, Portugal)
Tom Spencer*, (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Giuseppe Toscani (Universita di Pavia, Italy)
Rui Vilela Mendes ( CMAF and Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
Cedric Villani* (ENS, Lyon, France)
Bernt Wennberg (Chalmers, Sweden)

Key Note speaker: Antonio Camera. Issues related to Digital Media

More information: http://kinetic.ptmat.fc.ul.pt/

Conference by UTEN with speakers from the Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Program

12th International Conference on Technology Policy and Innovation (ICTPI09)

Date: July 13-14, 2009
Location: Porto, Portugal

ICTPI09 is being organized by the University of Porto and INESC Porto with the support of UTEN Portugal (University Technology Enterprise Network) and in cooperation with the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin and will address Science, Technology and Knowledge Networks and their central role in the development of long term growth strategies to face the financial crisis.
The theme and motto of ICTPI09 is due to challenge us in developing strategic responses to the crisis that integrate long-term concerns, by involving research and development, higher-education and science-based innovation.
This year's conference presents 13 top Key Note Speakers that will address major conference themes and nearly 40 paper presentations enriching the debate with European, American and Asian perspectives, besides 5 round-tables bringing to the floor case-based discussions of best practices in innovation and technology transfer. Editors of Technological Forecasting & Social Change; Technology, Entrepreneurship, Technovation; Journal of Technology Transfer and Models and Methodologies, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management will participate in a Round-table on Scholarly Publishing in Technology Policy and Innovation.

Raj Rajkumar, Professor of Electrical and Computing Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Co‐Director General Motors‐CMU Information Technology & Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research, USA

Marija Ilic, Professor of Electrical and Computing Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

More information http://www.ictpi09.org.pt/.

Public Lecture from Don Norman

Date: Monday, 6 July 2009, 18:00-19:30
Place: Auditorium Castanheiro at the Reitoria da Universidade da
Madeira, Funchal

Title: “In Favor of Complexity”
Speaker: Don Norman, Professor Northwestern University

Abstract: Why are things so complex? Because the world is complex. Our tools must reflect reality. Complexity can be good, leading to a rich, satisfying life, filled with rich, satisfying experiences. We must distinguish complexity from confusion, perplexity, and unintelligibility. The goal is complexity with order, lucidity and understandability.

Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen-Norman Group and Professor of Design at Northwestern University, is a world renowned authority on usability and design and the author of many books, including “The Design of Everyday Things,” “Emotional Design,” “The Design of Future Things,” and “Sociable Design.” Professor Norman is a guest of the University for MUSE III, the 2009 Madeira Usability and Software Encounters, an annual event sponsored by the Laboratory for Usage-Centered Software Engineering and the Department of Mathematics and Engineering at the University of Madeira.

This event is open to the public.

More information www.labuse.org