António Casimiro Says: “To Ensure a Trustworthy Network Operation will be Crucial for Telecom Operators”

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, through the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), funds 25 research projects in the Information and Communication Technologies areas. One of the projects approved for funding is TRONE - Trustworthy and Resilient Operations in a Network Environment, which goal is to enhance network quality of service and protection, operational efficiency and agility. During the first year of this project the research team published one paper in a journal and four papers in International Conferences and Workshops.

António Casimiro, principal investigator of the project at the Faculdade de Ciências of the Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL), in Portugal, explains that “the initial work in the project was directed towards the analysis of the possible use cases and the selection of one that would be appropriate to anchor the expected project results and, at the same time, relevant for Portugal Telecom,” the project industrial partner. Therefore “in the deliverable we analyze the main threats to the cloud infrastructure components and identify the possible controls that may be in place to prevent or minimize potential threats.” The research team did also a risk analysis for the considered use case, classifying the threats as more or less severe according to the probability of vulnerability exploitation. “The scenario provides a base for forthcoming work,” says Casimiro adding that “in particular it will serve to guide the definition of concrete proof-of-concept prototypes to show the benefits and impact of TRONE solutions.

Read the full article at http://www.cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=4282 .

Robert Unitech said: "The Business Angels Invest in People, More Often than they Invest in Technology"

“Startup funding: Streamlining venture capitalists and business angels” was the theme for the 2^nd UTEN Workshop 2012 that was held in collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. This two-day workshop targeted at Technology Transfer Officers (TTO’s) and Start-Up Companies aimed to increase the awareness and knowledge about the key aspects to successfully get venture funding in the US. A renowned expert from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Robert Unetich, was in Portugal to present his views on how to approach Venture Capital (VC). Robert M. Unetich is an active member of several Pittsburgh based venture capital firms, including Pittsburgh Equity Partners, and he is an active angel investor.
Read the article in Portugal at TEK.SAPO (July 11, 2012).

Cars Can Communicate With Each Other as They Go

A team of researchers from the Instituto de Telecomunicações of the Universidade de Aveiro lead by Susana Sargento is carrying out a prototype that enables cars to talk with each other. This prototype is developed in the scope of the DRIVE-IN project, which involves the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto (FCUP), Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), Universidade de Aveiro (UA), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the public institution IMTT, and companies like NDrive, Geolink, and RadiTaxis. It is supported by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Francisco Veloso said: “We Want to Educate Agents of Change”

Francisco Veloso is the new Dean of the Catolica-Lisbon School of Business & Economics. Veloso is one of the scientific directors of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), and a member of the National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Veloso was recently interviewed by a Portuguese journalist from the economic newspaper Diário Económico (pdf) about his strategy for the Catolica-Lisbon School of Business & Economics, his overview of the Portuguese academia and also about Portugal’s economy. Bellow we give you an idea about the key messages left by Francisco Veloso in this interview.

Read the full article at http://www.cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=4268 .

Eric Nyberg Seminar about Deeper QA: CMU, Watson, and the Open Advancement of Question Answering

July 19^th, 2012Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa more

Carnegie Mellon: A High Tech University

Extended article published by the Portuguese weekly magazine Visão on Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the "High Tech University". Cars moving without a driver, computers capable of identifying objects. The Portuguese students and faculty who study at Carnegie Mellon come back to Portugal with futuristic ideas. Statements by José M.F. Moura, director of the CMU Portugal at CMU, by Pedro Ferreira, Portuguese research assistant professor of Economics of Information Networks and Public Policy at CMU, and three dual degree students enrolled in the program: Ricardo Cabral, Susana Brandão, and Luís Marujo.Read the Portuguese article at Visão (July 05, 2012).

Employees as User Innovators

After analyzing 759 innovation proposals submitted by employees of a large international Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firm to a corporate idea management system over a two years period, three researchers concluded that “employees innovate in various ways, including modifying internal processes, creating new products and services, or significantly changing the way the firm delivers an existing service.” (Extract of the paper “Employees as User Innovators: An Empirical Investigation of an Idea Management System,” June 2012)

The paper titled “Employees as User Innovators: An Empirical Investigation of an Idea Management System,” was written by the dual degree doctoral student in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship Leid Zejnilovic at Carnegie Mellon University; Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics; Instituto Superior Técnica of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, with his two advisors Pedro Oliveira, Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, and Francisco M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University. This paper was written in the scope of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

We spoke with Leid Zejnilovic, the first co-author of the paper, about the importance of these findings. Read the full article at http://www.cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=4236 .

IBM Scientific Award 2011 Distinguishes Doctorate of the CMU Portugal

André Martins, doctorate of the dual degree doctoral program in Language Technologies (LTI) by the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST/UTL) and CMU, won the IBM Scientific Award 2011 for his paper "Turbo Parsers: Dependency Parsing by Approximate Variational Inference." This work was written by André Martins, with his four advisors Pedro M.Q. Aguiar and Mário Figueiredo, from Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (Portugal), Noah A. Smith and Eric Xing from Carnegie Mellon University.

Read the full article at http://www.cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=4228 .