In the next 12 months, 7 new Exploratory Projects developed within the CMU Portugal will explore areas as diverse as robotics, artificial intelligence, intelligent transport systems, language processing, among others. The call for proposals featured a total of 38 projects,7 of which were recommended for funding by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the scope of CMU Portugal. The projects will run at 12 Portuguese research units from all over the country in collaboration with 4 different departments at Carnegie Mellon University and will benefit from overall funding of 820 000 €.
All projects have an exploratory character, which enables researchers to sow the seeds for future projects. According to Nuno Nunes, National Co-Director of the CMU Portugal Program, “we hope that these projects will help to explore ideas identified by the scientific community, in a bottom-up way, that in the future may be the basis for other projects with larger dimensions.” Rodrigo Rodrigues, also National Co-Director of the CMU Portugal Program, adds that “the impact of these exploratory projects is expected to go beyond the publication of articles and other metrics. We hope that, above all, these projects will lead to new systems that answer real-world problems”.
The CMU Portugal Program regularly supports the launch of Exploratory Research Projects (ERPs) with the main objective of promoting Portugal’s international competitiveness and innovation capacity in Science and Technology (S&T) in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The successful proposals address different areas of knowledge and strategic relevance for the CMU Portugal Program, ranging from software networks, privacy, and security, repair of unmanned aerial vehicles, human-computer interaction, robotics, among others.
“Exploratory Research Projects (ERPs) remain a building block of the Program’s research strategy, a mechanism to bootstrap high-impact potential research activities in relevant Programmatic areas”, shared José M.F. Moura, Director of the CMU Portugal Program at CMU. This is the third call for exploratory projects promoted by FCT and CMU Portugal.
In 2014, the Program launched the Early Bird Projects Call, awarding 10 projects. The second call for Exploratory Projects took place in 2017, where 8 projects strengthened the collaboration between 11 Portuguese institutions and 4 CMU departments.
Since the establishment of the CMU Portugal Program in 2006, nearly 70 research projects have been funded through the international partnership between CMU and Portugal.
Projects recommended for funding under the FCT- Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program 2019 Call for Exploratory Proposals
- Automatic generation of humor for social robots
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Ana Paiva
Principal Investigator at CMU: Louis- Philippe Morency
Partner Institutions: Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa; Language Technologies Institute – Carnegie Mellon University
- CRUAV: Cooperative Trajectory Planning for Real-Time Surveillance in UAV-assisted Intelligent Transportation Systems
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Kai Li
Principal Investigator at CMU: Pei Zhang
Partner Institutions: Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto ; Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering – Carnegie Mellon University
- Intelligent Beamforming Metasurfaces for Future Telecommunications
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Stanislav Maslovski
Principal Investigator at CMU: Sheng Shen
Partner Institutions: Universidade de Aveiro (UA); Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) Aveiro; Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
- PassCert: Exploring the Impact of Formal Verification on the Adoption of Password Security Software
Principal Investigator in Portugal: João Fernando Ferreira
Principal Investigator at CMU: Nicolas Christin
Partner Institutions: Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; Inesc Tec – Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Tecnologia e Ciência; ; Department of Computer Science- Carnegie Mellon University
- Privacy in speaker diarization: Detecting “who spoke when” privately
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Isabel Trancoso
Principal Investigator at CMU: Bhiksha Raj
Partner Institutions: Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; Language Technologies Institute – Carnegie Mellon University
- SecurityAware: Fine-grained approach to detect and patch vulnerabilities
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Rui Maranhão
Principal Investigator at CMU: Hakan Erdogmus
Partner Institutions: Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa ; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering – Carnegie Mellon University
- Synthesizing Network Accelerators using Programmable Switching Equipment
Principal Investigator in Portugal: Luís Pedrosa, Universidade de Lisboa
Principal Investigator at CMU: Justine Sherry, Computer Science Department
Partner Institutions: Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; FCiências.ID – Associação para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento de Ciências; Department of Computer Science- Carnegie Mellon University
