INESC-ID had just recently approved 5 research projets under the FCT Call for the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program, under a total of 7 research projets that will be funded under this call. These 5 exploratory research projects where submitted in 2019 and will be supported with a total fund of around 300k€.

Nuno Nunes, co-director of CMU Portugal Program, says: “we hope that these projects could serve to explore ideas born from needs identified by the scientific community, in a bottom-up way, that may in the future be a foundation to larger ones.”

In the words of Rodrigo Rodrigues, co-director of CMU Portugal Program: “it is expected that the impact of these exploratory projects goes beyond publishing articles and other metrics. We hope that that above all, these projects lead to the construction of systems to respond to real problems”

The selected projects are listed below.

AGENTS: Automatic generation of humor for social robots

Principal Researcher in Portugal: Ana Paiva

Institutions involved: 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

PassCert: Exploring the Impact of Formal Verification on the Adoption of Password Security Software

Principal Researcher in Portugal: João Fernando Ferreira

Institutions involved: 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

PRIVADIA: Privacy in speaker diarization: Detecting “who spoke when” privately

Principal Researcher in Portugal: Isabel Trancoso

Institutions involved: 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 Researcher in Portugal: Rui Maranhão

Institutions involved:  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

SyNAPSE: Synthetizing Network Accelerators using Programmable Switching Equipment

Principal Researcher in Portugal: Luís Pedrosa

Institutions involved: 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

INESC-ID is looking forward to work in these projects!