Yesterday, 11 January 2022, saw the first session of the INESC-ID Early Stage Researcher (ESR) Talks.

Designed specifically to provide students, as well as early-stage postdocs, with an exclusive space that is their own, where they can present, chat and discuss any topic of their choosing (including their ongoing work as well as its associated glitches), the INESC-ID ESR Talks were conceived as an ongoing, perpetually-mutating program by students, for students.

Co-produced with our ESR community, actively together with ESR reps from every Research Area of the institute, the ESR Talks incorporate a space for talks, presentations and discussions as well as the snacks and fizzy drinks that ease a chilled exchange of ideas, chat and laughs on the Early Stage research experience and a favorite research topic, programming language or bit of hardware.

The first session of the program hosted talks by Rodrigo Bruno (Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems) with his talk “Virtualizing Runtimes to enable tomorrow’s Cloud Computing” and José Basílio (Information and Decision Support Systems) who covered “Integrative single-cell analysis of atherosclerotic arteries to identify unknown cellular identities”.

This session highlighted another vital feature of the INESC-ID ESR community: its disciplinary multitude. From the intricacies of coding to the coming of age of completely novel hardware paradigms or the investigation of molecular biological dynamics using sophisticated computational tools, research at INESC-ID spans most of contemporary computer science and computer and electrical engineering. The multiplicity of our ESR community makes these spaces of free exchange vital for a cohesive and mutually-knowledgeable community.

The next session of the INESC-ID ESR Talks will take place on 15 February 2023.