INESC TEC in a mission to face the scientific challenges of the United Nations
Ciência 2018 is the latest edition of the annual meeting of Portuguese researchers. It aims at promoting a broad debate on the main topics and challenges of the scientific agenda in order to stimulate not just the participation but also the interaction between researchers, the business sector and the general public.
27th July 2018
National Meeting with Science and Technology took place in Lisbon
INESC TEC was present in the event in several fronts, integrating the entire meeting that took place in Lisbon and having South Africa as the guest country.
This event “is a great evidence of the dynamics that our scientific system has, of its quality and of the great contribute that it can provide” declared António Costa, the Portuguese Prime Minister, in the first day of the meeting that took place at the Lisbon Congress Centre between 2 and 4 July. The meeting was promoted by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in collaboration with the National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture and the Parliament's Committee on Education and Science, with the institutional support of the Government through the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education.
Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation was also present and he also highlighted the importance of bringing encouragement to the Portuguese scientific community. “It is necessary to celebrate the Portuguese science, which is constantly improving. There are more and more proposals of Portuguese scientists. We have so much more Portuguese science that is proving itself to the world.”
This year, the programme was based on 17 Sustainable Development Objectives of the United Nations for 2030 with the purpose of revealing the need to further develop the research and innovation, while strengthening the communication and dialogue mechanisms recognised as increasingly important so that the knowledge and technology inputs can be supported by the society.
“Science is the future”
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa described this initiative as “an exciting event” that is being run in a “creative, innovative, lively and future-oriented environment and that’s good because science is the future”. The President of the Portuguese Republic therefore wanted to praise this initiative and “to live intensively a meeting that is supposed to raise awareness on all Portuguese scientific community”.
Under the open debates to the community on strategic challenges for science and innovation, INESC TEC was present in several panels and debates with the participation in different areas, covering subjects such as data science, energy, biomedicine and robotics applied to agriculture.
Rui Oliveira, member of INESC TEC’s Board was part of the panel that on the first day was dedicated to the structuring program AIR Centre entitled "Implementing the Atlantic International Research Centre: on the progress achieved" with the "AIR DataNET” communication.
On the other hand, Filipe Neves dos Santos, collaborator of the Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIIS), brought the presentation «Robotics and Intelligent systems for Portuguese agriculture and forestry context» to the debate on Industry, Innovation and Infrastructures, especially dedicated to Robotics and Advanced Computing and Communication Systems.
Ana Maria Mendonça, collaborator of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research (C-BER) presented the SCREEN-DR project with the communication «From data to quality assessment and pathology detection» to the participants of the panel that presented the information and communication technologies under the CMU Portugal Program. A case study on screening of diabetic retinopathy».
Also in the space dedicated to the CMU Portugal Programme, Eduardo Marques, researcher of the Centre for Research in Advanced Computing Systems (CRACS) presented a new tool entitled «Hyrax: Crowd-Sourcing Mobile Devices to Develop Edge Clouds».
Finally, João Peças Lopes, Director of INESC TEC, addressed the theme «Global Energy Grid Interconnections» in the panel dedicated to the Renewable and Accessible Energies.
INCoDe: National Digital Competences Initiative
The event also reserved a daily time to present the National Digital Competences Initiative or the INCoDe programme, which has Pedro Guedes de Oliveira has coordinator, also a Consultant for INESC TEC's board, with a total of eight expository sessions.
Sofia Marques da Silva and Nuno Feixa Rodrigues, assistant coordinators of the programme, presented and coordinated the sessions about "Inclusion" and "Education", respectively.
In the session entitled "AI Enabled Applications: challenges for our common digital future", the coordinator of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support (LIAAD), Alípio Jorge, made a communication concerning the theme «Data Science and Artificial Intelligence».
In the session about Qualification/Specialization, there was Ângelo Martins' participation with the theme "SWitCH: Requalification for IT using PBL on steroids" and Ana Paiva's, who presented project ASTROLÁBIO.
Luís Paulo Santos, researcher of the Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics (CSIG) also presented the theme «HP Visualisation» in a round table discussion, related to the INCoDe programme, about the theme “Towards a top-class European Advanced Computing Infrastructure”.
Presentation of the partnership with UT Austin
Still on the promotion of other structuring programmes, a workshop organised by UT Austin Portugal entitled "UT Austin and Portugal - Emerging Challenges of Knowledge" was held on 4 July.
This session had an introduction with the presentation of the new areas of the programme by José Manuel Mendonça, President of INESC TEC’s Board and Interim National Director of the UT Austin Portugal Program. In this workshop, João Claro, president of INESC TEC's Executive Commission, was invited to present the initiatives to be developed under the University Technology Enterprise Network (UTEN), one of the new areas of the UT Austin Portugal Program.
A space for exhibitions
Under the scope of the exhibition space dedicated to scientific demonstrations, INESC TEC presented a stand where it showed some technologies exhibited in the communications, as well as projects with potential interest for the audience of the event.
In the heath, C-BER presented two projects: SCREEN-DR and VR2MARKET, represented by the researchers Diego Wanderley and Adrian Galdran. The first project aims at developing a platform to help in the detection of the Diabetic Retinopathy. The second one consists in a mobile wearable health surveillance monitoring product for first response and other hazardous professions.
In the area of the industrial production systems, the following digital technologies were highlighted: Twin for Complex Systems in Industry 4.0, namely the paper of Centre for Enterprise Systems Engineering (CESE) with the new layouts of the production system and operation models of the several manufacturing plants of IKEA, and of the Centre for Industrial Engineering and Management (CEGI), which introduced the new layout of Fashion and Sports Retailer Warehouse that was applied in Sonae SR warehouses, both represented by Cátia Barbosa, researcher of CESE.
Exhibition of works in posters
To present the work that is developed at INESC TEC is one of the desired goals with the participation in the Science Summit. In this regard, six posters written by INESC TEC's researchers were presented.
In the Computer Science field, Paula Branco, Luís Torgo and Rita P. Ribeiro, researchers from LIAAD, presented the poster with the title «Utility-based Predictive Analytics».
Still in Computer Science, and through the work developed by the Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics (CSIG), with António Correia, Hugo Paredes and Benjamim Fonseca, along with Daniel Schneider, the poster with the theme "SciCrowd: An Experimental Crowd-Computing System Prototype for Scientific Discovery» was presented. A second poster of the same Centre, with the collaboration of António Correia, Hugo Paredes and Benjamim Fonseca, entitled «Mapping Dynamics and Evolving Patterns in Collaborative Computing Research: A Scientometric Analysis».
Regarding the Industry and Innovation cluster, the researchers of CRIIS Rafael Arrais, Luís Rocha, Héber Sobreira, Germano Veiga and António Paulo Moreira participated with the paper«DM4Manufacturing: Aligning Manufacturing Decision Making with Advanced Manufacturing Technologies».
The Networked Intelligent Systems cluster was represented by the researchers of the Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM), Eduardo Almeida, Rui Campos and Manuel Ricardo with the poster «A Network Planning Algorithm for Traffic-Aware Flying Backhaul Mesh Networks».
The Energy field was represented by the work entitled «Data Visualization Applied to Power Systems» of Mário Pereira, researcher of the Centre for Power and Energy Systems (CPES).
“People are the most important asset”
According to Manuel Heitor, the Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education, the most important asset of this meeting “are the people and the free exchange of ideas between researchers”, since we are now facing “a particularly critical moment in the development of the science maturity in Portugal”.
Ciência 2018 had 92 sessions, 565 communications, 690 posters and 82 demonstrations. In addition to the annual reflection on the state of the Science and Technology in Portugal and Europe, the approximately 4,000 participants were drawn into open debates on new scientific opportunities and challenges, which made the main goal fulfilled: to draw the attention to Science.
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC UP-FEUP, UP-FCUP, UMinho and UTAD.