newsletter colab_june 36

8/6/2019 Newsletter CoLab_June 36

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R&D PROJECTHIGHLIGHT

Project: INVITE: social Identity and partNership in VIrTual EnvironmentsPrincipal Investigator: Rui Prada, GAIPS, INESC-ID

INVITE (social Iden-tity and partNership inVIrTual Environments)http://project-invite.eu - explores the ef-fects of Social Identityin the collaborativeattitudes of peoplewhen interacting invirtual environments.

The main goal is tocreate articial agents that populate such environments andbehave believably and consistently with people expectations.This means that the agents need to react to Social Identitypriming in similar ways as people do. The social identity denesa shared identity that is recognizable by others (e.g. supporterof a club, similar jobs).

One of the main tasks of the project is to develop computa-tional models of social identity to drive the generation of be-haviour for the articial agents. This implies understanding ofthe psychological processes of social identity, such as self-cate-gorization and social comparison, and then dening algorithmsand knowledge representations that enable the agents to per-

form similar processes.

In order to test their ideas the research team is developing avirtual environment, in the form of a game, which depicts ascenario where social identity can be primed and affect thedecisions of the players, either articial or human. The theme

chosen is an emergency situation, where the participants mustcooperate in order to survive, but are also in the presence ofpossible egoistical choices. Participants will be grouped andprimed with social identity cues (e.g. belonging to similar oropposite social groups). The number of groups and the ttingof the social identity will be congurable. The game will takeplace in an island that is doomed to destruction (see picture).Players may escape the island if they team up to build a raft.However, the island is full of diamonds and they may spendthe time collecting them instead of collecting the wood that

is required for building the raft. The decisions are private and itwill not be possible to directly know who brought wood or dia-monds. It is assumed that non-player characters are buildingthe raft and do not take part of the collecting task. Thus, thegame is centered on the collecting decisions. In such, situationit will be a good decision to gather diamonds and wait for theothers to get the wood, but if nobody collects wood the wholeteam dies, thus, it is also important to care about the wood. Thispresents the typical dilemma of snow drift games.

It is known that social identity inuences people in such dilem-mas making players to be more or less cooperative. For exam-ple, people are inclined to cooperate more with those ofthe same culture and this effect is stronger if the culture is more

salient (e.g. in the presence of very distinct cultures). The arti-cial agents should follow the same patterns.An extensive experiment will be conducted to test how peoplewill react to manipulations of social identity and to test if thearticial agents are able to cope in a believable way. It should

STUDENT HIGHLIGHT

Gustavo Magalhes, Digital Media PhD Program

Research Topic: Web-based platform business models

Starting with the (not so) basic question:What is a business model? Despite the cur-rent wide use of the term business modelby society in general - managers, consultants,

business pundits, or the general public researchers have yet to develop a com-mon and widely accepted framework forthe term, in order to allow for a theoreticalconstruct of its concept. Even though theconcept of business model is increasinglyrelevant to all companies, economic, andstrategy literatures, there is no extensive litera-ture on business models, and no large-scalestudies on the topic.

Nevertheless, it is overall fairly acceptedthat the concept of business model stems from the con-text of e-business. During the last two decades, the de-mocratization and consolidation of the Internet, togetherwith globalization and open trading policies, have yieldeda number of diverse rather innovative web-based busi-nesses. In fact, the Internet has evolved from a network ofscattered inventiveness into a rather solid (and still evolving)backbone of businesses, communication, entertainment,and social communities. Specically, on a business perspec-tive, the novelty is that the way in which companiesmake money nowadays is different from the industrial era,where scale was so important and the capturing value

thesis was relatively simple. [1]

Although there is no generally accepteddenition of business model, it is often sim-

plied to the way the rm operates. However, amore comprehensive denition may describea business model as the design of the valuecreation, delivery, and capture mecha-nisms a rm employs.

The aim of Gustavos research is to developa framework understanding, designing, in-novating, and implementing new businessmodels for web-based platforms in diverseglobal markets.

Additionally, since joining the program Gustavo has co-operated in occasional projects at INESC Institute, namelycomposing a guide for digital entrepreneurship, collabo-rating in the study of a sustainable business model for in-ternet access and content broadcasting in Portos trans-port system, and providing business-plan-consultancy fora number of digital media companies at based at PINCcreative-industries-incubator in Porto, Portugal.

[1] Teece, D. J. (2010). Business Models, Business Strategy and Innovation.

Long Range Planning, 43(2-3), 172-194.


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Twitmetro: the novelty on the parliamentary elections in PortugalThe COLABSQUARE team meet with the responsible forthe Twitmetro, a new tool which is part of the Reactionproject, a Strategic Research and Development projectin Interactive and Advanced DigitalMedia, funded by the UT Austin | Por-tugal program. The principal investi-gator from this project, Mrio J. Silva,talked about this new instrument thatwas highlighted during the last parlia-mentary elections in Portugal.

CoLab: How does the Twitmetro

works?

Twitmetro is a system that collectsshort messages from the Twitter SocialNetwork (tweets) and parses theircontent in order to identify whichones refer to selected targets (5 politi-cal leaders in the 2011 parliamentaryelection). We identify the sentimentof these tweets (negative, neutral orpositive) with respect to the target.From the sentiment statistics, we generatethe interactive chart that is periodically updated andpublished online (http://legislativas.sapo.pt/2011/twitometro/).Journalists then comment on the evolution of sentimentas the political campaign advances.

CoLab: How many people are managing this tool andhow is their daily work?

Sixteen people have performed technical work and au-thored our short report describing the system, but thereare also additional stealth contributors who did not per-form software tasks. They were, however, key in openingthe doors to the newsrooms and involving the teams workingthere. We have been researching for some time how toproperly identify the Twitter users related to Portugal and

crawling their tweets, as well as building linguistic resourcesand strategies for sentiment analysis in user-generated contentin Portuguese. When it became obvious that there wouldbe an election very soon, we decided to join forces andcommitted to having this tool running fully automated ina reliable way before the start of the electoral campaign.We had seen similar tools in the latest elections abroad(US, UK, Germany) and we thought that we could do thesame or better in Portuguese with the resources we al-ready had assembled. What I have described is just the setweb services, databases and visualization software, butthe challenge included setting all this up running smoothlyand bullet-proof for continuous use in the production en-vironments of the newsrooms of our media partners.

How is our day to day work now? We have not been workingon Twitmetro since the campaign started, because theentire process, from tweets collection to the rendering ofthe chart is fully automated. But we worked very intensive-ly on the 3-4 weeks before it was publicly announced. We

will work on analyzing the data collected during the cam-paign and later on improving the methods for sentimentanalysis and data collection, but during the campaign

we mostly relaxed and watchedit display the sentiments aboutour politicians as everyone else.

CoLab: What kind of reactionshave you been receiving on thisproject?Surprisingly very good. We are

aware that internet users tend tomake very negative comments,but most were in fact very en-couraging and welcomed thenew instrument. We were veryopen about its internal operatingdetails since the project was an-nounced, by putting together inadvance a set of notes describingto the journalists and the publichow the entire process was per-formed. This, I believe, helped us

remain perceived as independent from the political con-tenders during the campaign.

CoLab: How did the partnership with Pblico newspaperand SAPO came along?

Pblico and SAPO are the industrial partners of the REACTIONproject; they have been involved in the proposal prepa-ration, and since the project started last October. We allwanted to do this as soon as the idea came out.

CoLab: Is Twitmetro planned to keep working after theelections? Which are the next steps?We have plans to develop tools like Twitmetro that enable

tracking social media and other content and use the col-lected information in the news production environment,both to assist the journalists and to create widgets forconveying directly to the reader in real time. The demonstra-tion and real use of tools like these this early in the projectwas not anticipated. However, we could not let pass suchan opportunity to cover an event like this election, so wechanged plans and decided to focus most of the teamentirely in the development of this tool. We will now goback to our research plan, focusing on improving linguis-tic resources, developing new algorithms and tools fornews data collection and integration, and evaluatingthem in the newsroom.

Given the complexity of the task and the diversity of theteams involved, I am still amazed that we were able topull this out in such short time. http://xldb.fc.ul.pt/wiki/Reactionis our project web page. People will see here most of thebuzz we found about our project in the media.

be hard for the people to understand if another player is arti-cial or human. The research team will also plan to study thestability of the teams and extend the computation model todeal with changes in the team formation, e.g. members beingexpelled or change teams.

The results of this project may be applied to the creation of ar-ticial characters in games and virtual environments that need

believable characters to enhance the players experience, inparticular for the creation of socially rich situations. This is es-pecially relevant in serious games that target the training ofsocial skills.


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Several UNL PhD students spentthe spring semester in Austin,working with UT faculty and makinguse of UTs extensive research fa-cilities. As the students prepare toleave, we s poke to PhD student

Luis Frias about his experience inAustin this spring.

Frias is a career designer whosexamining interactive lm and in-

teractive narrative for his thesis proposal. His project drawson both conventional lm studies and more technical as-pects of interface design. His goal is to develop a lm in-terface that uses video to get audience feedback. Hesays the broad range of Digital Media faculty helped himadvance his project and clarify his research questions.

Two classes at UT were particularly useful for his work, Friassays. This spring he took a research seminar with RTF pro-fessor Joe Straubhaar titled Analyzing Audiences. Inthis course, students learned about how ethnographicmethods and interviews can be used to study and bet-

Luis Frias Interacting In Austin

Design and Computation Series gathered students and researchersin Lisbon

The Design andComputation Se-ries presented agreat opportunityfor the studentsat IST and FCT/

UNL to share anddiscuss their workwith some experi-enced research-ers for differentcountries and, atthe same time, tobe exposed to in-novating work and

different research perspectives. IST and FCT/UNL hosted sixspeakers in April and May.

The rst visitor wasYacov Sharir from

University of Texasat Austin. He pre-sented some interestingwork regarding thecreati on of weara-ble computing de-vices and the useof ambient intelli-gence to enhancethe performanceof dancers. It was agood opportunityfor the students to

see different applications of the technology they study and

build. It was an enriching experience to see Yacovs aestheticperspective of the use of technology contrasting with themore engineering oriented perspective of some of the stu-dents.

Ernest Adams was our second visitor. Ernest is a game designconsultant with wide experience in teaching game design.He visited for three days. On the rst day he presented his viewon the future of gaming by projecting the challenges gamedevelopers face until 2050. This presentation was held at Or-dem dos Engenheiros and was open to a wide audience. Inthe next two days, Ernest gave two workshops: one on Gamedesign and another on Character Design. The workshopswere quite successful and completely full. Students were veryengaged in the design of games and characters and one of thehighlights was the design of a game based on a Portuguesewar hero, Anbal Augusto Milhais. In the last evening some stu-

dents joined ErnestAdams in a nicedinner in Bairro Altowhere they coulddiscuss their ideasin a relaxed envi-

ronment.

Peter Hall, fromUT Austin, gave atalk at Auditrioda Biblioteca, FCT/UNL, on Mappingas Visual Inquiry.This talk was thestarting event for a week long workshop with Dan Olsenon the same topic. In the workshop, students from differentbackgrounds including design, communication and com-puter science used their individual technical skills to makemapping experiments. Projects were designed to provide

the students an opportunity to investigate aspects of theirown research.

The third visitor was Panos Markopoulos from the EindhovenUniversity of Technology. He presented work at IST and FCT/UNL related to the use of persuasion techniques to helptechnology convey messages to users. His ideas inspiredlively discussions after the talks. It was a good opportunity forthe students to state their opinions and it was noticeable thefact that his talkstimulated the stu-dents.

The last visitor,

Anthony Brooksfrom Aalborg Uni-versity, presentedseveral examplesof the use of tech-nology to enhanceinteractive instal-lations as meansto generate play-ful and fun experi-ences. He showedseveral examples from the SoundScapes project where theseinstallations were used by impaired people. Seeing these exam-ples, illustrated by videos, was a very interesting experience for thestudents who could see how technology could be used toimprove the expressiveness and creative power of peoplethat have extreme limitations.

Students showing their workat the end of the workshop

Students working on thedesign of a game

Anthony Brooks presentingthe SoundScapes project

Ernest Adams presenting the instructions for theworkshop on Character Design


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Trainees from Digital Media Leadership Program complete internships

Students Arrive in Austin for ZON Animation LabA group of students and professionalshave arrived in Austin for what will bean intense educational experience.The ZON Digital Animation AdvancedLab is an eight-week course at UT Aus-tin intended to expand the skills of ex-perienced animators. Eleven anima-tors will stay on campus at UT and takeaccelerated courses with Radio-TV-Filmlecturers Geoff Marslett and Ben Bays.

The ZON Digital Animation AdvancedLab is funded by ZON, the Portuguesecable operator, in order to expand thedigital-media talent pool in Portugal. Thecompany covers the cost of travel andliving expenses for the students whiletheyre in Austin. ZON holds an annualmultimedia competition, and studentsare encouraged to develop projectsduring the lab that will be submittedfor the call this fall.

The students were chosen througha competitive process administered

by ZON. They come from a variety ofbackgrounds; many are working pro-fessionals in the video game and TV industry, while othersare graduate students and college instructors. Two winnersof the ZON prize will also attend classes with these students.

The format of the program will require intense effort fromthe students. On Mondays and Wednesdays, students willattend a three-hour class in the morning taught by Geoff Marslett

This month, the Digital Media Leadership Program bidadieu to two outstanding interns: Ioli Campos and KaterinaMarkova, who both recently completed their internshipexperience here in Austin, TX. Ioli interned for major public radiostation KUT as a digital journalist, while Katerina worked in

and then return in the afternoon foranother three-hour class taught by BenBays. Because animation is extremelytime-consuming, the rest of the weekwill be dedicated for students to workon their projects.

Geoff Marslett and Ben Bays are highlyrated animation instructors at UT. Marslett,who recently screened his animatedfeature Mars in Lisbon, emphasizes

character animation and fundamen-tal animation techniques. Bays lendshis years of experience in the video-game industry to his workshop on visualeffects and 3D animation.

It wont be all work and no play forthe students, however. The programhas organized recreational outings onan amphibious duck boat, a night at acountry dance hall, and even a oattrip down the scenic Guadalupe River.

The ZON Digital Animation Advanced

Lab follows last years ZON IntensiveScript Development Lab, which led stu-

dents through an intensive screenwriting and pre-productionexperience. Several of the students entered their projects inthe 2010 ZON competition, and two of the Labs students,Ricardo Filipe Feio and Pierre-Marie Jzquel were selectedfor the nal round of competition.

ter understand audiences relationships with media. Stu-dents also took part in eld work in East and South Austin,interviewing subjects about the digital divide. It was veryrich in terms of knowledge, Frias says, noting it providedvaluable insights into how to approach his topic.

Frias also attended a course in UTs School of Informationwith assistant professor Luis Francisco-Revilla. In the courseon Natural User Interfaces, students explored how devices

such as multi-touch screens have the potential to simplifyuser interaction. Frias says spending time with this technologyalso directly helped him advance his research.

In addition to these classes, Frias also sat in on two othercourses this semester. Also at the iSchool, he took theprograms introductory programming course, whichemphasized the Java language. Since his project willlikely be written in Java, it gave Frias some fundamentalknowledge. Frias attended Writing for Interactive Media/ Games taught by Sheldon Pacetti in the RTF depart-ment. Although the class emphasized video games, Frias

enjoyed the class, saying, It was very rewarding. Hes avery interesting guy.

In general, Frias is highly impressed with the range of re-search facilities and resources UT offers. The resources forresearch are completely different from what we have inLisbon, he says. Although Frias will be returning to Lisbonin July, he already has plans to come back this fall andstay in Austin several more weeks.

Frias also enjoys the cultural climate of Austin. The town isgreat, he says, although he has had at least one adjust-ment issue: nding a place with a good espresso. Friassays the best place hes found for a European-style cof-fee is actually an ice cream parlor. He prefers the coffeeat Dolce Vita in Hyde Park to most of the coffee placesin town.

PhD students can receive funding for both brief explora-tory visits or long-term research visits to Austin. Frias is oneof seven UNL students who came to Austin this spring aspart of the Digital Media program.

web design and development for startup data companyInfochimps.

Both interns were very well received by their host organi-zations. Joe Kelly, CEO of Infochimps, said Katerina has


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great talent and skills. (Her) output was always excel-lent. Emily Donahue, News Director of KUT, said Ioli is smart,talented, humble and very easy to work with...she createdsome wonderful work for KUT and was generous with hertime and talents.

Below are comments from Katerina and Ioli regardingtheir time in Austin:

My experience with the internship at Infochimps throughthe UT | Portugal program was highly valuable. The com-pany environment was quite a surprise. I also appreciatedthe brief insight to the US job market within my area ofwork. It was awesome to be learning new skills with theguidance of highly experienced developers and beingable to contribute with my knowledge, while having myown responsibilities for the work developed. Thanks to thisexperience I was able to reect about my personal andprofessional intentions.- Katerina Markova

I had already worked for ten years before coming to Austin anddoing this internship at KUT news. So I had some fears that

this could be a waste of time but I was encouraged to tryit as a way to improve my English and learn new digital

techniques. However the internship has completely surpassed myexpectations and provided mewith substantial and valuable work ex-perience. It was a unique chanceto stop my work routine, develop anew project and observe differentways a newsroom can work, be-sides just improving my English and

learning new techniques. Further-more KUT news makes awesome journalism and it was a truly inspi-rational experience being able towork near them.- Ioli Campos

Both Ioli and Katerina will be greatly missed, but their con-tributions to our program and their organizations werevery valuable and will pave the way for future interns. TheDMLP is currently accepting applications for Fall internshipopportunities from interested parties in Portugal, as well asseeking partnerships here in Austin with interested digitalmedia organizations. To learn more about DMLP, please

contact Jonathan Daniels at [email protected].

Summer Course and Workshop on Optimization in Machine Learning,The University of Texas at Austin, May 31 - June 7, 2011

The Summer Course and Workshopon Optimization in Machinelearning was held at the University ofTexas at Austin between May 31st andJune 7th. This event consisted of a

four day course taught by Profes-sors Nati Srebro (TTI/U. of Chicago)and Katya Scheinberg (Lehigh U.)and a day and a half workshop. Theevent was sponsored by the UT Aus-tin | Portugal Program in the Area ofMathematics (CoLab), the Programin Applied and Computational Analysis,Research and Training Group in Ap-plied and Computational Analy-sis (RTG-NSF) of the Department ofMathematics of UT Austin and the In-stitute for Computational Engineeringand Sciences (ICES). This event was

part of the programs of the Portu-guese Operations Research Society(APDIO) and the Portuguese Interna-tional Center for Mathematics (CIM),and was organized by Omar Ghattas(UT Austin), Katya Scheinberg (LehighU.), and Luis Nunes Vicente (U. Coim-bra).

A total of about 22 PhD students fromdifferent countries and universities at-tended the course. These included anumber of students from Portugal, one from Turkey, somefrom UT Austin, Texas State, Princeton U., Columbia U., UCSD,and several other institutions. The workshop included fourinternationally acclaimed researchers in the area of optimiza-tion and machine learning: Kristin Bennett (PRI), Inderjit Dhillon(UT Austin), Sanjiv Kumar (Google Research), and LievenVandenberghe (UCLA). In addition, some local PhD stu-dents and faculty joined the workshop.

In recent years it has become appar-ent that optimization and machinelearning are very tightly connecteddisciplines. Ultimately a machinelearning problem boils down to a task

of selecting a best hypothesis out agiven class which optimizes some cri-terion, such as empirical risk, training er-ror or the expectation of the gener-alization error. Each hypothesis classand a choice of setting (loss function,regularization, etc.) results in a par-ticular class of optimization problems.What makes machine learning problemsparticularly interesting for optimiza-tion is that while usually these classesof problems are well behaved, theyare inherently very large scale withcompletely dense data that often

does not t into the memory of onecomputer. A signicant develop-ment of new methods has occurredin both the optimization and ma-chine learning communities to targetthese large scale problems.

The optimization course covered thestatistical background and theoreticalguarantees of machine learning tasksand a variety of optimization tech-niques. The focus of the course was

on the convex setting, for which strong theoretical founda-tion is available. In the workshop the latest work was pre-sented for models, which do not necessarily result in convexoptimization problems, but which nevertheless have essentiallarge scale applications.

Nima Garmanjani (U. Coimbra) and Kristin Bennett (Rens-selaer Polytechnic Institute)

Ioli Campos

Participants and speakers for theOML event ICES UT Austin


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Leaders Roundtable #3, Benchmarking Best Practices on InternationalS&T Commercialization

On May 23, 2011, Dr.

Greg Pogue, recently ofAustin-based VentureCapital rm EmergentTechnologies and anew staff memberof The University ofTexas at Austin IC2Institute presented atLeaders Roundtable#3, Benchmarking BestPractices on Interna-

tional S&T Commercialization. Attending the Roundtablewere managers and staff members from Portuguese uni-versity technology transfer ofces and incubators, as well

as UTEN Portugal staff and Portuguese Ministry of Sciencerepresentatives. The event was held at the Institute of Mo-lecular Medicine (IMM), University of Lisbon. The round-table emphasis was on life science commercialization.Topics included funding models and landscapes; inven-tor vetting and the characteristics of successful life science

UTEN Workshop focuses on Portuguese Space Technology Transfer

The IST, Technical University of Lisbon,hosted the second UTEN Workshop2011, which took place on 6th June, or-ganized in collaboration with the Euro-pean Space Agency (ESA) and the FCT(Foundation for Science and Technol-ogy) Space Ofce.

Under the theme Portuguese SpaceTechnology Transfer, the Workshop welcomed an inter-nationally renowned speaker: Cornelis J.J. Eldering, fromthe European Space Agency (ESA), who presented theESA Technology Transfer (TT) and National TechnologyTransfer Initiatives, and led discussions on What can welearn from ESA TT model Successes & Failures? and Howto get space technology to non-space markets?.

The workshop also included contributions from severalPortuguese entrepreneurs: Nuno Soares (Inova+) present-ed the ESA Portuguese Brokerage model and DiamantinoCosta (Critical Software) talked about the Terrestrial Market

Applications, while Ricardo Marvo (Novabase) and JosEsperana (AUDAX ISCTE-IUL) focused on the FundingEntrepreneurs theme.

The aim of the second UTEN Workshop was to address anumber of challenges, such as the need to analyze the

current mechanisms for space technol-ogy transfer in Portugal and its results, aswell as the need to discuss ways of im-provement, in order to further increasethe return on space investment andthe social and economic impact. TheWorkshop gathered national stakehold-

ers in technology transfer and space.The purpose was for these experts to

discuss key aspects of the value chain and obtain recom-mendations on how to improve its efciency and impact.

This rst session (What do we expect to get from this eventand in what way can we contribute to improve PT SpaceTechnology Transfer?) formatted in a round-table setting,included short presentations by eld experienced expertsto promote discussion and ideas. During the event, ESAspecic initiatives aimed at facilitating space technologytransfer in the Member States were central points for ob-taining recommendations.

The results and conclusions of the event will be madeavailable soon and future sessions are expected to ana-lyze other issues on space technology transfer and obtaindifferent perspectives for the future.

inventors; university,

market and user rela-tions; product deve-lopment risk; businessintelligence; and theexperience of Emer-gent Technologiesand specically ofthe Emergent Com-pany Receptor Logic.Numerous contactswere made duringthe event, and follow-up visits were scheduled duringDr. Pogues visit in Portugal. Some of these contacts led toapplications to the US Connect program operated by UTEN Austin.

The event shared knowledge and skills in life science commer-cialization with Portuguese technology transfer mana-gers, incubator managers, and staff members, and ongoingcontacts continue between Dr. Pogue and event attendees.

Events

Festival Futur en Seine 2011 17-26 June, Paris

The UTAustin-Portugal Digital Media Coordination mem-ber Heitor Alvelos is going to participate in the closing

conference of the Futur en Seine festival in Paris on 25June, in representation of futureplaces.

More information at: http://www.futur-en-seine.fr/en/che/creativeconference/

E3 Forum (Education, Employment Entrepreneurship) -30th June, Lisbon

Registrations for the E3 Forum are now open. The E3 Forum

(Education Employment Entrepreneurship - www.e3forum.org) is being organized by graduate students on the MITPortugal Program and will take place on the 30th of Junein Lisbon, Portugal.

Ana Paula de Amorim,Dr. Greg Pogue andProf. Carlos Faro visit at Biocant

Dr. Greg Pogue (4th from right) withattendees at Leaders Roundtable #3


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Useful linkswww.utaustinportugal.org www.fct.mctes.pt www.utexas.edu www.ic2.org

www.ati.utexas.edu www.austin-chamber.org http://colab.ic2.utexas.edu/dm/ www.utenportugal.org

We want to hear from you! Want to share your doubts and concerns about something you read? Want to see other topics featured in next monthsnewsletter? Want to contribute with articles or art? Please send all your feedback to [email protected].

Ongoing Opportunities

Prize Ser Capaz Investigao e Tecnologia

The Salvador Association intends to stimulate the develop-

ment of projects that can make life easier for people withphysical disabilities through the creation of this Prize. Theproject winner will receive 10.000.

This annually award provides funding for projects that con-tribute to the development of products, tools, technologies,methodologies, equipment or technical systems to prevent,counteract, mitigate or neutralize the inability of a personwith physical disabilities.

Deadline for submissions 14th October 2011.

More information at: http://www.associacaosalvador.com/

Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge 2011

The Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge is an idea contest pro-moted by Fraunhofer AICOS with the objective of motivatingand rewarding research of practical utility, through the at-tribution of a scientic prize to MSc/PhD Students and Re-searchers from Portuguese Universities in the areas of ICT,Multimedia and other related Sciences. The Challenge con-sists in awarding the best ideas based in graduation thesisthat were developed having Research of Practical Utilityin mind.This years edition of the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge willaward a total of 9.000 in scientic prizes. In addition, theaward winners may also receive the opportunity to join the

Fraunhofer AICOS research team, depending on their overallperformance in the Challenge.

The end of the idea submittal period is 31 July 2011.

More information at: http://www.challenge.fraunhofer.pt/

Submissions open for U.Frame, the International AcademicVideo Festival. Entries will be accepted through July 15.

U.Frame will take place October 6-8 in Porto and is a uniqueinternational lm and video festival exclusively for studentsand recent graduates. Works are accepted in the catego-ries of documentary, ction, animation and experimental.

For entry details, see www.uframe.org.

Applications for ZON Creativity in Multimedia Award 2011open until 7th November 2011 at www.zon.pt/premio

This is one of the largest monetary prizes awarded in multidis-ciplinary national competitions, reaching a total of 200.000,divided into three categories: Contents and Multimedia Ap-plications, Digital Animation and Short Films. The prize also

includes fellowships at UT Austin.

The goals of the forum are to create a space to discussthe link between academic training at the PhD level, careertracks outside and inside academia, and entrepreneur-ship. Ultimately we want to create links between PhD stu-dents and companies by showcasing work!

Invited Speakers include Richard Wurman (Co-founderof TED Conferences), Paul Stein (CSO Rolls Royce), ZeinalBava (CEO Portugal Telecom), Jos Salcedo (CEO Multi-

wave Photonics), Mackey Craven (Analyst Bessemer).

4th Annual Conference of Video Games 2-4 Decem-ber 2011, Porto

The Conference of Video Games is the home of creativity and

science that lies behind the promotion of video gamesand interactive experiences. The main objective ofthis event is to stimulate discussion in the eld of videogame development and to reduce the gap betweenacademia and the entertainment industry. The event or-ganization invites to submit high quality scientic researchto help create the basis and set the trends of the future ofthe videogame industry in Portugal.

More information at:http://www.dcc.fc.up pt/~videojogos2011/

newsletter colab_june 36

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