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Editorial
A few weeks ago, I decided to compare JNICT (the ancestor of FCT) funding in 1990 and 2020 FCT funding. In order to enable a proper comparison, I expressed these fundings in GNP and the result was, possibly for many of our younger readers, amazing. In fact, JNICT funding in 1990 amounted to 0.5 % of the Portuguese 1990 GNP whereas FCT funding in 2020 was only 0.3 % of the 2020 GNP.
As bad as these figures look, they are even worse, in my opinion for two major reasons.
At the time JNICT had very few long-term commitments, so it could devote its funding to create, together with the universities a set of infrastructures that host a great part of today’s research centres.
Given the growing number of new researchers, who cannot find permanent jobs either in the universities whose budgets, in real terms have remained constant or even decreased, and in the Portuguese industry, which can only support a minor fraction of the newly formed PhDs, FCT has devoted a major part of its funds to support for up to 6 years these new researchers at existing research centres.
The current short-term FCT strategy will create a major problem, estimated at 300 M€/year that is likely to appear in or around 2025.
A possible mock-up solution may well be implemented by law. It suffices to force current research centres to permanently hire the researchers when their current work contract laid by FCT) terminates. Given the current work legislation, which makes it almost impossible to end a permanent working contract, the situation will be very serious indeed since many research centres will be forced to close.
Good solutions discussed with the research centres and the researchers are urgently required and mostly welcome.
(About this subject, watch here the interview with Carlos Salema on the RTP in 1990!)
Carlos Salema
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Life at IT Coimbra
In the scope of the IT Board visits to the IT sites and branches, we have been at IT Coimbra, at DEEC - Department in Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Coimbra. This visit was a great opportunity to get in touch closely with the latest research work undertaken by the IT researchers at the Coimbra site.
See the photoreport!
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A tribute to José Manuel Bioucas-Dias
Mário Figueiredo paid a tribute to the late José Bioucas-Dias, by presenting a lecture entitled "In Memoriam: an overview of the many contributions of José Manuel Bioucas-Dias to remote sensing", on his life and brilliant work. This lecture was presented in the scope of the webinars "Spatial Data Science… think spatially about your data science problems" on past June 29th, promoted by CERENA and INESC-ID.
According to Clarivate Analytics, José Bioucas-Dias featured among the “most influential scientific minds in the world”, representing one of the most prestigious sources for assessing the impact of scientific publications, researchers and institutions in his time.
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IT in the 5th New Space Atlantic Summit
The program of this conference included the IT speakers Yasser Omar, Armando Nolasco Pinto, Nuno Borges Carvalho, and the President of the Portuguese Space Agency, the President of ANI - Agência Nacional de Inovação, sponsored by the European Space Agency - ESA and many other industrial partners.
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ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) is the premier international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers, and many more, come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice.
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Project Celeste distinguished in the contest "Promove o Futuro do Interior"
Celeste's Project – public luminaire for the prevention of light pollution, designed by a consortium led by University of Aveiro, in partnership with the Municipality of Pampilhosa da Serra and the Instituto de Telecomunicações, was distinguished in the 4th competition of the program "Promove o Futuro do Interior”, promoted by BPI, Fundação La Caixa and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.
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The study, co-authored by Manuel Humberto Herrera Argiró, a Ph.D. student at Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT-UNL), Cláudia Quaresma (Professor FCT-UNL) & Hugo Plácido Silva (DBE Professor and IT researcher), was presented at the 13th Advanced Doctoral Conference On Computing, Electrical And Industrial Systems (DoCEIS), organized by FCT-UNL.
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EMLAYERING is an exploratory R&D project running at the Instrumentation and Measurement Group at Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon. This project aims at revealing the full potential of EM testing for the PBF layer-wise QC by exploring different contactless EM methods to complement ECT; proposing EM multi-method array probes with high spatial resolution; leveraging DL for detection and characterization of defective conditions. The goal is to attain the scientific knowledge on EM multi-method NDT needed to demonstrate high-resolution EM multi-method array probes and DL combined potential for the PBF layer‑wise QC. Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) metal 3D printing has matured from a prototyping technology and might become an option when producing functional, lightweight, or highly complex parts e.g., in the aerospace and biomedical industry.
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Our team identified the physical origin of this instability, and our work in this field is today a reference that led to worldwide research in strategies to passivate electrical active impurities in TFTs. The group of organic electronics made a crucial contribution to the commercial development of transistor devices.
Currently, the organic electronics team is positioning its research in what is believed to be the next big revolution in organic electronics, Bioelectronics. Organic bioelectronic devices can be used to translate biological signals and promote the regeneration of biological tissues and even repair faulty nervous connections...
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Orangel Azuaje Contreras
Analytical Methods for the Analysis of Worst-Case End-to-End Delays in Communication Networks
Orangel Azuaje Contreras is a Ph.D. student in the Doctoral Program of Telecommunications at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, supervised by Ana Aguiar (IT Porto).
His research topic - Analytical Methods for the Analysis of Worst-Case End-to-End Delays in Communication Networks - focuses on the description and analysis of worst-case end-to-end delays in communication networks, either wired or wireless networks, with the goal of coming up with more realistic values for the correct design of critical safety applications.
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Alireza Javaheri
I have joined to Instituto de Telecomunicações in July 2016 as a Ph.D. student to work on an FCT research project about point cloud coding and quality assessment. I joined the multimedia signal processing group, where I met several Ph.D. and post-doc researchers working on similar topics and had a nice working environment.
My Ph.D. was supervised by João Ascenso and co-supervised by Fernando Pereira on the topic of point cloud quality assessment. This was a challenging experience that significantly impacted my scientific career and my personal life, providing me with a set of skills to overcome any future difficulties.
During the 5 years of my Ph.D., significant contributions were made to the emerging field of point cloud quality assessment, publishing 8 papers with 160 citations. I successfully defended my Ph.D. at the end of May 2021.
Currently, I am living in Kingston in Ontario state, Canada. I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ingenuity Labs at Queen’s University under the supervision of Michael Greenspan. I have been continuing my research on point cloud quality assessment but also focusing on co-supervising Ph.D. students on a computer vision project of 6DoF pose estimation using point cloud data. Moreover, I am now involved in Industry, providing deep-learning-based solutions for robotic bin-picking for a company called Bluewrist.
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