PIC at 11ª Mostra Universidade do Porto

Pavilhão Rosa Mota | 14,15, 16 and 17 of March 2013

A Mostra da Universidade do Porto é a exposição anual da oferta formativa da maior Universidade do País.

Mas é muito mais do que isso: é um espaço aberto de comunicação entre os estudantes do ensino básico e secundário e os seus colegas do ensino superior, uma oportunidade para os visitantes questionarem os docentes e investigadores da U.Porto sobre a sua atividade científica, os seus projetos, o impacto do seu trabalho.

Na Mostra da Universidade do Porto, todas as faculdades marcam presença na área de entrada, concentrando e distribuindo toda a informação relativa aos cursos que oferecem, enquanto que os seus departamentos se dispersam pelo imenso pavilhão, organizando atividades de interação que ilustram o encanto pelo conhecimento nas suas áreas de especialidade. Nisto são acompanhados pelos mais destacados centros de investigação da U.Porto, especialistas em fazer evoluir o conhecimento e explorar as suas aplicações.

Apoio social, estudos no estrangeiro, grupos académicos circum-escolares, voluntariado… Espetáculos, conferências, teatro, ações de envolvimento… A vida académica não se esgota nas aulas, e também está presente na Mostra da U.Porto.

Arquitetura, Belas Artes, Biomédicas, Ciências, Desporto, Direito, Economia, Engenharia, Farmácia, Gestão, Letras, Medicina, Medicina Dentária, Nutrição e Alimentação, Psicologia e Ciências da Educação: nomes de escolas, núcleos de conhecimento, possíveis percursos, saberes para uma vida.

Queremos ajudar a escolher um caminho ou a confirmar uma vocação. Venham ter connosco.

LIFEisGAME at WAMS

Presented by José Serra | 13th of February | Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto

The number of sold smartphones and tablets all around the world led to an exponential increase of the available applications, for diverse operative systems in many areas.
These solutions have conquered the health context and the national market has proliferated mobile applications that aim to help professionals to carry out their activities with the greatest competency and efficiency as possible.
This workshop, aimed for students, researchers, health professionals and others interested in the area, seeks to present mobile applications in the health area developed in Portugal.

Pedro Mendes at Jortec

19 of February | 14h00 | Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa | Sala IC Ed.VII

Na semana de 18 a 22 de Fevereiro, na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa decorrerá a Jortec (Jornadas Tecnológicas) 2013, um evento organizado por alunos de diversos cursos com o apoio e colaboração da Associação de Estudantes. Este evento é direcionado a alunos, docentes, investigadores e empresas sitiadas no campus da FCT (Caparica).
Apresentamo-nos como alunos do Departamento Informática da Faculdade de Ciências e de Tecnologia da UNL. Fomos nomeados responsáveis pelo dia 19 e 20 de Fevereiro e assim sendo, definimos o tema “NextInput” como o predominante desta edição.
Para o dia convidamos diversas empresas e oradores conceituados com experiência na área, pretendendo abordar ao longo do dia a importância das tecnologias que melhoram a interação pessoa-máquina.

UT Austin-Portugal Digital Media Year 6 Report

The UT Austin | Portugal Digital Media Program has steadily continued to foster the development of digital media education and industry in Portugal. Despite limited resources in the sixth year, the program strengthened existing initiatives including the doctoral programs, and even moved toward increased collaboration with the RTP broadcasters. The program continues to build relationships among scholars, independent entrepreneurs, major media industry players, and other members of the digital media community at a variety of institutions around the world. In doing so, it has highlighted Portugal’s developing identity as a site of technological innovation, entrepreneurial creativity, and innovative academic research.

José Serra as a Student Volunteer at SIGGRAPH 2012 Singapore

28th of November to 1st of December of 2012

This unique opportunity is available to undergraduate, graduate, and vocational students (except high school) who want to work behind the scenes of a world-class conference. Student Volunteers dedicate 25 or 15 hours in exchange for full conference access (when not on duty) and additional exclusive student-volunteer-only mentoring and professional development events.

José Serra at Iberspeech

On the past November 22nd José Serra presented his paper “A proposal for a visual speech animation system for European Portuguese”  at IberSpeech 2012 that took place in Madrid, Spain. This paper was also published in  Communications in Computer and Information Science Journal published by Springer.

Newsletter Instituto de Telecomunicações- November

Prémio Prof. José Luis Encarnação - 2012 edition

“November is usually the month when we plan next year activities. Planning is usually a difficult task. All the more so when it deals with R&D, a notoriously hard to predict activity. To make matters worse, we have preciously little information besides pious intentions that excellence will be the paramount factor in funding agencies decisions.In times of hardship the last thing one should do is to take for granted that the situation will not change much. On the contrary, the only prediction we feel pretty confident with, is that there will be significant changes coupled with major budget cuts. Fund wise, 2013 is likely to be very different from the recent past and shortcomings will byte deep. For IT to survive, everyone should stand up to the challenge and dig hard in the well of funding opportunities that includes but lies beyond FCT” by Prof. Carlos Salema
issue 17 | November 2012

Presentation of Luís Grifu at the IRI [Imagens do Real Imaginado]

07th November of 2012 | Almeida Garrett Municipal Auditorium -Palácio de Cristal | Porto, Portugal

The IRI is a  documentary film festival and it also includes animation (digital and traditional) and multimedia.

Last year Miguel Anxoprado and Jiri Barta (animation film directors) were invited speakers and this year they will  have José Miguel Ribeiro and Bastien Dubois.

Luís Grifu presented the works made in the Experimental Animation Lab (UT Austin | Portugal) and had also an workinprogress installation “Casal de Papelão” using his new interaction model – handPuppit (Performance Animation using virtual hand puppets)

Jose Miranda 2nd place for Professor José Luís Encarnação 2012 Award

José C. Miranda got the 2nd place with the article “Sketch express: A sketching interface for facial animation”, co-authored by Xenxo Alvarez, João Orvalho, Diego Gutierrez, A. Augusto Sousa and Verónica Orvalho, published in the Journal Computer & Graphics. This prize from Grupo Português de Computação Gráfica rewards the most significant papers in the area of Computer Graphics in Portugal.

Luís Grifu, Teresa Vieira, José Serra and Pedro Bastos at FUTUREPLACES

17 October 2012 | Porto, Portugal

Curated by Heitor Alvelos, Karen Gustafson, Nuno Correia and Pedro Branco, FUTUREPLACES 2012 is a meeting of people with one question in mind: if digital media can do so much for global communication, knowledge and creativity, how can it contribute to local cultural development? October 2008 marked the start of this challenge. After the success of prior editions, where we surveyed current successful projects from very diverse backgrounds and fields of knowledge, and rehearsed strategic approaches, we will dedicate FUTUREPLACES 2012 to interpreting our heritage and preparing what’s ahead in these times of great changes.

Luís Grifu presented his research on Virtual Marionette, Teresa Vieira on Parameterized Shading Methodology for Animation of Facial Expressions, José Serra presented the LIFEiSGAME project and Pedro Bastos presented his PhD thesis on Optimized Facial Rigging for Key Frame Animation.

Celebration Workshop Science-Based ICT for a Better Life – 5 years of IT in Porto and 20th Anniversary of IT

16 October 2012 | Departamento de Ciência de Computadores | PIC

Instituto de Telecomunicações  celebrated it’s 20th anniversary and IT Porto the 5th. This celebration had  the following agenda:

14:00 – 14:30    Welcome Coffee  

14:30 – 15:30    Opening Session

António Fernando Silva, Director of FCUP

Sebastião Feyo de Azevedo, Director of FEUP

Carlos Salema, Director of IT

“5 Years of Multi-disciplinary Research at IT Porto” by João Barros (Director of IT Porto)

José Marques dos Santos (Rector of U.Porto)

15:30 – 16:00    Posters and Demos

16:00 – 16:30    ICT for Intelligent Transportation, Michel Ferreira

16:30 – 17:00    ICT for Health & Entertainment, Bruno Oliveira

17:00 – 17:30    ICT for Future Infrastructures, Luís Almeida

17:30 – 18:00    Closing Remarks, Carlos Salema and João Barro

WORKSHOP on Information Visualization at PIC

by Sebastián Urbe from Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires

Information visualization can be defined as the visual representation of data, with the purpose of better understanding the inherent information that it contains, and for transmitting it to a target audience. It’s a hot topic at the moment, and many organizations make use of it for understanding their processes, people and trends, and to gain insight that might lead to better decision making. This course will show the basics of information visualization and provide some examples and exercises for participants to work with.

European Researcher’s Night

28th of October | Rectory Building of the University of Porto

The Researchers’ Night is an event bringing together the public at large and researchers. It occurs annually on the fourth Friday of September all over Europe. Its main objective is to reveal scientists and science in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. The Researchers’ Night offers the opportunity to discover research facilities that are usually not open to public (laboratories, research centers, museum collections, …), use the most recent technologies and instruments with the guidance of scientists, participate in experiments, competitions and quizzes, watch demonstrations and simulations, exchange ideas and party with the researchers.

These innovative and exciting activities allow for public engagement and meetings with researchers in relaxed and festive environments. The events aim at showing that researchers are ordinary people with extraordinary jobs and that research is all about communication and international cooperation.

The events are supported by the European Commission as part of the Marie Curie Actions, which is an EU programm to boost European research careers. The competitive calls for the EU (co-)funding are managed by the Research Executive Agency (REA).

Researcher José Miranda wins Best Demo and Poster Award at the Symposium on Applied Perception

The ACM Symposium on Applied Perception brings  together researchers from the fields of perception, graphics and visualization, to facilitate a wider exchange of ideas. The goals are to use insights from perception to advance the design of methods for visual, auditory and haptic representation, and to use computer graphics to enable perceptual research that would otherwise not be possible.

Researcher José Miranda  presented “Perceiving Interactive Sketching Through Facial Expressions” and was awarded with Best Demo and Poster. As a result he was selected to display his work at SIGGRAPH, one of the biggest Conferences in the area.

Verónica Orvalho as invited speaker at the 1st International Seminar of Special Education

Auditório do Parque Biológico | Vila Nova de Gaia | 6 Julho

O 1º Seminário de Educação Especial de Vila Nova de Gaia pretende reunir pesquisadores e estudiosos de diferentes proveniências, docentes, discentes, profissionais e pais que articulam nas suas discussões aspetos relacionados com a Educação como a inclusão, formação, práticas pedagógicas e transições pós escolares dos alunos com NEE, sobretudo os que estão na transição para a vida adulta.Pretende promover a reflexão sobre a importância do processo inclusivo, sobre o compromisso de toda a sociedade na constituição do ser social, a sua importância na vida de todos em geral e, particularmente, na vida dos jovens com deficiência. Assim, seria pertinente que pudéssemos contribuir para esbater as barreiras existentes nos diferentes percursos da vida, gerando novos paradigmas que fortaleçam a construção de uma sociedade onde impere a equidade.

Veronica Orvalho’s scientific talk at VERE Plenary Meeting

7 June | Pisa, Italy

Facial morphologies and their challenges in Computer Graphics
Abstract: One of the biggest problems of representing a face is due to their anatomical diversity and to the variety of visual styles, turning harder to reproduce an empathic and human-like face. But, there is no formal classification. In this talk I will explore the different methods that we use for representing a wide range of visual style faces on 3D characters.

Verónica Orvalho as invited speaker at the 4th International Conference on Software Development for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion- DSAI’12

Douro Museum Conference Room, Peso da Régua | 21st July 2012

Natural User Interaction: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives
Natural User Interaction (NUI) is perhaps the biggest challenge in the scope of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. It refers to the user ability to interact with computing systems in a simple, natural and unthoughtful way, using such means as speech, touch, gesture of human hands, arms and whole body, facial expressions and, including also, sensing, understanding and responding to biometric signals generated by the human body, during interaction tasks. This concept also means using HCI technology in a seamless way, with a short learning period and with the possibility to perform multimodal interaction. Key-players in ICT, like Microsoft and Apple, have recently revolutionized the interaction world with the speech features of the new Windows Phone Mango or the iPhone 4S, and with the multimodal speech and gesture interaction of Microsoft Kinect. In this Workshop, the main Portuguese experts on HCI and NUI will bring their opinion, experience and vision about the current challenges that this area faces, and unveil what in their opinion will be the future of Natural User Interaction.

Verónica Orvalho as invited speaker at the I Seminário Tecnologias e Perturbações do Espectro do Autismo

Universidade do Minho- Pólo de Azúrem | 6th June 2012 |16h15

The goal is to present, reflect and discuss the use of Technology as a tool in the intervention of the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The idea is to involve several areas in one open space for to discuss ideas and possibilities of intervention and collaborations on this theme. We invite investigators that work on the development of techniques that involve the technology as a therapy for ASD, as a learning approach.

CoLab Newsletter- UT Austin | Portugal – May 2012

The UT Austin | Portugal International Collaboratory for Emerging Technologies or CoLab is a partnership between the Science and Technology Foundation of Portugal (FCT) and the University of Texas at Austin, in conjunction with several Portuguese universities. Launched in 2007, the goal of this project is to expand the presence of advanced digital media through educational and research exchange. Education and research take place in three different program areas, digital media, advanced computing, and mathematics. Each of these program areas approach advanced digital media from the perspective of their specific competencies, whether that’s computation, modeling, or creative production.

TALK: Professor Toni Susin from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

PIC-Faculdade de Ciências da UP | 22nd of May 2012 | 14h00-15h00

Cage Based Deformation Methods
Abstract: Cage based deformation techniques aims to be an easy to use tool for graphics modeling, texturing and animation. In this tutorial we describe the most important methods, their basics, and the desirable properties that they should satisfy. We also present a comparative to show the strong and weak points of each one, taking into account their distinctive utilities. Finally, we discuss some applications that exploit cage capabilities in order to create a more complex deformation system or to simplify other deformation techniques

Verónica Orvalho, Tiago Fernandes and Luís Grifu at SIGCHI 2012

The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference on human-computer interaction.  CHI 2012 focused on the centrality of experience—from the models, theories and practical insights we need to understand and design for user experience to experiencing innovation through hands-on interactivity.

TALK: Jake Aggarwal and Veronica Orvalho

IC2 University of Texas at Austin | 9th May | 13h00-15h00

A Game About Emotions

The team presented the first prototype of the LIFEisGAME project.  People could see the prototype in action. They explained the game design process and introduced the game techniques that makes this project possible.

Newsletter Instituto de Telecomunicações

Project snapshot LIFEisGAME- Learning of facial emotions using serious games

“With over 15 research publications in fields like facial animation, automatic visual speech, rigging, user interface, virtual characters, our team is preparing to release in May of 2012 at UT Austin an early prototype of the technology of LIFEisGAME.” | Issue 12 | April 2012

UTEN PORTUGAL- Annual Report

The University Technology Enterprise Network

The University Technology Enterprise Network works to develop globally competitive and sustainable S&T commercialization know-how in Portugal. UTEN is a component of the UT Austin|Portugal Program working together with the other international partnerships of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, FCT.

Jean-Luc – Texturing from Software to Hardware

Jean-Luc Duprat, an Graphics Architect at Intel . with over over 15 years experience as a software developer in the field of computer graphics. He is involved with major hardware manufacturers, major video game studios, a major animated motion picture, and with Internet broadcasting of independent films. Jean-Luc was an Invited Speaker at our onference “Videojogos2011″ organized by Porto Interactive Center (FCUP – Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto), FEUP (Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto) and Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos Videojogos, with the theme: Texturing from Software to Hardware .

Don Marinelli – The Triumph of the Gamer

Don Marinelli is Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center and a tenured Professor of Drama and Arts Management. Donald was an Invited Speaker at the conference of “Videojogos 2011″ organized by Porto Interactive Center (FCUP – Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto), FEUP (Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto) and Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos Videojogos.

4th Annual Conference on Art and Science of Videogames 2011

The 4th Annual Conference on Art and Science of Videogames was organized between the 2nd and 4th of December of 2011, held at the Department of Computer Science of the Faculdade de Ciência da Universidade do Porto. The goal of the event is to encourage investigation of the Videogame industry in Portugal.
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JECRIPE visits LIFEisGAME

André Brandão, the coordinator of the JECRIPE project visited the LIFEisGAME team. They talked about a future cooperation on developing games for children with special needs. We hope that this cooperation will bring a better future for special children all around the world.

Best Paper Award- SBIM

Sketch Express: Facial Expressions Made Easy 

Eurographics Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling | Vancouver, Canada | 2011

Verónica Orvalho as Speaker at Innovation Forum on Services and Technologies for Interactive Media (NET-STIM)

Pavilhão do Conhecimento, Lisbon, February 24, 2010

“The goal of the Thematic Network “Innovation Forum on Services and Technologies for Interactive Media (NET-STIM)” is to gather the expertise of Portuguese research centers, private companies and government agencies in order to place Portugal at the forefront of innovation in key interactive technologies and services for digital media.”