Special Report on UITT and CRACS

BIP is associating to the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of INESC in the city of Porto. As such, the “Special” section will, over the following months, visit each R&D Unit and group integrating the institute. More than “looking to the past”, the intention is to allow people to know INESC Porto LA’s current moment, the year in which INESC celebrates its 25th Anniversary in Porto, as well as the new goals and challenges that the next quarter of a century will bring.

Special Report on UITT

A recent step in the innovation and support to technology transfer

The establishment of INESC Porto’s Innovation and Technology Transfer Unit (UITT) in 2006 was the result of the need to support R&D units in the components of technology transfer and business incubation. In 2007, this Unit launched LET-In - Laboratório de Empresas Tecnológicas (Laboratory of Technology Enterprises) to complement its business incubation component. UITT, coordinated by Alexandra Xavier, aims at creating, improving and disseminating knowledge valorization practices, working directly in the internal processes of innovation management, creating mechanisms to support entrepreneurship and developing R&D activities in innovation management and entrepreneurship.

Other than the strong R&D components in several engineering units, INESC Porto has been dedicated to consulting, advanced training and technology transfer. UITT works as an interface between the other R&D Units and the market, identifying business opportunities and supporting initiatives. The Unit works in three specific components: Innovation Management, Entrepreneurship and R&D. The Unit’s mission is, according Alexandra Xavier, “to contribute to the sustained development of INESC Porto through the valorization of knowledge and people”.

Business incubation

The LET-In is a laboratory that offers, other than the physical and virtual spaces of (pre-)incubation, an advanced and personalized technological and business consulting to idea and project promoters that configure potential opportunities for the economic and social valorization of scientific and technological knowledge generated in or outside INESC Porto.

This laboratory corresponds to one of the paths followed by INESC Porto in the broader framework of its strategy for the valorization of RDI activities. LET-In promotes and facilitates the emergence of business initiatives that contribute to the real economic and social valorization. The main innovative aspect with this programme to support (pre-)incubation lies precisely in the fact that it offers an integrated service that plays a part both at the level of the technical and scientific maturing of projects with strong synergies with INESC Porto’s areas of intervention, but also at the level of the business potential behind those projects.

Results in the business world

Some results of UITT’s activities are already visible. Several companies are today examples of INESC Porto’s activity on the market. Fibersensing, established in 2003, performs in the area of Structural Monitoring Systems. On 29 November of last year, the company received an honourable mention in the category of Innovation of the Awards CEP-AEP 2009, given in the context of the Entrepreneurial Cooperation Forum Galicia-North of Portugal. Three other companies were launched in 2007: Xarevision, Audolici and Tomorrow Options.

Xarevision develops private TV networks - Corporate TV and Digital Signage Networks – creating specialized means for a local and contextualized communication, complementing other communicational and marketing initiatives carried out by brands in large supermarkets.  Audolici works in the area of Hi-Fi Audio Systems and Tomorrow Options develops medical devices. In 2008, three more companies were launched: Smartwatt Energia, which develops innovative products in the energy area; NextToYou is the company responsible for a set of modular and corporate systems  that make it possible to integrate different types of solutions, such as communications, multimedia, building security and management, and ProcessNet, is responsible for Business Process Management.

Other two more recent examples of business incubation are the spin-off companies Tecla Colorida, established in 2008, and HESVI, established in April 2009. Tecla Colorida was established for the development and dissemination of the portal www.escolinhas.pt, a collaborative and social platform specifically designed for Primary Education Schools, based on Web 2.0 and Social Web functionalities. HESVI develops and produces a new type of 3rd generation nanoparticle solar photovoltaic panels, integrated in glass, with extremely competitive costs in the construction work market.

UITT encourages researchers for knowledge valorization

According to Alexandra Xavier, all Units can benefit from UITT’s activity since the “researchers’ attitudes are changed, thus leading to a higher sense of responsibility and encouragement towards knowledge valorization. Furthermore, it makes it possible to “develop a spirit of initiative and a culture of risk, a potential for the diversification of the income sources”, she concludes.

One of INESC Porto’s mission is to actively contribute to the social and economic development of Portugal, and the Northern Region in particular. Working as an interface between the university and the firms, public institutions and services, “it is precisely through technology transfer and through the economic valorization of knowledge that INESC Porto fulfils this mission”, the manager of UITT guarantees. In the future, “we hope to continue to contribute more and even better to the creation of wealth and qualification in the Northern Region”. Furthermore, “we want to continue playing an active role in solving problems and modernizing the industry, as well as the companies and the local and regional administration”, Alexandra Xavier concludes.

Special Report on CRACS 

The result of the will to create a unit of excellence

The Centre for Research in Advanced Computing Systems (CRACS) was the result of the will to create a scientific unit of excellence with an international impact, with areas of application with a highly demanding computational level, where new scalable languages and models are fundamental. Created in June 2007, CRACS is the result of a proposal for the establishment of a new R&D unit made to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), led by Fernando Silva, ever since then the group coordinator. At that moment, CRACS had eight collaborators with Ph.D., all members of the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Science of the University of Porto (FCUP), and 10 Ph.D. students.

Currently, the team has ten effective collaborators with Ph.D. and 50 other collaborators, from which 18 are Ph.D. students and 20 are MSc students. According to Fernando Silva, over the last three years, the group “was relatively successful in obtaining funds, namely in six FCT projects that CRACS led and in four others as participating entity”. CRACS was also involved in two other European projects, and three QREN projects, “obtaining funds above one million Euros”, the manager states.

The connection to INESC Porto

The connection that CRACS has to INESC Porto is relatively recent. Ever since its foundation, CRACS became member of INESC Porto’s Associated Laboratory as an autonomous unit. It was the “excellent support infrastructure that INESC Porto provides, its vast project experience and the potential for synergies” that led, according to the manager, to this decision. On the other hand, when CRACS (and the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support) became part of the Associated Laboratory, INESC Porto’s critical mass in informatics increased, “thus contributing to take research in this area to the levels of excellence that the other scientific areas in the institution had already achieved”, Fernando Silva highlights.

“Our perspective of INESC Porto is that that it is an institution that has managed to successfully combine multidisciplinary areas, improving them and promoting the establishment of synergies that constitute today an incredibly relevant asset, both nationally and internationally”, the manager confirms.

Three landmarks of the group

When questioned on the most important projects to the group, Fernando Silva, admits that it is still too soon to talk about the most relevant projects. However, he adds that “all recent projects have been extremely important since they have encouraged further research, thus making it possible to bring more and more young researchers to work with us, promoting and consolidating the group’s research work”. Even still, three projects have been "extremely relevant to the group”: Logic Environments with Advanced Parallelism (LEAP), Breadcrumbs and Calculi and Languages for Sensor Networks (CALLAS), all FCT projects.

LEAP is a project that “recovers an area of excellence in the group”, Fernando Silva explains, "aiming for an efficient exploration of parallelism in the new multicolour cluster architectures”. The Breadcrumbs project focuses on the collection of news fragments and on the organization and aggregation of those fragments by the readers, as well as on the demonstration of the relationships between the readers and between the news. This project is part of the UTAustin-Portugal programme. On the other hand, CALLAS aims at the development of programming languages for wireless sensor networks. Here, languages are designed and implemented so as to guarantee that the programmes developed within these languages do not present a class of execution errors.   

A promising future

And because people contribute every day to the excellence of INESC Porto and its research groups, we wanted to know who played the most important role in the recent history of the group that works on programming languages, parallel and distributed computing, data mining, intelligent systems and software architecture. To Fernando Silva “most members of CRACS are renowned worldwide, having already published countless articles in the most important conferences in their areas of work”. Over the last three years, “it is important to highlight the qualitative leap in the research work carried out by three members of CRACS, namely Álvaro Figueira, José Paulo Leal and Manuel Eduardo Correia”, the manager states, adding that “the projects that were achieved, the post-graduate students that they supervise, and the publications contributed largely to the valorization and acknowledgement of CRACS”.  

The first three years of CRACS translate the group’s current success, not only from the scientific, but also from the financial point of view, “and it is expected that the upcoming years will consolidate the group and possibly take the peers’ acknowledgement to a level of excellence”, Fernando Silva foresees. The group manager highlights that “the main challenge, in the current context, is to diversify the financing sources, looking mainly for European projects”. In the future, the group’s aim is to achieve the level of “Excellent” in the next evaluation of the advisory board and increase the number of effective members with Ph.D. CRACS is thus an example of excellence in INESC Porto’s activity.