INESC TEC researchers awarded at StudECE conference
Cristina Oliveira and André Fernandes, researchers at INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), were the great winners of the 1st PhD Students Conference in Electrical and Computer Engineering (StudECE2012), which took place on 28 and 29 June.
Cristina Oliveira won the ‘PhD Scientific Excellence Award’ (for best PhD student) for her presentation entitled “Wireless Stent-Graft Endoleakage Monitor”. This work was also authored by Nuno Almeida and José Machado da Silva, both from UTM. André Fernandes took home the ‘MSc Scientific Excellence Award’ (for best MSc student) with his poster presentation entitled “Online Topology Free Gaussian HMM Parameter Estimation based on Clustering”, supported by Simon Malinowski and Ricardo Morla, also members of UTM.
José Carlos Príncipe, President of INESC TEC’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and professor at the University of Florida (USA), and Eduardo Camacho from the University of Sevilla (Spain) were the guest speakers at this conference. The programme also included a debate session entitled “Highly qualified Human Resources to stimulate the internationalisation of companies”, led by José Manuel Mendonça (president of INESC Porto, the coordinating entity of INESC TEC), Alberto Barbosa (EFACEC), Aurélio Blanquet (EDP – Energias de Portugal) and Alan Kardec (Brazilian National Petroleum Agency).
The event was organised by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) with the support of INESC TEC. Around 110 people from different institutions participated in this event, which included, other than INESC TEC and FEUP: the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (INEB), the School of Engineering (ISEP), the Institute of Telecommunications (IT), the Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro (IEETA), the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (LIACC), the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the São Paulo State University (UNESP) and the Federal University of Pará, both from Brazil, as well as the University of Vigo in Spain. The programme of StudECE2012 also included 20 oral presentations and 37 poster presentations.
This event was designed for MSc and PhD students working in Electrical and Computer Engineering. The aim was to complement the fact that there wasn’t until now in the world an event that would gather PhD students and researchers. The aim was to promote discussion on their ongoing work, which is often characterised by its high quality and industrial potential.
According to the organising committee, the result was very positive. The event was a platform to promote the image of the University of Porto nationally and internationally. It is important to highlight that three INESC TEC collaborators were members of the organising committee – Bruno Ferreira (ROBIS), Clara Gouveia (USE) and Hélder Oliveira (UTM) –, all of them PhD students.
