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Thoughts from the President...
The current FCT call for individual and institutional proposals for scientific employment is, in my opinion, a recipe for disaster.
National funding (mostly FCT) for research projects are clearly insufficient to support the large number of available doctorate holders. In addition, these funds have been made available at an irregular (and unpredictable) pace. In order to cope with the R&D demand, most units used the increasing supply of highly qualified manpower as interns or scholarships. Even if it was the only solution, it is obviously a bad one, since it does not include social security (except voluntary and limited).
A work contract is not only the obvious but also the correct solution, were it not the current applicable work laws. If a young PhD holder who signed a temporary contract for up to three years, in the scope of a project, signs another contract with the same employer, in the framework of the FCT program and less than one year after the end of the first contract, then the lastcontract automatically becomes permanent.
How can the R&D unit manage its budget to guarantee a permanent contract, with the associated fixed costs, for such a large number of PhD holders, considering the highly irregular nature of available funding? What looked like a substantial improvement in the contractual conditions of young doctorates might well turn into a disaster unless, either the applicable work contract laws are modified, national science funding becomes regular or the demand for non-university based job market has a significant increase.
Carlos Salema
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Our highlights this month
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Following FCT's latest Call for Associate Laboratory Status, IT received an excellent classification, successfully renewing its title of Associate Laboratory for the coming 10 years.
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Project QuantSat-PT wants to prepare the country for the future European Quantum Commmunication Infrastructure.
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IT researchers are developing an unlikely, yet extremely practical, form of heart monitoring which seamlessly integrates into our daily routines. All we have to do is use the bathroom.
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IT partners with Wavecom to develop wireless technology for vital signs monitoring
CoViS is an innovative and disruptive project for the health sector, which could prove particularly useful in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.
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Key industrial sectors are rapidly transformed by digital and communication technologies leading to the fourth industrial revolution. New ones in the making, like Smart Cities, inspire a new breed of applications and services.
Within this area, the three-year R&I project 5GINFIRE aimed to create a pioneering 5G playground, consisting of 8 European testbeds and 1 Brazilian facility, that enabled experimentation in various vertical industry domains in the context of initial 5G based applications and services, as well as 5G networking capabilities. The project involved an international consortium of ten institutions, including IT, with most of its experiments focusing on areas of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation and media related applications.
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In this new segment, we track down the companies that today tell some of IT's biggest success stories, and we chat with the people behind them to learn more about the unique businesses that are born when research meets entrepreneurship.
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Veniam is a tech startup accelerating the future of mobility by delivering what they call “The Internet of Moving Things”. With an IP portfolio of 150+ patents, Veniam’s Intelligent Networking platform enables connected cars and autonomous vehicles to move massive amounts of data between vehicles and the cloud, at a fraction of the cost.
Just as the IT spin-off turned 9 years old this month, we caught up with co-founder Susana Sargento to find out more about its journey and evolution.
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Don't miss our upcoming events...
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CALL FOR PAPERS
EAI GoodTechs Conference 2021
Deadline
1 April, 2021
The 7th EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good is accepting paper submissions focusing on the design, implementation, deployment, operation and evaluation of smart objects and technologies for social good. Don't miss the opportunity!
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IST ZOOM SEMINAR
Scaling Optimal Transport for High dimensional Learning
14 April, 2021 | 18.00 - 19.00
Online
In this talk, Gabriel Peyré (École Normale Supérieure) will explain how to leverage entropic regularization methods to define computationally efficient loss functions, approximating Optimal Transport (OT) with a better sample complexity. The event will be held via Zoom (free registration).
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Preeti Yadav
Practical quantum privacy protocols
PhD in Information Security by Instituto Superior Técnico, November 2020, within the DPPMI doctoral programme, under the supervision of Paulo Mateus (IT/IST), Nikola Paunkovic (IT/IST) and André Souto (FCUL). The thesis proposed several protocols in the area of key-distribution, commitment based protocols, and contract signing, and also analysed the security considering several practical aspects.
Preeti is currently working as a Senior Consultant at Altran Portugal, in Lisbon.
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Daniel Fernandes
Towards a New Cloud-based Planning & Optimisation Methodology for Mobile Communication Networks
Phd in Information Science and Technology by ISCTE, September 2020, supervised by Francisco Cercas (IT/ISCTE) and Rui Dinis (IT/FCT-UNL). The thesis, done in collaboration with Multivision, uses telecommunication network measurements to create methodologies for estimating radio coverage for Single Input Single Output (SISO) systems while presenting a methodology for extending applicability to Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems.
Daniel is currently a teacher in the UPskill project.
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Benedikt Richter
I was affiliated with IT in Lisbon during my PhD, within the Doctoral Programme in the Physics and Mathematics of Information: Foundations of Future Information Technologies, where I studied the role of information theory in gravity and in black holes.
After concluding my PhD, I travelled in the Middle East and Africa for a few months, before starting my current position, in late 2018, as Software Consultant at TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, a German IT consulting company based in Munich.
Since then, I have worked on several projects ranging from sports equipment manufacturers to social networks, where I was able to deploy knowledge and skills acquired at IT. The main focus of my job is the design and implementation of IT systems that solve complex problems these companies are facing, so classical software engineering plays an important role, but so does software design and requirements engineering.
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