CISTER participated in Portuguese delegation led by Minister Manuel Heitor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

The Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Manuel Heitor, visited on February 1st Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) on an official visit, along with a delegation of 15 people including the Director of CISTER, Eduardo Tovar.

The visit was focused on strengthening the cooperation in ICT between the Portuguese Government and CMU through the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program (CMU Portugal), by promoting strategic networking meetings among the Portuguese delegation and research groups, faculty, and leaders of CMU. The visit was hosted by the Director at CMU of the CMU | Portugal Program José Moura and included discussions with James Garrett, CMU’s Provost, and Farnam Jahanian, CMU’s President.

Some of the future initiatives were presented such as the launch of new Executive Training Programs, the takeoff of both Faculty and Student exchange programs between Carnegie Mellon and Portuguese universities, and a call for large research projects that will launch soon. This call for projects will be the first launched in Phase III of the CMU|Portugal Program under the Global Science and Technology Partnerships (GoPortugal) initiative. The planned global budget is 18 M€ and will fund collaborative R&D projects between companies, non-corporate entities of the R&D system under the scope of the Portuguese international partnerships, which includes the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Portugal partnership. For this call, CMU Portugal projects will focus on the broad ICT area with a focus in Data Science and Engineering; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Autonomy and Mobility; Cloud Computing; Design in a Variety of Societal Settings and Applications.

The delegation included also the President of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Paulo Ferrão; Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program National Co-Director, Nuno Nunes, representatives from industry (REN and Altice Labs) and from academia (CISTER/ISEP, Universidade do Minho; Instituto Politécnico de Leiria; Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança).

Photo: CMU Portugal Presentation by Nuno Nunes and Jose F. Moura. Minister Manuel Heitor on the right.