The partnership between the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and Carnegie Mellon University – CMU Portugal – will take five INESC TEC researchers to the United States of America, within the scope of several mobility grants. More specifically, the researchers were selected under three programmes: Visiting Faculty & Researcher, Affiliated PhD Student, and Dual Degree PhD.
In the first case, the selected researcher was José Pereira, thanks to his work in database systems, collaborative networks and dependent distributed systems; he will spend between 14 days and two months at the facilities of the North American institution. On the other side of the Atlantic, the INESC TEC researcher and professor at the University of Minho hopes to “establish a collaboration with the Database Group”, led by Andy Pavlo and Jignesh Patel – considered a “reference in database research”.
“The group has a track record of original work with significant impact in terms of transactional processing, performance evaluation of data processing systems and, more recently, self-management of systems using AI techniques,” recalled the researcher.
INESC TEC researcher Susana Marques is in her second year of her PhD; she perceives the Affiliated PhD grant as an opportunity to “develop innovative solutions to the challenges of federated learning, especially in decentralised and heterogeneous contexts”. In this sense, the path involves “exploring and implementing peer-to-peer solutions that can overcome the current limitations of federated learning – as is the case of high communication costs and dependence on central servers”. The researcher will also focus on data heterogeneity, “one of the main challenges in the context of federated learning”.
In the long term, the researcher perceives her time at the American university as a way to “add value” to her work, namely through the opportunity to “work with renowned experts”. “CMU is one of the most advanced centres in this area, with highly qualified professionals who have explored solutions to complex problems like data heterogeneity,” stated Susana, a PhD student in Informatics at the University of Minho.
“This interaction will not only grant access to new knowledge, but also allow me to test and improve the solutions I am developing, ensuring that my research meets the most topical and relevant challenges.”
Also within the scope of the Affiliated PhD programme, Álvaro Silva believes that this experience – in which he will collaborate with a “diverse team” – will allow him to have access to “different areas of expertise, but also to explore different outlooks, something vital to innovate and integrate new approaches” into his research. The work, focused on making “verification-aware languages more accessible to a greater number of programmers, exploring the use of large-scale language models, may benefit from a “multi-university environment, between FEUP and CMU, with the support of INESC TEC”.
Manuel Barros, who in addition to being a researcher at INESC TEC is also a PhD student at the University of Minho, is preparing to embark on his second experience at Carnegie Mellon University, after two months at the institution in late 2023, under the Visiting Students programme. He recalled that experience as “quite rewarding, personally and professionally”. “Being part of the research team of Professor Eunsuk Kang, my advisor at CMU, allowed me explore a different way of carrying out scientific work”.
Concerning his research, focused on the use of formal methods to solve problems related to the coherence of distributed systems, it advances the work carried out during his master’s degree. “The coherence of a distributed system is related to how close its behaviour is to a centralised (i.e., non-distributed) system. Higher levels of coherence ensure that the system behaves similarly to a centralised system.”
Reyhaneh Mohsenzadeh Yazdi, researcher at INESC TEC and FEUP, will join Manuel Barros in the Dual Degree PhD programme, in engineering and public policies.
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC, UP-FEUP and UMinho.
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