The 1st Lisbon Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS) PhD symposium took place on the 22nd of September 2023 at DEI and was attended by 45 students focussing on a range of different fields spanning from Robotics and Reinforcement Learning to NLP and Computer Vision. 

During the event, students had the chance to familiarize themselves with the goals and aspirations of LUMLIS, which is part of the wider European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and were presented with the research of the main institutes of IST (INESC-ID, ISR, IT) including work on responsible AI, extended reality multilingual agents, intelligent robots and Generative AI tools. Students also heard about the Centre for Responsible AI consortium, led by Portuguese startup Unbabel, of which some LUMLIS researchers and PhD students are actively contributing to. 

In the afternoon, students had the opportunity to learn and be inspired by IST alumnus João Santinha, who shared his career path and research experience and discussed challenges and opportunities in bridging research between industry and academia. There was also a  roundtable discussion with panelists João Santinha, Chrysoula Zerva and Filipa Correia, which delved deeper into the post-PhD researcher career.