Na próxima 4ª feira, dia 10 de dezembro, teremos três talks no âmbito do processo de scouting.

Autor e vínculos: Sebastian Prost, Northumbria University

Bio: Sebastian Prost works as an Innovation Fellow in Design and Co-Creation at the Centre for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. He is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in computer science, HCI, sociology, and participatory design. He has extensive experience in working with non-profit organisations for social and digital innovations. He received his PhD in Digital Civics from Newcastle University, UK, where he explored the role of socio-technical infrastructures for sustainable and inclusive local food systems. In his work, he explores and critiques what role digital technology may play in fostering or undermining social justice, sustainability, and democracy.

Título: Co-creating Socio-digital Innovations: Reflections on Infrastructures, Equity, and Sustainability

Abstract: In this talk, Sebastian will present three socio-digital innovation projects in Northeast England. Drawing on his PhD research, he will present findings from a participatory design project that launched a local food hub in a low-income neighbourhood. Enabled by a digital ordering platform, the projects show the potentials and limitations of digital technology in addressing systemic issues of poverty and exclusion. From his current Innovation Fellowship, he will present a walking interview method and smartphone app for participatory data collection. The participant-led walks enabled collective sense-making of local issues and opportunities for place-based innovations. Finally, he will showcase a physical and digital deck of playing cards designed for and with researchers to reflect on the sustainability of their work. Connecting these projects, this talk will address the importance of non-extractive research, equitable research relationships, inclusive research methods, and what role of digital technology can play in social innovations when working with marginalised communities to co-create local responses to global crises.

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Autor e vínculos: Francisco Fernandes, INESC-ID

Bio: Francisco Fernandes received the MSc degree in Applied Mathematics and Computation and the PhD degree in Information Systems and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. He is currently a Researcher at INESC-ID at the Graphics and Interaction group. His current research interests include Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Título: Bioinformatics in 1D, 2D and 3D

Abstract: The areas of Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Genetics present several challenges that experts still struggle to computationally solve in more efficient ways, either due to the complexity of the problems or due to the vast amounts of data involved. In Biology, genetic information flows through increasingly more complex biomolecules, from DNA to RNA and then to proteins, alongside with progressively more elaborate shapes and arrangements, from primary to tertiary structure, encompassing linear sequences, secondary folds of loops, sheets or helices, and finally three-dimensional volumetric structures. In the 1D case we face challenges such as circular sequence alignment and comparison, assembly of DNA sequencing short reads, and search of genes in huge metagenomic databases, just to name a few examples. In the 2D case, for instance, the detection of specific microRNA motifs can be used to predict RNA interference and understand complex metabolic pathways. In the 3D domain, protein folding and docking and peptide design and binding affinity scoring are highly relevant to the pharmaceutical drug design process. This presentation will give an overview about several developed projects which tackled these problems, as well as the range of advanced algorithms and data structures behind them, namely efficient text indexing methods, spatial partitioning techniques, Molecular Dynamics simulations and recent Deep Learning architectures.

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Autor e vínculos: Juan A. Acebron. INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and Department of Mathematics, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)

Bio: Juan A. Acebron received the Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Engineering from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), in 2000. From 2000 to 2012, Acebrón was a visiting Researcher at the Rome Supercomputing Center (Rome, Italy); the Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego; the Department of Information Engineering, Universita di Padova (Padova, Italy); University of Alcala (Madrid, Spain), University Rovira-Virgili (Tarragona, Spain), and Instituto Superior Tecnico (Lisbon, Portugal). Acebrón is currently a Researcher at INESC-ID, and the Department of Mathematics at the Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain), being an Assistant Professor on leave at the Instituto Universitario de Lisboa ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon, Portugal), Information Science and Technology Department. His main research interests are in computational mathematics, mainly developing efficient and scalable algorithms for high performance supercomputing and random dynamical systems.

Título: Novel approaches in scientific computing for the efficient simulation of large-scale problems using high performance supercomputers

Abstract: Applications of present-time and future require increasingly powerful and efficient computational resources. In fact, computers were build for exactly one purpose: solving hard scientific and engineering problems which required too much numerical computation to do by hand. Scientific Computing has emerged today as a third pillar of science, complementing theory and experiment, and capable of reaching levels where the experimental science can not afford to enter, the experiments being prohibited or impossible. However, more often than would be desirable numerical algorithms have been proposed ignoring the computers where the simulations are run. In the past this did not pose any problem, since computers were purely sequential, and any improvement in the performance of the underlying computer architecture redounded automatically on the performance of the algorithms. However, with the advent of parallel architectures this does not occur anymore, due basically to the communication and synchronization overhead when parallelizing the sequential codes. During this talk, we present several novel numerical algorithms based mostly on Monte Carlo simulations for solving specific problems in Science and Engineering, which are modeled mathematically by differential equations. Such methods are inherently parallel, and naturally fault-tolerant, hence overcome all the obstacles mentioned above, and moreover they are specifically suited for large-scale simulations.

Nota: a participação do palestrante Juan Acebron será via Zoom.