There and Back Again: in the Footsteps of a PhD

World Youth Days

2011-08-23T14:42:00.004+01:00

Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy, 2000

Quatro Vientos, Madrid, Spain, 2011

History of WYD:

MIT CSAIL Cooking-Baking Robot

2011-08-04T00:59:00.002+01:00

MIT CSAIL students programmed the PR2 robot (built by Willow Garage) to perform the wide variety of tasks required to bake cookies. For more info...

Married Life as seen on Disney Pixar UP!

2010-10-07T17:08:00.007+01:00

Carl & Ellie by Michael Giacchino

My favorite movie!

[PT] Pope in Portugal - his words to the youth

2010-05-18T16:15:00.001+01:00

Microsoft Courier: digital Moleskine

2010-03-17T19:19:00.003Z

More info at gizmodo...

Robosoft's Kompai robot assists the elderly

2010-03-11T18:49:00.001Z

Source: IEEE Spectrum

DIY: SHiFT'2010

2010-02-24T17:59:00.002Z

A short video on SHiFT a happening, an international conference and unique event, gathering leaders and participants from all walks of life, to discuss and share Social and Human Ideas For Technology.

SHIFT 2010, 16-17th April

Teatro Aberto, Lisbon, Portugal

SHiFT 2010: DIY from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Last Lecture: Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams, by Randy Pausch

2010-02-24T17:54:00.002Z

Situated interaction with a virtual receptionist

2010-02-02T17:28:00.007Z

Related publications:

Bohus, D., Horvitz, E. (2009) Learning to Predict Engagement with a Spoken Dialog System in Open-World Settings, in Proceedings of SIGdial'09, London, UK (pdf from ACL anthology digital archive).

Bohus, D., Horvitz, E. (2009) - Models for Multiparty Engagement in Open-World Dialog, in Proceedings of SIGdial'09, London, UK (pdf from ACL anthology digital archive).

(More information here...)

AR Drone: Augmented Reality Robots Take Flight

2010-02-02T14:55:00.004Z

The AR Drone is one of the first consumer products to combine robotics with augmented reality. The quad-rotor vehicle carries two cameras and can stream video to an iPhone via Wi-Fi. On the phone, the live video is overlaid with flight controls and additional graphics for a variety of games.

Long time, no see...

2009-11-13T10:03:00.003Z

It's been a long time since I've been here last time...
In the meanwhile, I've been to Dusseldorf to visit Pedro and Patricia, then to Brighton for Interspeech'2009, then to London for SIGDial 2009 and YRRSDS 2009.
Back to Lisbon I've been lecturing a lot of classes (16.5 hours a week) and office hours (9 a week).
I'm also coding my first baseline of my cooking coach spoken dialogue system in the context of my PhD.
Olympus, Audimus and OntoChef have been around along with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, living together through Parallels.
It's being a hard a busy time, but some results are coming to light.
More news soon...

Information, by MAYAnMAYA

2009-11-13T10:02:00.001Z

Nice video about what information is:

Information from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Gelados Santini

2009-11-05T21:00:00.003Z

Santini's ice creams have been one of my favorite ever since I was introduced to this small but excellent Italian ice creams factory.

It is in Cascais, Portugal, so you can grab an ice-cream and just eat it while walking trough the villa or while you watch the sea...

Happy 60 anniversary!

Lego Mindstorms Robot solving Sudoku and Rubik Cube

2009-08-27T21:59:00.003+01:00

Children's imagination

2009-08-25T21:17:00.002+01:00

Powerful! ^.^

The invasion of cute therapeutic robots

2009-07-31T17:09:00.001+01:00

NASA: the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11

2009-07-20T16:20:00.000+01:00

MIT Media Lab, LabCast #38: Robots to the Rescue

2009-07-14T15:55:00.005+01:00

MIT Media Lab, LabCast #38: Robots to the Rescue

The Personal Robots group presents a scenario demonstrating mixed-initiative human-robot teaming for disaster response.

Layar’s augmented reality on a mobile phone

2009-07-11T18:39:00.002+01:00

[PT] [Querido mudei a Casa] da Ana - Diana

2009-06-22T17:29:00.002+01:00

Duas amigas do Liceu. Uma surpreendeu a outra...

Japanese cooking robot

2009-06-19T09:25:00.008+01:00

What's cooking at Tokyo's International Food Machinery and Technology Expo?

More here (from Reuters)

It's good to see that some progresses were made since Johnny 5...

Japanese housekeeper robot

2009-06-18T10:36:00.001+01:00

Twendy-One, the latest humanoid robot

2009-06-16T08:40:00.001+01:00

Official MDS (Mobile Dexterous Social) Robot

2009-06-15T14:45:00.002+01:00

Designed and built in a collaborative work by MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group, University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, Xitome Design, and Meka Robotics.

Aldebaran Robotics' Nao

2009-06-14T09:14:00.000+01:00

New Wii Fitness Games

2009-06-11T15:24:00.000+01:00

Project Natal: Meet Milo and see cool stuff

2009-06-10T15:17:00.000+01:00

Curiosity, Opportunity and Spirit, take my name to Mars, please!

2009-06-08T20:56:00.000+01:00

Smurfs

2009-05-14T16:05:00.002+01:00

[PT] Juramento de D. Nuno Álvares Pereira perante a Rainha D. Leonor

2009-05-11T19:54:00.001+01:00

Toma esta espada, cavaleiro.
Exerce com ela o vigor da justiça
e derruba o poder da injustiça.
Defende com ela a Igreja de Deus e os seus fiéis;
dispersa os inimigos do nome cristão;
protege as viúvas e os órfãos.
O que estiver abatido, levanta-o.
O que tiveres levantado, conserva-o.
O que estiver conforme a ordem, fortalece-o.
É assim que, ufano e glorioso somente com o triunfo da virtude,
chegarás ao reino celeste,
onde reinarás eternamente com o Salvador do mundo

Após o que o Oficiante Cavaleiro dizia :

Senhor, é para que a justiça tenha um apoio neste mundo
e o furor dos maus um freio
que permitiste aos homens,
por uma disposição particular,
o uso da espada

Investidura em cavaleiro de D. Nuno Álvares Pereira perante a Rainha D. Leonor e toda a corte em Lisboa, 1373

Disney's Ultimate Wall-E Robot

2009-04-30T18:51:00.002+01:00

TweenBots at Washington Square, NYC, NY

2009-04-30T18:30:00.001+01:00

Google earth flight tracker

2009-04-30T17:50:00.001+01:00

A flight tracker that provides a Google Earth file and shows the flight, updating every 1 minute.
Geeky!

By the way: welcome back, Miguel!

Twouble with Twitters

2009-04-27T14:47:00.001+01:00

[PT] Portuguese President on Nuno de Santa Maria Canonization

2009-04-26T18:33:00.002+01:00

More about Nuno de Santa Maria here...

«Sabei que o Senhor me fez maravilhas. Ele me ouve, quando eu o chamo» (Sal 4,4). Estas palavras do Salmo Responsorial exprimem o segredo da vida do bem-aventurado Nuno de Santa Maria, herói e santo de Portugal. Os setenta anos da sua vida situam-se na segunda metade do século XIV e primeira do século XV, que viram aquela nação consolidar a sua independência de Castela e estender-se depois pelos Oceanos – não sem um desígnio particular de Deus –, abrindo novas rotas que haviam de propiciar a chegada do Evangelho de Cristo até aos confins da terra. São Nuno sente-se instrumento deste desígnio superior e alistado na militia Christi, ou seja, no serviço de testemunho que cada cristão é chamado a dar no mundo. Características dele são uma intensa vida de oração e absoluta confiança no auxílio divino. Embora fosse um óptimo militar e um grande chefe, nunca deixou os dotes pessoais sobreporem-se à acção suprema que vem de Deus. São Nuno esforçava-se por não pôr obstáculos à acção de Deus na sua vida, imitando Nossa Senhora, de Quem era devotíssimo e a Quem atribuía publicamente as suas vitórias. No ocaso da sua vida, retirou-se para o convento do Carmo por ele mandado construir. Sinto-me feliz por apontar à Igreja inteira esta figura exemplar nomeadamente pela presença duma vida de fé e oração em contextos aparentemente pouco favoráveis à mesma, sendo a prova de que em qualquer situação, mesmo de carácter militar e bélica, é possível actuar e realizar os valores e princípios da vida cristã, sobretudo se esta é colocada ao serviço do bem comum e da glória de Deus.
-- Da Homília do Santo Padre Bento XVI por ocasião da Canonização do Santo Condestável

Tru Confessions - Tru's Movie

2009-04-26T16:31:00.001+01:00

Adegga at Vinus

2009-04-24T17:04:00.000+01:00

Lost generation... maybe not!

2009-04-22T10:34:00.001+01:00

[IT] Habemus Papam: 4 years later...

2009-04-20T14:22:00.001+01:00

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: Learning from Text at Web Scale

2009-04-15T15:34:00.003+01:00

The biggest successes in natural-language-related machine learning have been statistical speech recognition and statistical machine translation. The reason for these successes is not that these tasks are easier than other tasks; they are in fact much harder than tasks such as document classifi cation that extract just a few bits of information from each document. The reason is that translation is a natural task routinely done every day for a real human need (think of the operations of the European Union or of news agencies). The same is true of speech transcription (think of closed-caption broadcasts). In other words, a large training set of the input-output behavior that we seek to automate is available to us in the wild. In contrast, traditional natural language processing problems such as document classification, part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition, or parsing are not routine tasks, so they have no large corpus available in the wild. Instead, a corpus for these tasks requires skilled human annotation. Such annotation is not only slow and expensive to acquire but also difficult for experts to agree on, being bedeviled by many of the diffi culties we discuss later in relation to the Semantic Web. The first lesson of Web-scale learning is to use available large-scale data rather than hoping for annotated data that isn’t available. For instance, we find that useful semantic relationships can be automatically learned from the statistics of search queries and the corresponding results or from the accumulated evidence of Web-based text patterns and formatted tables, in both cases without needing any manually annotated data.
-- In The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data,
IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2009
by Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, Fernando Pereira, Google

OLPC: it's not a laptop...

2009-04-13T23:20:00.003+01:00

[PT] [ES] Coca-Cola advertisement

2009-04-05T16:58:00.002+01:00

TEDTalks: David Pogue's medleys

2009-04-01T16:43:00.001+01:00

2 years later...

2009-03-21T09:21:00.001Z

... we still miss you!

[PT] Esperança para Portugal

2009-03-20T21:20:00.000Z

Microsoft Office Labs vision for 2019

2009-03-17T11:06:00.000Z

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

BlackBerry bullet on Apple (and a response)

2009-03-16T18:44:00.003Z

[PT] O Magalhães não sabe ordenar números :-(

2009-03-15T20:52:00.001Z

Se alguém conseguir esclarecer o mistério, agradece-se!

Human touch, by Toyota

2009-03-13T12:51:00.002Z

TEDTalks: debunking myths about the so-called "developing world", by Hans Rosling

2009-03-12T17:15:00.000Z

[PT] SINFO: XVI Semana Informática

2009-03-09T08:46:00.002Z

Começa hoje a XVI Semana Informática do Instituto Superior Técnico.

Aquarela do Brasil

2009-03-06T19:32:00.001Z

RobotCub iCub

2009-03-05T16:51:00.001Z

Via: Robots dreams

Augmenting kitchen appliances

2009-03-04T17:56:00.000Z

J. R. R. Tolkien

2009-03-02T23:45:00.001Z

Another Inkling that I like very much is the great writer J. R. R. Tolkien.
I've only read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but his life is very impressive.

Computing...

2009-02-19T16:07:00.005Z

My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men.
— Karen Sparck-Jones: Pioneer in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. 1935–2007

Taken from: "Women in computing - take 2", Communications of the ACM, Volume 52, Number 2 (2009), Pages 68-76

Competing Women

2009-02-18T16:27:00.000Z

The best advice I've ever heard about how women should compete in the workplace was spoken by Betty Snyder Holberton, the first of my three favorite work partners: 'Look like a girl. Act like a lady. Think like a man. Work like a dog.'
— Jean Bartik: Programmer for The Groundbreaking Eniac Computer

Taken from: "Women in computing - take 2", Communications of the ACM, Volume 52, Number 2 (2009), Pages 68-76

Formation of the Earth: 650 Million Years in 1m 20s

2009-02-17T16:21:00.000Z

Google Latitude

2009-02-16T11:34:00.000Z

Lighthouses versus Waves

2009-02-15T15:43:00.002Z

Happy Valentine Day

2009-02-14T07:56:00.001Z

Hasta siempre, my dear Grand Mother in law

2009-02-14T07:10:00.007Z

With so short notice we left us to meet your beloved husband and son.
May your life example inspire us and makes us fighters like you were.
Take care of us... from Heaven!

Active Life: Outdoor Challenge for Wii

2009-02-13T17:07:00.001Z

Google Power Meter

2009-02-12T09:09:00.001Z

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
— Lord Kelvin

Ladybug, ladybug fly away home!

2009-02-11T20:38:00.001Z

Today we return home!
It was good to live in America for another short term.
Now the finish line is here and everything will go very swiftly.
I might be absent for a while...
...but you know where to find me!
See you all soon!

Welcome back home

2009-02-10T08:55:00.002Z

Criteria for a good thesis

2009-02-09T07:38:00.001Z

I found in a blog a comment on some criteria to decide on the best thesis on Australia and New Zealand relative to 2007. First, it is great that there are such kind of competition. Then, as the author also says, it is important that everyone applies for such things. You never know...

a clear enunciation of the problem considered in the thesis
a clear statement of the solution or solutions found or constructed
what the implications of the thesis might be, both from what is stated in the thesis itself, and from any publications arising from the thesis
quality of the outlets (journal impact factors or the quality of the peer-reviewed conferences at which the work was presented)
whether there have been any citations (excluding self-citations)
publications that are co-authored: a clear statement on what the candidate's contribution has been
the style of writing
the quality of the document in terms of publication standards
the scholarship involved

Note: the indentation and highlights are mine.

In honer of all the Moms that do a great job out there...

2009-02-08T11:09:00.000Z

Imagine...

2009-02-07T09:51:00.000Z

Shift in Marketing Reality

2009-02-06T11:47:00.000Z

Exponential times... Did You Know?!

2009-02-05T10:39:00.002Z

Work...

2009-02-04T18:44:00.003Z

Intellectual pride blind us. I see it in my work as a writer and painter; before settling at my desk or taking a brush in hand, I always ask God to illuminate me, and it's as if I were working on my knees. Herein lies the power of the Pope's call to the "humility of reason" — reason isn't an autonomous power. Every time we try to isolate it from morality or the heart, we deform it. Reason has to bow before what it encounters. With this humility, it becomes what it was created for: a tool at the service of the whole truth of man.
— Michael O'Brien, writer

[PT] Queridos amigos, MUITO OBRIGADA!

2009-02-03T18:29:00.001Z

In English: Dear friends, thank you very much!

Thesis outline

2009-02-02T11:00:00.005Z

Roberto Benigni, Divina Comedia, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII vv. 1-21

2009-01-31T20:03:00.001Z

iPhone...

2009-01-30T17:28:00.003Z

Via pecola.artedoengenho.net...

Futile attempts...

2009-01-29T23:44:00.002Z

A day in a PhD student life

2009-01-28T23:31:00.002Z

The vicious cycle

2009-01-27T23:48:00.003Z

[PT] Choque tecnológico

2009-01-26T17:10:00.003Z

Isto sim, é choque tecnológico.
Em vez de darmos computadores ao desbarato, enriquecermos a vida pública ao produzir conteúdos úteis para todos.
Parabéns Sr. Presidente.
Já agora, convença a Dra. Manuela Ferreira Leite a fazer o mesmo: precisamos de canais assim! Precisamos de ouvir aquilo que são as verdadeiras propostas dos nossos políticos, sem o filtro enviesado dos nossos media. Precisamos de falar claro! E de ouvir tudo aquilo que é dito por aqueles que fazem propostas ao país e não apenas os excertos que certos iluminados nos seleccionam, ao mesmo tempo que aumentam a nossa incapacidade de julgarmos por nós próprios, seguindo os nossos critérios, o nosso coração... tornam-nos espectadores, quando queremos ser protagonistas!
Obrigada!

Time zones differences

2009-01-25T23:29:00.003Z

Playing House in the White House

2009-01-24T15:19:00.006Z

A letter of advice from twins Jenna and Barbara Bush to Sasha (7-years-old) and Malia (10-year-old) Obama.

Absorb it all, enjoy it all

Surround yourself with loyal friends

And finally, although it's an honor and full of so many extraordinary opportunities, it isn't always easy being a member of the club you are about to join. Our dad, like yours, is a man of great integrity and love; a man who always put us first. We still see him now as we did when we were seven: as our loving daddy. Our Dad, who read to us nightly, taught us how to score tedious baseball games. He is our father, not the sketch in a paper or part of a skit on TV. Many people will think they know him, but they have no idea how he felt the day you were born, the pride he felt on your first day of school, or how much you both love being his daughters. So here is our most important piece of advice: remember who your dad really is.

The complete letter is here.

Happy Birthday!

2009-01-23T00:44:00.002Z

Happy Anniversary: 2 years and a half...

2009-01-22T10:03:00.001Z

Vatican 2.0: a youtube channel

2009-01-21T00:38:00.000Z

Great news to all the Catholic World!
After xt3.com, a social network for those who have participated on World Youth Day meetings, now the Vatican has an YouTube channel. On Xt3 the Pope even sent a message to those who were at Sidney in last WYD.
I'm just sad that "Embedding disabled by request"...

I really would like to post the video of the Pope explaining why they decided to do it here.

Hope to see a similar movement on other web 2.0 applications like twitter.
We have much to learn from the way the president of this great country has been using all the technological paraphernalia to create such a great movement around him during the campaign and now as a president.
(And I'm also happy that this sentence can be read both in Portugal and the Unites States and be true all the same: the impact and the size of the commitment are certainly different, but they exist on this two great nations...)

Obama's inauguration speech

2009-01-20T19:11:00.006Z

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

What is demanded, then, is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall; and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

CNN PhotoSynth Special Report on the 44th Presidential Inauguration:

Rochester, NY

2009-01-19T09:35:00.001Z

University reinventing itself

2009-01-12T20:40:00.001Z

Starbucks pledge 5

2009-01-12T19:51:00.000Z

Starbucks pledge 5

Innovation Centers

2009-01-11T20:37:00.000Z

Graphics facilitation explained...

2009-01-10T20:18:00.000Z

... with graphics by graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck:

Where the Hell is Matt?

2009-01-09T15:31:00.002Z

Video "Where the Hell is Matt?" (2008), from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Thanks Mary and Astronomy Picture of the Day

Thank you, OLPC

2009-01-08T19:53:00.001Z

Traveling...

2009-01-02T03:41:00.003Z

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
- St. Augustine

The traveler sees what he sees.
The tourist sees what he has come to see.
- G.K. Chesterton

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
- Aldous Huxley

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
- Mark Twain

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
- Mark Twain

New Year's wishes

2009-01-01T11:24:00.003Z

Happy New Year!

Obedience

2008-12-24T23:02:00.003Z

It's difficult for us to change for the better because readiness to change means fighting our own will. This is a great source of conflict in marriage. Much as we would like to be great lovers, we must acknowledge that we love our own will more. We love God - up to a point; we love our husband - up to a point. But as Kierkegaard noted, our most dearly beloved usually is and remains our own will.
One thing alone brings people to the readiness to change: love. Love can melt the coldest heart, making it fluid and malleable. What a liberation from self-imprisonment to be able to go against our own wishes out of love! Love makes dying to my will sweet, though it may be that this sweetness is enjoyed only after a long struggle.
- It's so hard to change, in By love refined - letters to a young bride, by Alice von Hildebrand

If you adhere to the indication, that the other person gives you, that the authority gives you, if you try to understand her, you will discover the truth and life more than before and this makes you admire the other and makes you affectionate towards the other. To understand this means to begin to understand how our companionship is born, how a community is born, how friendship is born.
- Obedience, in Is it possible to live this way? - an unusual approach to Christian existence, Vol. 1 Faith

White Christmas...

2008-12-23T10:19:00.000Z

Looks like we are going to have one... in fact, snow is already here!

OLPC - Advertisements

2008-12-10T15:15:00.001Z

Skills: the right to education
by olpcfoundation

One Laptop per Child : Zimi's Story FULL
by olpcfoundation

A new decade...

2008-12-06T04:47:00.000Z

Being in the US, I get a 30 hours 30th birthday: starting at 0h00 in Lisbon, Portugal, ending at 23h59 in Chicago, IL :-)

Propaganda on death

2008-12-03T22:02:00.001Z

They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda.
- XXVIII Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis