5th Emerging Technologies Workshop: Promoting Collaborations

1 Mar 2016

The workshop gathered all UT Austin | Portugal program academic areas: Advanced Computing, Digital Media, Emerging Technologies and Mathematics, aiming at fostering the collaboration between the areas.

The 5th Emerging Technologies Workshop organized by Paula Vilarinho was held at the University of Aveiro (Auditório Mestre Hélder Castanheira, Livraria da Universidade de Aveiro) on February 24th.

During this one day meeting over 50 scientists attended the workshop, coming from different universities in Portugal: University of Aveiro, University of Coimbra, University of Lisbon, University of Minho, University of Porto, New University of Lisbon and International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL). Two guests from The University of Texas at Austin were also present, Dr. James Sham and Professor Paulo Ferreira.

The Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Aveiro, Professor José Fernando Mendes welcomed the participants to the meeting and Prof. Fernando Santana the National Director Portugal of The UT Austin | Portugal Program strengthen the importance and timing of this Workshop. In this phase of the program and in the next one is crucial that interdisciplinary among the four areas is promoted.

The brainstorming meeting around on establishing R&D collaborations between the different areas started with a morning session in which participants presented their research achievements and scope of their interests. James Sham lecture on “Creating collaboration between artists and scientists / engineers” was the motto for the group work that followed. The afternoon’s brain storming sessions were devoted to discussions in the form of round-tables combining scientists from different areas, aiming to establish possible collaborations and create ideas for project proposals. After each 15 minutes of brain-storming the teams were changed and ideas for projects collected. Around 30 ideas for common projects were selected.

The workshop ended with a visible excitement of the participants, looking forward to continue their collaborations started during that day.

A movie promoting the workshop will be available soon.