UT welcomes visitors from the UNL Digital Media PhD program

18 Jan 2011

Eight students in the UT Austin|Portugal Digital Media program at the New University of Lisbon are arriving for a semester in Austin.

The students' visits are supported by Advanced Digital Media Mobility Awards.  During the spring 2011 semester they will attend UT Austin classes and work on their PhD research together with UT faculty.  The students and their areas of study:

Marta Ferraz
Marta Ferraz’s interests include child development, education, health, and environmental sustainability. Her PhD project, “Digital Playgrounds—Children, Technologies, and Sustainable Development,” explores ways to promote cognitive, emotional, social, and motor development while maintaining environmentally conscious design practices.

Luís Frias
Luís Frias’s research builds on his years of professional and teaching experience in design. His project “Interactive Narratives in a Multisensorial Environment” focuses the ways in which digital media have enabled new forms of narrative content through collaborative storytelling and interfaces that produce a multisensorial experience for the audience.

Luís Gomes
Luís Gomes’s experience lies in analysis of consumer-business relationships and in marketing, including five years heading the Marketing Department at Público, one of Portugal’s major newspapers.  His research interests focus on digital advertising, its characterization and permission marketing.

António Maneira
António Maneira studies the design, implementation, and evaluation of interactive learning systems, including social networking applications. Additionally, he is interested in digital storytelling and film production.

Ana Cabral Martins
Ana Cabral Martins studies how digital media have transformed the film industry and the audience’s experience. Her research explores the potentials of interactivity within the immersive aesthetic of the film industry.

Afonso O’Neill
Afonso O’Neill researches collective intelligence tools that support public policy decision-making. He intends to explore ways to enhance existing prediction market platforms, focusing on the potential of mobile devices, in order to improve decision-making by aggregating dispersed information in useful ways.

Paulo Nuno Vicente
Paulo Nuno Vicente studies mobile phone use in low and middle-income countries, from the perspective of collaborative journalism. The main objective of this research is to capture original data and reflect on the main trends in mobile use in developing countries, particularly on how citizens and journalists from less economic developed countries are using digital mobile communication technologies to enhance new forms of public information.

In addition to the eight PhD students, three winners of the ZON Prize will soon arrive at UT. The ZON Prize for Creativity in Multimedia is a prestigious national competition whose winners receive both a cash award and the opportunity to engage in research at UT Austin.  The three students from Lusófona - Ivo Correia da Silva, Zara Pinto and Raquel Laranjo - won the 2009 competition for their short film "Romeu & Julieta, the Musical."