The CMU Portugal Program Summit 2022 is an yearly event that serves as a platform to present to the CMU Portugal External Review Committee the work and the outcomes that have been made by the Program in the last year, giving them a broad perspective of the research and education initiatives being developed under the scope of the Program. Throughout the two days, the ERC had the opportunity to evaluate the Program’s activities and assess its overall performance at internal meetings.

ERC Chair Sir John O’Reilly, Giulio Sandini, Senior Researcher and Founding Director of the Italian Institute of Technology, and Fernando Pereira, VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, attended the Conference onsight, leading the discussion in several panels as moderators. Joining remotely were Yvonne Rogers, Professor and Director at the Centre of Excellence in Human-Computer Interaction of the University College London, and Ali Sayed, Dean of Engineering EPFL School of Engineering.

During CMU Portugal’s third phase, several Portuguese ICT companies have been associated with the Program, with 16 CMU Portugal Industrial Affiliates, 17 Companies involved in large-scale projects, and several more in the Ph.D. thesis. In addition to the companies already involved with the Program, others were present at CMU Portugal Summit 2022, such as Fundação Santander Portugal, Startup Lisboa, Neuraspace, and WoW Systems, expressed being open to future collaboration opportunities that may arise in the future.

The event held a presentation and roundtable regarding the approved projects of the “Mobilizing Agendas”. Paulo Dimas, VP of Product Innovation at Unbabel, spoke about the initiative “Responsible AI,” which aims to lead the charge on developing the next generation of AI products created ethically and used to change society for the better. Paulo’s intervention was followed by Miguel Campos, CEO at WOWSystems that leads the “The eGames Lab ” consortium that aims to boost Portugal’s eGames development sector and creatives Industries. Carlos Cerqueira, Business Development Manager at Neuraspace, completed the panel on the work developed by the company, which is exploring AI smarter space traffic management to fight space debris.