The UT Austin|Portugal Program offers events throughout the year which connect our research and educational activities to the broader public.

To keep up with our offerings, please see our calendar or subscribe to our newsletter.

Digital Media - Advanced Computing - Mathematics

Digital Media Events

Digital Media program events attract a variety of participants from around the world including industry representatives, members of the local art and music communities, media activists, and scholars. These events promote interaction and collaboration on local and international levels, fostering new relationships and strengthening existing communities of interest. Two primary examples are the International School on Digital Transformation and the Future Places digital media festival.

International School on Digital Transformation

The International School on Digital Transformation completed its inaugural session in July 2009 with great success, bringing together a diverse group of scholars, students, activists, and entrepreneurs. From July 19 to July 24, nearly 75 participants assembled daily for interactive meetings at the Universidade do Porto. The program addressed topics including community informatics, e-government, intellectual property, and activism facilitated by mobile technologies. The School’s participants included university professors, graduate and undergraduate students, government workers, and community organizers, coming from a number of countries such as Portugal, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Republic of Macedonia.

The program featured a broad range of distinguished speakers including Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, an international organization focused on the use of mobile phones and community organization; Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum; social networking researcher Jorge Martins Rosa of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa; and cultural and media studies expert Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia. A complete list of the School’s faculty and areas of interest may be found on www.digitaltransformationschool.org.

Future Places

In 2008 and 2009, the Future Places digital media festival in Porto hosted international competitions that attracted entries from around the world. These contests have featured a diverse array of compelling pieces by artists from Australia, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Turkey, among other countries. Finalist entries have included performances, interactive media installations, experimental films, and audio recordings, many of them demonstrating great technical and artistic innovation.

In addition to the international competition, the festivals have offered a variety of events. Attendees came to Porto to participate in workshops and go to concerts, parties, panels, and performances. The festival focuses on the interaction between digital media and local cultures, examining how different forms of digital media can strengthen and reinvigorate local cultures, providing new avenues for production and exploration.

The festivals have offered a range of scholarly, social and creative activities including panel sessions, 24 hour live community radio broadcasts, film screenings, and participatory performances. Workshops have focused on a range of topics such as interface design for mobile devices, Arduino and physical computing, location-aware narrative production, and mobile audio recording and performance. In 2009, nearly 20 universities were represented at the festival’s various activities. Both years, Future Places has provided a site for social networking as artists and scholars from around the world to exchange ideas and collaborate on projects, contributing to the festival’s great success. For more information about Future Places, please go to www.futureplaces.org.

Digital Media Summer Institute

The Digital Media Summer Institute is an annual event that take UT Austin faculty to Lisbon or Porto to teach intensive graduate-level credit course for advanced students and industry professionals. In 2009, over 100 students attended these courses, and the average student rating for the courses was 4.67 out of five. Course topics have included the following.

• Screenwriting for New Media
• Advanced Animation
• Film Preservation and Historiography
• Sound for Film
• Interactive Music 
• Online Journalism
• Digital Documentary Production

Advanced Computing Events

The advanced computing area also offers a number of throughout the year to offer additional training options for both industry professionals and researchers. Two representative events are the TACC Spring Schools in Lisbon and Porto, and Advanced Seminar on Multicore Platforms at the University of Minho. Additional events included the Functionally Graded Materials Workshop, also at the University of Minho.

TACC Spring Schools

The Texas Advanced Computing Center coordinates Spring Schools in Portugal for computational scientists seeking to broaden their skill sets. In 2009, TACC held two of these spring schools, one at the University of Porto and one at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. These spring schools consist of a series of workshops on a variety of topics including:

• Introduction to Parallel Computing
• Ranger Hardware Overview and User Environment
• Advanced MPI programming
• Optimization and Performance Engineering for Scientific applications
• MPI Programming
• Scalability Performance
• Advanced visualization techniques

Functionally Graded Materials Workshop

Professor Chelikowsky of UT Austin was a keynote speaker at the Portuguese Workshop on Functionally Graded Materials, at the Univ. of Minho. This workshop used available laboratory facilities to promote the exchange of ideas and expertise in order to create a National/International network of researchers and industries within the frame of functionally graded materials. 

Mathematics Events

Like Advanced Computing, the Mathematics program area also offers intensive programs for advanced students as well as workshops on a variety of topics. The intensive programs included the Postdoctoral Academy in Mathematics and Mathematics Summer School in Financial Mathematics. Recent workshops in Portugal and Austin have dealt with topics such as Kinetics & Statistical Methods for Complex Particle Systems and Imaging, Modeling & Visualization in Multiscale Biology.

Postdoctoral Academy in Mathematics

The Academy brought together postdocs from the Mathematics programs of both the Carnegie Mellon|Portugal and UT Austin|Portugal partnerships, for a two-day event to address the theme Applied Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. S peakers included awardwinning mathemeticians Luis Cafarelli from UT Austin and Panagiotis Souganidis from the University of Chicago. 

Mathematics Summer School in Financial Mathematics

A two week program on financial mathematics was provided for advanced undergraduate and first year graduate students from Portuguese universities, to prepare them for the follow-on advanced workshop. This summer school took place at The University of Texas at Austin with financial support from the National S cience Foundation for US attendees and from the CoLab program for Portuguese attendees.