The International School on Digital Transformation is an annual intensive program on the democratic transformation of society through digital media. ISDT 2010 will be held July 25-30 in Porto, Portugal. The School is now accepting applications from advanced students and recent graduates from around the world with an interest in digital technology and the enrichment of civil society. The application deadline is April 30, 2010.

The International School on Digital Transformation is an intensive six-day residential program, conducted in English and bringing together emerging and established scholars and professionals from a variety of countries. During the week, innovators in digital communications will serve as teachers and mentors, presenting current projects and engaging in discussion. Presenters and students will be regarded as peers during the School. For Gary Chapman, lecturer of University of Texas at Austin, “ISDT is a unique experience, a different kind of event — a cross between a research conference and a week-long ‘camp’ of diverse people using digital technologies to help transform societies from the bottom up. And Porto is the perfect place to do this.”

Students of the School will have the opportunity to develop and apply research design skills to projects important to civil society. Consisting of approximately 30 students and 15 faculty members, the School seeks to create an atmosphere of scholarly collegiality, fostering dialogue among diverse perspectives including those of design, policy, and research backgrounds. The daily schedule will include time for presentations, workshop-style collaboration, and informal brainstorming sessions among faculty and students.

The School’s program will focus on these themes:

• Democratic transformations of society through digital media
• Innovations in transparency and political participation using new online tools
• Grassroots civic activities using digital technologies
• Prospects for digital communication in developing regions
• Economically and politically galvanizing historically underserved areas
• Developing “open cities” and municipal participation through technological interventions

For more information about the School, its faculty, and to apply, please visit: http://digitaltransformationschool.org/2010/

The futureplaces showcase at SXSW took place at the AMODA-Club DeVille evening event on March 13, and was a great success! For 40 minutes on a hot Austin night, the audience was offered a selection of recordings from the two editions of the festival (including various sound samples from the concerts by the STOP collective), as well as recordings of various local initiatives throughout Europe. A highlight of the set was the spontaneous audience interaction with samples from a demonstration in London called “Scream for Mother Earth”!

The sound tapestry, performed by Heitor Alvelos and Anselmo Canha, was accompanied by projections by João Cruz. These projections incorporated the festival´s URL (futureplaces.org), as well as slogans referring to the festival, the outcome of an oblique brainstorm which included:

VISIBLE CHALLENGES

FICTITIOUS ERAS

UNKNOWN POTENTIAL

MAGNETIC OTHERS

DISCREET FACILITATORS

ENDLESS ENDS

POTENTIAL VERTIGO

MIXABLE CITIES

HISTORICAL EXPANSION

HOPEFUL LANGUAGES

ANXIOUS CONSENSUS

The profile of the festival was raised through the showcase itself, as well as through the distribution of flyers and t-shirts. Many attendants expressed great interest in submitting work for futureplaces 2010.

Kathleen Tyner, Assistant Professor in the Radio- Television-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin presented the opening keynote speech at the Second Annual International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Appli-cations on March 25-26, 2010 in Braga, Portugal. The speech, An Array of Play: Games for Living and Learning, presented a wide range of contexts for serious games and virtual worlds across academic disciplines.

The conference, hosted by the Universidade de Minho in Braga, convened researchers, game producers and computer scientists from around the world to present and discuss the latest research in the area of “serious games.” The next conference in 2011 will be held in Greece. To see complete details, including the winning research papers from the conference, please click on: http://www.vsgames2010.org/

Preceding the conference, as part of the Co-Lab effort to identify co-supervision activities for students, Professor Tyner also presented her research on digital media to graduate students at the University of Porto on March 23, 2010. The meeting was coordinated by Professor Artur Pimenta Alves, Co-Director of Digital Media at the University of Porto and offered an opportunity for students to present their current work and to learn about links to people and resources that could support their research.

As part of the advanced digital media program, UT Filmmaker and professor Andrew Garrison spent time in Porto in March, and reports on his co-teaching experiences there.

Two Porto classes, two realities of sight and sound. In one, a course on documentary, film-makers shoot people at work an old couple making shoes by hand, a woman setting up her little butcher shop at the market, another woman taking a break from work behind the lunch counter to talk to the crew-she knows everyone of her customers. The students’ challenge, from U.T. Professor and filmmaker Andrew Garrison working with Porto instructor and filmmaker Soraia Ferreira, is to tell these stories in three minutes each, the first assignment in their new documentary class.

Across town in the afternoon, Garrison works with Dr. Carlos Guedes in a class where eight graduate students listen and watch rough cuts of grad student films from the University of Texas Dept. RTF. The class in Sound Design at the University of Porto will edit and design sound for these four films. They have just completed a first assignment in three days—a two-minute “sound portrait” of another member of the class. The finished pieces are fun, complex, impressive, weaving between the speakers, making use of effects, atmospheres, and spoken word.

Both courses are part of a unique, combined PhD and Masters program that is working across disciplines in Porto, and, in the case of the Sound Design class, collaborating across the waters with Texas student filmmakers. Garrison returns to Austin after the week but will continue to listen and view work and advise students in collaboration with Ferreira, Guedes, and Dr. Jose Alves, in real time and time-shifted on-line

The UT Austin|Portugal Program is promoting international events in Portugal that play a role in the development of imaging technologies to support the advance of science and engineering fields. These are crucial in current e-Science developments, which in most cases, require innovative

ways to grasp the results of the simulation of computer models. Scientific visualization events will be active in Portugal this May and June with the support of the

Advanced Computing program: the IBERGRID’2010 conference and the Summer School in e-Science with Many-Core CPU/GPU Processors.

The IBERGRID’2010 (http://www.ibergrid.eu/2010/) is the 4th edition of a series of Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conferences that started in 2007 under the framework of the bilateral agreement for Science and Technology signed between Portugal and Spain. IBERGRID’2010 will take place in Braga May 24th 2010 and aims to leverage the construction of a common Iberian Grid Infrastructure and to foster cooperation in the fields of grid computing and supercomputing. The organization of the IBERGRID event includes an International Conference with several parallel Thematic Sessions (May 24th-27th), an HPC Workshop (May 27th afternoon), and a 1-day Hands-on Tutorial (May 28th), for researchers in computational science and engineering.

This tutorial, with hands-on sessions, addresses issues related to access different types of remote HPC facilities, from thin-node-distributed-memory clusters (such as Ranger as TACC), to fat-node-SMP clusters (Finis Terrae at CESGA, Galicia, with up to 1TB of shared RAM) and to CPU_GPU clusters. This latter topic is covered by Paul Navratil from UT Austin, who will talk about CUDA and will access and use the Longhorn cluster at TACC, the largest visualization and data analysis GPU-cluster system in the world.

The Summer School in e-Science with Many-Core CPU/ GPU Processors (http://advcomp.di.uminho.pt/uta/mcss2010/) is planned for the 3rd week of June, also in Braga, and is the first course in Europe given by two NVidia senior members (David Kirk and Michael Garland) and a faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Wen-mei W. Hwu).

David Kirk is an NVIDIA Fellow and served from 1997 to 2009 as NVIDIA’s chief scientist, a role in which he led the development of graphics technology for today’s most popular consumer entertainment platforms. Wen-mei W. Hwu is the Walter J. (“Jerry”) Sanders III-Advanced Micro Devices Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Michael Garland is currently a research scientist with NVIDIA Research and an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign.

The Summer School will also have other experts in Graphics Computing and from other Scientific Computing areas, to present their views and experiences in using CUDA in the development of their libraries or scientific applications.

For more information on how to attend, please visit the following websites: http://www.ibergrid.eu/2010/, for IBERGRID’2010 and http://advcomp.di.uminho.pt/uta/mcss2010/, for The Summer School.

CoLab researcher Tomás Henriques has won the 2010 Guthman Musical Instrument Competi­tion for his Double Slide Controller, an electronic instrument featuring two slides inspired by the trombone.

Henriques describes his Double Slide Controller as “a new electronic instrument whose playing technique is based on the acoustic slide trombone. It has two independent slides and two ver­satile hand controllers that allow free motion in three spatial dimensions.” A demo with more explanation is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEDAJY92gt4

Tomás Henriques is a researcher at the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is currently on a post-doctoral research leave and teaching in the Music Department at Buffalo State College. He collaborates with Carlos Guedes and Bruce Pennycook in the CoLab-funded research project “Kinetic Controller Driven Music Systems”. He is a composer for both acoustic and electronic instruments and conducts research on real-time interactive music composition and interfaces for real-time speech synthesis.

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is an annual event at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology which awards a prize for the best new ideas integrating musicality, design and engineering.

The third edition of the Summer Institute in Digital Media is now on the way, with the applications open for the Lisbon courses.

The Lisbon courses will take place at FCSH/UNL (Av. Berna, 26) and will cover the subjects of: Online Journalism (June 21st to July 2nd), with Rosental Alves, Interactive Documentary (June 14th to July 2nd), led by Karen Kocher and The New Entertainment Marketplace (June 21st to July 2nd), led by Tom Schatz. Additional courses are expected and will be announced soon, please check the Program’s website for updates.

All interested students may apply to one or more courses by email to utaustinportugal@fct.mctes.pt. The application must have the students’ Résumé and a Motivation Letter to up to 350 words, as well as the person’s basic info (name, telephone, address, contacts). The name of the course should be state in the email’s subject (one email per course).

For more information on the courses’ schedules and professors’ bios please visit http://www.utaustinportugal.org/.

The UT Austin|Portugal Program announces the opening of the PhD Scholarship calls for 2010. The Call opened on April 15th and the deadline for applications is May 15th. All interested candidates must sub­mit their application electronically or by post to the UT Austin|Portugal Program.

The Program is accepting PhD applications in Advanced Digital Media and Mathematics. The Advanced Digital Media applicants can apply to the following subjects: Production of Audiovisual and Interactive Content, Journalism, Technology, Industry, Public and Markets. The Mathematics applicants can apply to the following subjects: Algebra and Number Theory; Analysis and Numerical Analysis; Analysis and Par­tial Differential Equations; Geometry and Topology; Optimization; Stochastic Processes and Mathemati­cal Finance and Dynamical Systems.

For more information about this call please go to the Program’s official website (http://www.utaustinportugal.org/) or send your questions to the directors of your interest area (in English): dm.colab@fct.mctes.pt (for Digital Media) and math.colab@fct.mctes.pt (for Mathematics).

Main objectives

1. To enhance digital inclusion and integration:

-By understanding the con-ditions and patterns of the access, use, appropriations and associated competencies of users and non-users of digital media, with a focus on digitally excluded families and on children and young people;

-By identifying how the na-tional, regional, social and cultural contexts can affect digital inclusion.

2. To promote comparative research and advanced education on digital media

-Working on a transnational and interdisciplinary approach.

-Training young graduate students on how to research digital media issues.

-Promoting participatory methods of research

Year 1

The ongoing qualitative research involves the observation of digital environments and interviews with families, involv­ing different generations and ages (15+). The script adapt­ed to each country includes questions about life history and media uses, focusing on digital media.

In Portugal, two members of 65 families were interviewed, in a total of 130 interviews. In Texas, the interviews were conduct­ed with three generations of 16 families. These families also provided retrospective information from 10 years ago, which allows for a quasi-longitudinal comparison.

The interviews were conducted by about 60 young research­ers, who received proper training in post-graduation classes, in each country.

The collected data is now being analyzed by the project team that includes researchers in nine universities, six of them in Portugal,and about 15 PhD students in both countries.

The scientific dissemination of the research has taken place in

international congresses (IAMCR, ICA, ECREA), in the form of collective panels and individual papers.

The focus of Diogo’s PhD research work is to raise the abstraction level of parallel programming by developing a new set of programming constructs that promotes a stronger separation of concerns in parallel computing. The idea is to separate the domain specific code from parallelization issues, that is, hidden from programmers (such as scientists) as far as possible the complexity of parallel programming, by identifying parallelization concerns that can be specified as separate modules and investigating the use of different programming paradigms and programming constructs for each concern (e.g., a data flow model to specify data distributions, algorithmic skeletons to address coordination of tasks, etc.).

A framework named YaSkel (figure 1) was already developed as result of Diogo’s PhD research activities. YaSkel is based on Skeletons and Software Patterns, it allows parallelizing legacy code seamlessly through the use of the Dependency Injection Pattern. This work was presented by Diogo and his Portuguese supervisor – Professor João Luís Sobral – at ISPDC 2009 (International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing).

At this moment Diogo is spending a semester, from (past) February to July, at the University of Texas at Austin integrated on a research group, which leader is Dr. Keshav Pingali – Diogo’s supervisor at UT Austin. During this period Diogo will be focused on his research, besides other tasks he will be working on graph algorithms. One of those algorithms constructs Phylogenetic trees (figure 2) upon a given set of taxa, and was written by Tandy Warnow et al. Despite the main goals will be to apply separation of concerns and to achieve better performance from parallelization of the algorithm, another important goal is to do applied science.

 Main Research Interests:

• Parallel and Distributed Systems Programming
• Multicore and High Performance Computing Platforms
• Software Engineering, namely Analysis, Design and Patterns
• Algorithm and Graph Theory
• BioInformatics