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On Friday, November 12, the MIT Portugal Program paid a visit to the Escola Secundária Carlos Amarante, in Braga. This was done under the scope of the Ciência Viva initiative, “Professores MIT vão à Escola” - whose objective is to disseminate science in Portuguese high schools and to encourage students to pursue their studies in high tech fields in which MIT is a world leader. The series has reached thousands of students and facilitated informal and personal interactions with dozens of MIT faculty members at schools across Portugal.

The session at Escola Secundária Carlos Amarante was conducted for about 80 eleventh grade students, with presentations by Professors Bruce Tidor (MIT) and Lígia Rodrigues (University of Minho) - a graduate of the high school.  Professors Tidor and Rodriques were ably supported by  Joao Nuno Torres (Ciência Viva) and Hortense Santos (School Director) as they presented the session topic: “Modern Research in Bioengineering”.

The PhD Integration Workshop is an annual event that introduces our new first-year Sustainable Energy Systems PhD students to energy research in the MIT Portugal Program.  Coming together for the first time as a cohort, they have an opportunity to interact with each other as well as with the more senior students and faculty in the context of workshops, research presentations, and social events.  This year’s program took place in Lisbon over the course of a full week in mid-November, distributed between venues on the IST Almeda campus, the University of Lisbon campus, and ISEG.

MIT faculty and researchers who participated were Prof. John Fernandez, Prof. Joel Clark, Prof. David Marks, Stephen Connors, and Ned Spang.  They were joined during the week by students from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the School of Economics and Management (ISEG), the University of Coimbra, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL), and the University of Porto, and Portuguese professors Carlos Silva (IST), João Serra (FCUL), Antonio Vallera (FCUL), Miguel Brito (FCUL), Isabel Proença (ISEG), Luis Dias (Coimbra), and Antonio Martins (Porto).  About 40 students from the four participating Portuguese universities were present.  On several days students further along in the PhD program joined the first-year students.

The 2nd Meeting of the Monitoring and Control Cluster on Smart Buildings/Smart Spaces was held on  November 11-12, 2010 at Instituto Superior Técnico and was jointly organized by the European Commission (through Dr. Jorge Pereira, Principal Scientific Officer of Embedded Systems and Control), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Telecommunications Institute (IT), and the MIT Portugal Program.

On the first day the conference was held at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Alameda Campus). Throughout the day, interventions by business and academia representatives pointed to the challenges and opportunities in capturing the “intelligence” of a fully networked environment of sensors that are already deployed but presently working in isolation (e.g. energy, meteorological, and transportation-related).  This would allow for a more informed decision-making process in our everyday lives, for instance in the adoption of networked vehicles or “intelligent” energy management solutions. Although this vision of a fully networked environment of sensors and actuators may have its benefits, some issues remain - like privacy and security - that need to be properly addressed.