The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program (CMU Portugal) has recently attributed an investment of 21M€ to research, of which 11.4 M€ come from the European COMPETE 2020 Program and from the Portugal Foundation for Science and Tegolechnology (FCT). Of this value, 6M€ are through the CMU Portugal Program at CMU while 3.5M€ come from participating Portuguese ICT companies.

These top national companies include Feedzai, Compta, Farfetch, First Solutions, Glintt, GLSMED Learning Health, Ingeniarius, Outsystems, Unbabel, and We Do Consulting, which will lead all projects in partnership with 13 research groups from Portuguese Universities. ISR-Lisboa will be a partner in two of these Large-Scale Collaborative Research Projects projects:

 

iFetch: Multimodal conversational agents for the online fashion marketplace

Lead by Farfetch together with 
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
 and
 The Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, iFetch proposes to deliver a new generation of task-oriented conversational AI agents, which can interact by using verbal and visual information in a seamless manner, to mediate the interaction between large organizations and their users.

This will be based on conversational technology and algorithms, by addressing critical challenges, like tracking the evolution of the shopping needs throughout the conversation and relating product categories and characteristics, thus leading to better user engagement. To do this researchers will work together with access to Farfetch’s unique product knowledge base, massive (multimodal) training data, and experience in deploying and maintaining large AI systems ensuring a successful research program.

 

IntelligentCare: Intelligent Multimorbidity Management System
Lead by GLSMED Learning Health with Priberam, INESC ID – Instituto De Engenharia De Sistemas E Computadores and Associação Do Instituto Superior Técnico Para A Investigação e o Desenvolvimento. as well as Hospital da Luz
 and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University
.

This project will focus on managing the issue of a growing population with multimorbidity (co-occurring diseases), a worldwide problem to the sustainability of the healthcare system. IntelligentCare aims to develop a patient-centric solution to manage multimorbidity conditions by using analytical methods to explore data from the electronic health records and measures reported remotely by the patients. Under the value-based healthcare framework, the project will develop methods for early signalization and characterization of patients, identification of personalized clinical pathways based on evidence, and based on patient value vision, together with monitoring and prediction of hospital interactions. To achieve these goals research will be conducted in advanced analytical algorithms, particularly deep learning methods, in order to fully explore data. This is an innovative approach to evaluate the multimorbidity condition by introducing the concept of value to the patient in the process of characterization and prediction of patient interactions with the hospital.

 

According to a CMU Portugal this Call for Large-Scale Collaborative Research Projects, which was launched in May 2019 by ANI – Agência Nacional de Inovação, was initially planned to fund 3 to 4 projects but, recognizing the high quality of the 17 proposals submitted, the evaluation panel recommended 10 projects for funding during the next 3 years.