First Foundation Project

We want to foster a mindset of agency: that you can create the change you want to see, rather than becoming a victim of the circumstances, creating an empowering environment where good ideas are encouraged and rewarded.

Our aim is embodied by the motto see amazing in every student. This means two things: recognizing that everyone has potential while, at the same time, helping students discover by themselves what they can really become, with proper guidance from mentors, professors and even researchers. It’s all about building a participative hands-on collective, preparing people to work together towards building the future instead of being mere spectators, by showing them what they can do.

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This project consists of a week-long course designed to teach B.Sc. and M.Sc. students how to engage with physical computing, by building and programming robots. The course shall be open to students from all backgrounds, with the sole restriction that they must know how to program (preferably in Processing).

This project aims to empower students to build embodied agents that escape the confinements of their computers and operate (sense and act) in the physical world. The goal of this bootcamp is not to be a thorough theoretical course on robotics, but rather to teach students how to quickly design, build and program a robot to perform a given task. Students are then free to take the knowledge acquired and combine it with concepts from various courses in the bachelor’s and master’s programs, to build their intelligent robots.

CyberSecurity is deemed as necessary for the Internet and to secure the digital components of our lives. In the past years, communications in data networks have expanded exponentially, leading to increased and more sophisticated attacks.

In this context, universities, research institutes, enterprises are faced with the challenge of training their human resources to the ever-increasing threats. CSLab aspires to position DEI as a reference laboratory regarding CyberSecurity, by providing access to knowledge, equipment and experience of red and blue hacking teams. CSLab will go beyond a set of equipment, teaching/learning activities, it will also pursue collaboration network and security academias of vendors.

CSLab fills the actual gap in DEI: what is a modern Informatics Engineering Department without a cybersecurity laboratory?

FeedNPlay will give the department a new way to communicate and interact with its community and reach out to external ones. It consists, primarily, of an array of five large LCDs mounted on the wall of the most populated corridor in the department, right after the entrance. These displays will offer a dynamic, digital medium with diverse contents, ranging from images, videos, animations, text, information visualization projects, moving typography, as well as live and interactive artworks, installations and media experiences. With FeedNPlay, we aim to create a unique medium that motivates the design and exhibition of different projects made by students and researchers from the department and also by designers, artists, and creatives from across the world.

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The Feedzai Award for Teaching Excellence is a yearly monetary award for the professor that proposes and executes the most profound curriculum change, as well as teaching methods, in a university course, being recognized by their students and peers as an example of teaching excellence.

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The goal of Ignite Coimbra is to provide a unique learning experience for people who are curious about space and want to have an enriching experience. The event will last for two days, featuring multiple lectures where guest companies will present topics related to the space sector, coupled with different challenges with prizes, following each talk. The participants will be able to interact with those companies, fostering a closer contact between them. The main challenge will take place on the last day of the event, requiring the participants to team up, work on their ideas and prepare a pitch, which will be evaluated by a panel of judges. During preparation, they will also have the opportunity to receive feedback and guidance from the judges. At the end of the event, the participant with the highest combined score from all the challenges will be the overall winner of the event, receiving the main prize.

The underrepresentation of women in informatics is an issue of profound importance, that may not only limit women’s access to lucrative and impactful careers but also forfeits the tech industry itself, as gender diversity fosters innovation and improves team performance.

INSPIRA-BALANCE proposes to raise awareness about the importance of inclusion and gender balance in the field of informatics, particularly through activities that encourage people to step out of their comfort zones, inside and outside the Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI). Those activities will involve DEI, external schools, families, companies, and society in general to recognize the urgent need for gender parity in the tech sector and will produce an enduring outcome.

INSPIRA-BALANCE will leverage INSPIRA, a mentoring program for female talent retention in Informatics. While we will capitalize on the digital presence of INSPIRA to amplify reach and share outcomes, we have planned seven actions to be carried out throughout one year to create an impact and make a lasting change in the perception of gender balance in Informatics.

ShiftAPPens unfolds as a 48-hour Hackathon, where the central objective is the collaborative conceptualization and realization of an idea within the designated time frame. After the timely submission of projects, a discerning evaluation follows the team’s final pitch, undertaken by a panel of hand-picked judges.

This event transcends the primary focus on Shift APPens’ main competition, offering an expansive experience. Alongside the central event, participants have the opportunity to engage in diverse activities. These include talks, workshops, and smaller competitions sponsored by the participating companies.

We will also introduce a Mentoring Program throughout the participation in ShiftAPPens, available to all participants. The primary objective of this program is to assist and engage participants in seeking solutions and enhancing their projects by soliciting feedback and guidance from professionals across various domains, ranging from web development and frontend expertise to pitching and business model refinement.

(8th Edition of ShiftAPPens: Download Project Description)

The goal of this project is to identify and motivate talented high school students at the national level to explore IT as a possible option for their future career and to create awareness of the excellence and opportunities that DEI may provide these students if they enroll at one of its BScs programs.

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TOPDEI is focused on addressing three main challenges: boosting entry-level student participation, offering more advanced training opportunities to bring the best students to international competition level, and achieving financial sustainability.

We aim to promote activities that allow students to raise their own bar even further to attain excellence, and to expand the current TOPDEI student community. Similarly to previous editions, we propose to organize internal competitions, to offer two courses on Competitive Programming and to organize a Programming Camp, but also to offer tutoring activities on a weekly basis (TOPDEI Meeting Point), to give awards to the best performing students on on-line competitions, and to enable the best TOPDEI students to attend an international advanced programming school.

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UptoData is the first edition of a National Data Science Students Meeting. This project aims to promote interest and knowledge in the field of Data Science, an area of study and work that is gaining increasing expression in Portugal. The target audience for this event are students from the various bachelor’s and master’s degrees that involve the area of Data Science.

Throughout the days of the event, students will be offered countless activities focused on promoting both direct dialogue and networking with companies and socializing between participants from all over the country. With this in mind, we intend to promote sustainable activities from talks to workshops.

Even though VR is a well-established technology with clear indication that it will be an important medium of the future, it is underexplored and under-represented at DEI. Thus, if DEI is to continue to represent our many possible technological futures, we need to create the conditions for students, professors, and researchers to engage with this technology from innovative developer and user perspectives.

The VRLab will provide these conditions by allowing access to knowledge, equipment, and experiences. Going beyond a set of equipment and teaching/learning activities, it will embody the very nature of VR by being simultaneously a physical and a virtual space. Leveraging existing Social VR platforms, such as Mozilla Hubs, in the VRLab, people will be able to meet, learn, exchange ideas, both physically and virtually.

The Wearable Systems Lab intends to be a multidisciplinary laboratory as a cohesive element to support the development of innovative ideas in several application areas requiring the use of wearable devices.

The Lab’s multidisciplinary nature facilitates integration with other DEI labs, including the VR Lab and the Amazing Lab, as well as labs from other research units of the university. The goal is to establish itself as a central hub for wearables and geospatial data analysis and grow in people, collaborations, and equipment. To achieve this the lab will conduct its research and collaborate with renowned national and international research institutes. This will allow us to develop new integration techniques for future wearables and optimize lab-proven integration techniques that will push the limitations of current techniques and make them more widely appropriate for everyone.