The PhD open Days at Técnico will take place on 5th and 6th April at Salão Nobre. aiming to bring together PhD students and experts.

Professor Arlindo Oliveira, president of Técnico, attended the opening session and highlighted the importance of the event, encouraging students “take and use this opportunity because it will allow you to learn about other areas, and ask experts for feedback on your projects”. “In Portugal people do not normally attend these events, but they are quite useful and very important.”, he added.

The Almuni Talks was the event that registered a larger participation so far. Four invited speakers who did their PhD at Técnico shared their experiences. Mariana Almeida, scientific researcher at Priberam, did her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and continued to work on research, namely in Machine Learning. She is also one of the main researchers involved in the EU project SUMMA and the responsible for the Machine Learning Lunch Seminars regularly held at Técnico.

João Graça, founder and CTO of Unbabel, spoke about the choices he made. “After I finished my PhD I began to think what would be next step. There were a lot of options, namely to go abroad, but I had my family and friends in Portugal”, explained engineer João Graça. He explained how he created Unbabel, a startup where machine translation is always monitored by a native speaker, the motivations that lead him to set up the company and the successful team.

On the first day, Dr James Yates, researcher at ITQB NOVA, presented a workshop on the development of knowledge and skills in scientific writing.

The second day will be focused on cybersecurity and renewable energies. A Pitch Competition among PhD students will also take place and the 20 pre-selected students will compete to win a certificate that will guarantee a free ticket to the next Web Summit, to be held in Lisbon.