News

Short-term scientific meeting with Dr. Barna Kovács

On February 2017, INESC TEC received the visit of Dr. Barna Kovács, Associate Professor at the Department of General and Physical Chemistry of the University of Pécs (Hungary). His visit was part of the first short-term scientific meeting (STSM) in the scope of STRONGMAR.

This one week STSM took place at the laboratories of the Centre for Applied Photonics (CAP) at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), where Dr. Barna collaborated with Dr. Pedro Jorge.

PhD students learned different techniques and tested new sensing materials, from the University of Pécs, to enable new optical chemical sensors. The work comes as a natural sequence of previous collaborations where the team already used different indicators for environmental monitoring and aquaculture (detection of dissolved CO2 and pH, projects AQUAMONITOR, MARINEYE and CORAL). Dr. Barna also shared his experience with antifouling materials that are being tested to make feasible the use of the sensors in an aquatic environment.

Dr. Barna visited the laboratory of the Centre for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CRAS) at ISEP as well, where the needs for monitoring chemical parameters, in the context of different projects, were evaluated.

From this STSM resulted some ideas for common projects and collaborations, which soon will be materialized as joint applications in competitive funding calls.

2016 STRONGMAR conference

The 2016 STRONGMAR conference was held at Porto (Portugal) on the 17th of November 2016. It was organized by INESC TEC with the support of Fórum Oceano (the Portuguese Association of Maritime Economy) and took place within the BUSINESS2SEA 2016 event.

The conference was chaired by Dr. Alan J. Jamieson, which is a Senior Lecturer in Marine Ecology at Newcastle University.

The programme was mainly devoted to sea science, and comprised ten talks from speakers of the British Geological Survey (Scotland, UK), CIIMAR (Portugal), INESC TEC (Portugal), IPMA (Portugal), the Marine Scotland Science (Scotland, UK), the Newcastle University (England, UK), the Scottish Marine Institute (Scotland, UK) and the Strathclyde University (Scotland, UK).

The STRONGMAR conferences take place every year from 2016 to 2018. The next editions will be devoted to sea technology and sea innovation, in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Winter School on Underwater Vision and Robotics

The Winter School on Underwater Vision and Robotics was held at Girona (Spain) from the 17th to the 21st of October 2016. It was organized by our partners of the Universitat de Girona (ViCOROB – Computer Vision and Robotics Research Group and CIRS – Girona Underwater Vision and Robotics Research Centre).

The programme comprised lectures on underwater robotics, underwater vision and underwater mission planning; and hands-on training on underwater vision and underwater mission planning.

The school participants were all students and researchers from the Centre for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CRAS) of INESC TEC, which presented and discussed their research activities and interests.