UC researchers Take Over UFAL

A group of University of Coimbra (UC) researchers arrived to the Federal University of the Alagoas (UFAL) to re-conquest the place.
This also marks the first visit of Prof. Marco Vieira, which is the scientific coordinator of the project, to the UFAL and is inserted in the context of a 1-month secondment. Nuno Antunes is a post-doc researcher and will be fulfilling a 3-month secondment, as will Cristiana Areias, which is returning to Maceió after last year’s secondment url.

The secondment kick-off activities include a series of seminars by the local students of Prof. Baldoíno Fonseca’s group which serve to start collaborations and receive feedback (full schedule available here). Presentations by Cristiana and Nuno are scheduled for the following Thursdays, during the regular meeting of the research group Engineering and Systems Group (EASY) at the Institute of Computing-UFAL.

During the stay, Nuno will be in charge of the second part of the Software Engineering discipline in the Master in Informatics program at UFAL, covering topics of Secure and Dependable development of systems.

The first class was held together with a talk by Marco entitled “Dependable and Secure Computing @ UC: Past… present… & future”. The talk focused on the UC’s research work and attracted a large attendance (see the picture below), inclusively with as several UFAL professors taking their students to attend. The talk served also as motivation for the students and to discuss potential collaborations.

Nuno’s and Cristiana’s longer secondments will allow collaborating with the local MSc and BSc students. Currently, Henrique Alves and Marcus Piancó are already developing work on the prediction of software vulnerabilities based on change history information and on the existence of certain Code Smells. Furthermore, other students will have the opportunity to collaborate in the implementation of techniques for testing and injecting faults in Service Oriented Architectures.