Carolina Carreira awarded Huawei scholarship
Carolina Carreira has been awarded an extremely competitive Huawei scholarship, becoming one of 50 awardees selected among 5300 applicants.
An Early Stage Researcher (ESR) in the Automated Reasoning and Software Reliability (ARSR) Research Area, Carolina is developing her PhD research on usable security under the CMU Portugal program (supervised by João Ferreira at INESC-ID, Alexandra Mendes at INESC-TEC and Nicolas Christin at Carnegie Mellon University), focusing on users’ motivations and concerns when using security software.
The Huawei scholarship program (Programa de Bolsas Huawei), now in its second edition, awards 50 university students in the sciences and engineering with 5.000€ each under the company’s commitment to education as one of its “main pillars of action and a fundamental territory where [they] have invested significantly in Portugal.”
In her PhD, Carolina has been investigating how to communicate technical concepts. As Carolina herself adds, “I don’t just try to communicate the concepts, but also understand the motivations and concerns that users might have.” Her PhD project builds upon her MSc project, but it tackles a more ambitious and general problem. With this project Carolina will study the impact of formal verification on systems’ security and perform the first collection of studies on people’s mental models on formal verification. This will entail studying people’s perceptions and mental models related to the impact of formal verification on software security, how to convey formal verification concepts and their relation to security, as well as investigating the impact of formal verification on the adoption of software products.
On receiving this scholarship, Carolina commented that “given that this program aims to ‘recognize and help students with academic merit and outstanding personnel, also reinforcing the fight for gender equality in the engineering sector‘, I am grateful to have been one of the 50 awarded out of 5300 and that this award serves to enhance the next years of my doctorate.”
Carolina was awarded her 2022/2023 Huawei scholarship in an award gala on 04 April 2023 held in Lisbon, Portugal.
Congratulation Carolina!
Upcoming Events
Educational Workshop on Responsible AI for Peace and Security (UNODA)
On June 6 and 7, The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are offering a selected group of technical students the opportunity to join a 2-day educational workshop on Responsible AI for peace and security.
The third workshop in the series will be held in Porto Salvo, Portugal, in collaboration with GAIPS, INESC-ID, and Instituto Superior Técnico. The workshop is open to students affiliated with universities in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa, Oceania, and Asia.
Date & Time: June 6 a 7
Where: IST – Tagus Park, Porto Salvo
Registration deadline: April 8
Summary: “As with the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) on people’s day-to-day lives, the impacts for international peace and security include wide-ranging and significant opportunities and challenges. AI can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but its dual-use nature means that peaceful applications can also be misused for harmful purposes such as political disinformation, cyberattacks, terrorism, or military operations. Meanwhile, those researching and developing AI in the civilian sector remain too often unaware of the risks that the misuse of civilian AI technology may pose to international peace and security and unsure about the role they can play in addressing them. Against this background, UNODA and SIPRI launched, in 2023, a three-year educational initiative on Promoting Responsible Innovation in AI for Peace and Security. The initiative, which is supported by the Council of the European Union, aims to support greater engagement of the civilian AI community in mitigating the unintended consequences of civilian AI research and innovation for peace and security. As part of that initiative, SIPRI and UNODA are organising a series of capacity building workshops for STEM students (at PhD and Master levels). These workshops aim to provide the opportunity for up-and-coming AI practitioners to work together and with experts to learn about a) how peaceful AI research and innovation may generate risks for international peace and security; b) how they could help prevent or mitigate those risks through responsible research and innovation; c) how they could support the promotion of responsible AI for peace and security.”