Ada Lovelace Day - Manuela Veloso - Elvira Fortunato

I pleged to post an entry about a woman in science and technology on Ada Lovelace Day. I decided to write about 2 women, not one.

First I would like to talk about a roboticist, Manuela Veloso. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon and is the Herbert A. Simon Professor. Manuela Veloso led the CORAL (Cooperate, Observe the world, Reason, Act, and Learn) research group researching scientific and engineering challenges of creating teams of intelligent agents in complex, dynamic and uncertain environments. With her students, Manuela Veloso has developed teams of robot soccer agents, which have been RoboCup world champions several times.

She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. She also received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1980 and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1984 from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon.

Manuela Veloso is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and President-Elect of the RoboCup International Federation. She was awarded an NSF Career Award in 1995 and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997.

Manuela Veloso created the new “V-unit” program several years ago, to provide an opportunity for graduate students to grow a Vision of how computer science and technology can affect non-traditional problems dealing with society, ecology, and sustained devlopment.

Veloso is the author of one book on “Planning by Analogical Reasoning” and editor of several other books, and have published more than 100 research papers.

The second scientist that I would like to introduce is Elvira Fortunato. Elvira is a professor of Mater Science Depart. of FCT and Director of CENIMAT (Mater Investigation Center). She is one of the best researchers of what is called transparent electronics.

Her group has created a disposable transistor with a layer of paper in his structure as described in their paper: High-Performance Flexible Hybrid Field-Effect Transistors Based on Cellulose Fiber Paper, published in Setember, last year.

I only accept comments in Portuguese, English and French. Update: The team lead by Elvira Fortunato has created an electrochromic transistor capable of varible color on various surfaces.(in Expresso 2009-04-25, via: Portal das curiosidades