SAPO’s collaboration with universities continues to bear fruit and once again the projects developed at SAPO Labs are being shown on Codebits, still in prototype but perfectly functional. Celso Martinho, technical director of SAPO, shows his satisfaction with the development that the initiative has had at the University of Aveiro and also at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, where he was working during this year still informally.
“We know that this commitment to connect universities is important and that it brings new ideas, many experimental, that may or may not be transformed into products” he explains. Some of the more mature projects have been shown in previous editions of Codebits and others are now reaching this stage.
Verbatim was put online today and offers a new view on news news, extracting direct and indirect quotes from the news and organizing them by topics and personalities.
Developed at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, the project takes advantage of innovative algorithms and is fully automatic, exploring the various sources of online news to present quotes, but also trends, classifying information and presenting a color “thermometer” according to topics and quotes are more or less used by different news sources, Jorge Teixeira, one of the researchers involved, explained to TeK.
Also from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Trends is another project that debuts on Codebits and uses information from SAPO research to work in a graphic and intercrossed way the terms and trends (pass the repetition) of the searches carried out by users.
Sérgio Nunes, a researcher at FEUP involved in the two projects, admits that the initiatives are already fully functional prototypes and that they can grow into autonomous projects, a decision that relegates to SAPO’s responsibility.
From the Aveiro laboratory, from which projects like Carne p’ra Canhão have already emerged, WeOnTV now appears, which this year is more mature and projects the features of instant messaging services onto the television screen, allowing the sharing of ideas and impressions with friends about the image of the TV broadcast.
Celso Martinho, technical director of SAPO, admits that this is a project with great potential and that the development carried out within the scope of SAPO Labs is very important, having managed to overcome some of the limitations of this type of interfaces, such as the lack of a keyboard on the remote control. and also the user’s motivation in front of the TV, which is different from the one sitting at the computer.
Also the SAPO Campus, which has been developed with the University of Aveiro, is now in a phase of greater autonomy, and will be open to the entire university, and in 2010 it may also be extended to other institutions, including universities, institutes and even secondary schools.
This project brings into the pedagogical community a collaboration and interconnection that often exists informally, with the placement of class videos on YouTube, or messages on Twitter, although it does not intend to replace e-learning systems.
Fatima Hunter
