Category Archives: Technology

Destination Pluto: new horizons in engineering

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Diversity is key in a team operating a mission as challenging as New Horizons, said Alice Bowman, the Mission Operations Manager of the first spacecraft to travel to Pluto. At her talk at the Institute of Technology of the University of Lisbon, on October 7th, Bowman told the story of an exciting journey to the far reaches of our solar system, but also described the difficulties of aiming at a planetary body that is unlike any of the other worlds explored so far. Continue reading →

Computers are learning our language

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Between September 19th and 21st, Lisbon welcomed researchers from all over the world who are pushing at the boundaries of how we can use computers to process text and speech. At the conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015), the range of topics covered included automated translation, the use of computers to extract information from documents or sentiments from social media content, and the generation of text and speech in natural language. Continue reading →

Café Scientifique – Nanotechnology

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‘Nano’ has become a fancy word to sell miniaturised devices, and some science-fiction filmmakers used it to name the ‘magical’ technology that moves the plot on. In the laboratory, working at the nanoscale means moving atoms around with useful effects on our scale, said Michael Fay, the invited speaker in this year’s first Nottingham Café Scientifique and a researcher at the Nottingham Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Centre. Continue reading →