*Lunch will take place at:

Restaurante Café Oriental
Largo do Toural, 11, 4810-427 Guimarães
Telefone: 253 414 048

*Lunch will take place at:

Restaurante Café Oriental
Largo do Toural, 11, 4810-427 Guimarães
Telefone: 253 414 048

What Programming Language Design
Taught Me About Life

(Kent Pitman — HyperMeta, Inc., USA)

Through my many years of involvement in the design, standardization, and use of various Lisp dialects, including Common Lisp, ISLISP and Scheme, I came to see languages as much more complex entities than mere functional behavior or stylized syntax. Languages are about community and shared values—and not just the kinds of values that get returned from a function call. The choices a language designer makes will attract certain users and alienate others. That’s a responsibility to be taken very seriously. I’ll highlight some of the complex choices that differentiate various programming languages, and survey some of the factors that can influence such choices, as well as the consequences that can come of them. Along the way, I’ll also share some of the life lessons I took away into the real world from my own experiences in language design.

From Eliza to Siri
A brief survey on Natural Language Understanding

(Luísa Coheur — Instituto Superior Técnico / INESC-ID, Portugal)

Natural Language Understanding is usually defined as the task of mapping natural language into some meaning representation that the computer is able to understand. Natural Language Understanding models are at the core of several applications in the area of Human Language Technologies, ranging from simple tasks in which short commands are uttered to robots, to complex dialogue systems or reading comprehension exercises. However, natural language is much more difficult to conquer than we tend to believe, and, therefore, Natural Language Understanding research is still far from being able to offer general, mature and fully automatic solutions. In this talk, I will review the main ideas behind old and current Natural Language Understanding models. I will describe the main achievements, but also the challenges that still need to be surpassed in what I consider to be the holy grail of Human Language Technologies.

Norma-Simplex:
Exploring the Full Spectrum of Languages

(Nuno Carvalho — United Nations University (UNU-EGOV), Portugal)

Languages come in many flavours and with different purposes. This talk illustrates the heterogeneous use of languages in different settings in the context of the Norma-Simplex project, an infrastructure for legal documents analysis, assessment, and re-factoring. From the programming languages used to perform different tasks, to the markup languages used to store models and interchange information between systems, including the natural languages techniques being explored in between.

Static Application Security Testing

(José Pereira — Checkmarx, Portugal)

Have you considered auditing your source code using static analysis tools? What do these things pick up that you can't with a code review? How do they work? Software security concerns have fortunately been increasing over the last few years, certainly due to the continuous growing number of threats being thrown at our applications every day. Still, not every project's contributor is a software security expert and hiring one to perform thorough code reviews for each contribution can be unsustainable. This is where SAST (Static Application Security Testing) comes in. These tools rely on static source code analysis to parse and query abstract syntax trees, or parse trees, inferring potential vulnerabilities without having a running system. The basic components of these tools will be discussed as well as their pros and cons.