University of Minho

The University of Minho (UDM), founded in 1973, is located in the Minho region of Northern Portugal, and has two campi, in the towns of Braga and Guimarães. With its 16000 undergraduate, 2000 post-graduate, and about 1200 teaching staff, the University is one of the biggest Universities in Portugal, and considers itself to be a complete University, offering degrees that span Medicine and Technology, to Arts, Humanities and Law.

The University is also positioned as a Research University with about 120 PhDs being awarded each year, an average yearly production of refereed papers published in international journals of 2/full time equivalent, and 250 R&D contracts being signed every year with external companies. This project will be hosted at the Algoritmi Research Centre of the Engineering School and will be conducted by the mobile and ubiquitous computing group. This group has an extensive experience in projects in this field with national and European funding. In particular, the group has been running, since 2005, a research program on situated displays. This program integrates industry contracts and several research projects in public displays, providing a crucial background for this project. Within the scope of this research program, there are currently three active projects: WESP, a project funded under a partnership program with Carnegie Mellon University and focused on security, privacy and identity management in situated services; the Instant Places project on bluetooth- based social interaction around public displays; and the Living Lab for Situated Displays(to start in September 2009), a shared infrastructure for open innovation in public displays.