Beyond new media education and research, participants will receive training in entrepreneurship, innovation, and business development. While PhD research will be oriented towards foundational literature, research methods, and practice, the Digital Media Program will actively promote projects initiated by students in partnership with select industrial and financial partners. During the assessment period, expressions of interest have been set forth by leading Portuguese companies, including YDreams, Innovagency and By-Design, and the daily newspaper Público. These and other companies allow the practical implementation of an industrial affiliations program to be extended to other Portuguese, European, and American firms and media companies.

Through its collaboration with the College of Communication and the IC² Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, the Digital Media Program will explore the commercialization and marketing of digital media technologies and processes and the preparation of young digital media entrepreneurs and technology managers. One goal will be providing strategic advice and access regarding new and emerging markets in the United States and worldwide. These business development and commercialization activities will feature links with the Austin Technology Incubator and its market making activities in Austin, Texas, nationally, and internationally.

With respect to business applications and enrichment activities, the goal is to promote and guide technology transfer and entrepreneurial ventures and businesses in new media by attracting highly qualified students in the humanities, arts, and communication as well as in science, engineering, and business. Collaborations with new media technology-based firms will promote joint initiatives involving Portuguese institutions and public and private institutions in Austin, Texas. These activities will include support and promotion of:

• Initiatives for the identification and mobilization of innovative technologies with commercial potential;
• The internship program (noted above) with Portuguese students in Texas start-up firms and Texas students in Portuguese start-up firms, which will occur primarily during summer academic terms;
• A series of training workshops on “technology-based entrepreneurship;”
• A “new media venture design competition” or festival that brings together leading academic institutions with graduate programs in the digital media area. A large-scale “show-and-tell” and roundtable environment can facilitate sharing across institutional boundaries;
• An annual prize for the best new ideas for new media-based firms developed cooperatively by students at Portuguese institutions and The University of Texas at Austin.

The following areas will be jointly explored in order to find specific research topics of common interest:

• Computational Science: modeling, simulation, optimization, performance analysis and tuning, numerical methods for parallel and distributed computing;
• Computer System: paradigms and algorithms, system performance analysis, middleware, tools and technologies, and development of useful environments to the user.
• Applications: in science, engineering, economics, civil protection and risk management;

In addition, TACC and the Portuguese institutions will work together on deployment and operational issues for advanced computing, such as software, tools evaluation and secure access. All projects in these areas will include education, training, outreach activities and will consider opportunities for technology transfer, as Figure 2 shows.

In the area of Computational Science, work will be developed closely with teams of computational scientists and applied mathematicians from both UT-Austin and Portugal. Joint work will build on previous experience with interdisciplinary research at all the Portuguese universities involved in the partnership and will focus on the development of parallel numerical methods for science and engineering applications.

In the area of Computer Science, the main research issues to pursue include models and tools for programming, compilation, execution and debugging, web services, workflows, (utility driven) resource allocation in networks and global properties of large computer networks. Issues in fault-tolerance, like autonomic computing, self-healing, software aging, rejuvenation, dependability, and quality of service in advanced computing, will also be addressed. Overlay and peer-to-peer networks will also be studied as well as broadband wireless technology for advanced computing.

The research agenda will also include work on load balancing and resource allocation across a shared computing and communication infrastructure. For example, there is a need to extend traditional quality of service (QoS) metrics that have primarily been defined for communications services, so as to enhance the performance of an advanced and grid computing application, or multiple applications that share computing/communication infrastructure.

Research towards formulating and extending utility-based resource allocation for dynamic networks, and in particular for metrics that are relevant to the applications at hand, e.g., delays in transferring large amounts of raw data to remote sites, or approaches to routing and network caching of shared data among distributed sites will be pursued.

In the area of Deployment and Operations, collaboration will be aimed at improving cluster and grid computing environments by exchanging information about approaches and technologies, by developing best practices, and by investigating issues of U.S.-Europe advanced interoperability. The collaboration will also provide guidelines for those performing R&D using clusters and grids so that technologies are usable and provide the needed functionality.

In the area of Applications, the collaboration will consider the following:

• Study the relationship between advanced computing and power systems, and how the former can be used to enhance the performance of the latter;
• Optimize models and simulations using the advantages offered by advanced and grid computing technology (in fields such as oceanography, new materials, nanotechnology, flooding, and forest fires);
• Develop distributed data warehouse for simulation data obtained from protein folding and unfolding;
• Develop algorithms for large-scale parallelization of image processing and visualization (for medical applications, cultural heritage);
• Solve challenges posed by the analysis of terabytes of raw data (e.g., telescope information data processing about stars);
• Apply advanced and grid computing to research in environmental sciences, material sciences and geological sciences;
• Develop software verification and validation methods for parallel algorithms and result analysis.
• Develop web portals for user-friendly access to grids and scientific results;
• Test existing parallel codes using different advanced environments;

All research programs will include faculty and student exchange, co-supervision of Ph.D. students, and hosting of exchange post-doc fellows. An annual workshop in the field of advanced computing will be co-organized between UT-Austin and Portugal in the second and following years, which should include a Ph.D. doctoral consortium. A series of regular seminars of visiting faculty and over the Internet on advanced computing between Portugal and UT-Austin is also intended.

The goal is to create an internationally attractive graduate program which will be organized along the following guidelines:

1. Students enrolled must satisfy the requirements of all of the participating universities. Therefore, upon completion of these academic requirements, the student will be allowed to submit his thesis both at the participating Portuguese universities and at UT-Austin and the student will be able to obtain a degree in mathematics from the participating institutions.
2. There is a long history of scientific interaction between the Department of Mathematics at UT-Austin and Portuguese universities namely in the areas of applied mathematics and partial differential equations. Furthermore, both UT-Austin and the involved Portuguese universities have strong and complimentary groups in geometry and topology providing the framework for strong intellectual cooperation to promote high quality scientific collaborations and research. In the near-term, collaborations will also include other areas such as mathematical finance and algebra.
3. Portuguese and UT-Austin students should be involved in these cooperative research activities as soon as possible so that they can obtain the most benefit from these bi-national collaborations.

Research activity resulting from this cooperative program should be monitored by established research centers at the participating universities and which employ the involved researchers including the following key Portuguese faculty and institutions: Diogo Gomes (ISTUTL); Luisa Mascarenhas(FCTUNL ); Manuel Marques and Jose Rodrigues (FCUL), and Luis Nunes Vicente (University of Coimbra).

University Technology Enterprise Network (UTEN) commercialization activities will help incubate and accelerate global marketing of Portuguese knowledge-based start-up and established firms and prepare young entrepreneurs and technology managers to be competitive in the global knowledge economy. Emphasis will focus on company growth by providing strategic advice and access to new and emerging markets in the United States and worldwide and by exploring the possibility of incubating and accelerating the growth of Portuguese technology-based start-up firms. This will require entrepreneurship and commercialization training. Forms of collaboration need to be developed through specific programs that involve faculty, students, and industry experts with valuable experience and technological specialization in the fields concerned.

UTEN technology commercialization fellowship and internship programs will enhance Portuguese commercialization and entrepreneurship know-how by focusing on technology industry sectors that have the greatest potential for job and wealth creation for Portugal. In general, Portuguese university graduates and entrepreneurs lack opportunities to obtain hands-on experience in world-leading technology companies. While UTEN will promote university interaction with US industry in Austin, Texas and nationally, an equally important activity will be to accelerate the universities’ and Portuguese industry’s interaction and market access internationally. In an effort to afford such opportunities for selected Portuguese talent, UTEN will launch the Technology Fellowship and Internship Program (TIP) with leading international public and private institutions and companies to offer value added know-how concerning technology/knowledge entrepreneurship, marketing, and management.

This internship program will, whenever possible, be instituted collaboratively with IC² Institute and The University of Texas at Austin and seek a broad range of industrial and academic partners. There will be a special focus on “career development programs” in particular industry sectors. Initially internships will be targeted for highly educated Portuguese scientists and practitioners to work in commercial settings in Austin, Texas (including global firms) and over time in other US and worldwide locations. This training will utilize state-of-the-art models and concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship and will emphasize business development for the targeted industry sector.

The internships could be from 3-months to over a year in duration depending on industry realities and the desires of the participating companies and interns. The activities of each participating intern will be monitored by IC² Institute, UT-Austin via regular contacts with the participating company and the intern. Interns will be required to write quarterly reports on their work and progress. On completion of an internship program the interns will return to Portugal to transfer their S&T commercialization know-how to colleagues in Portugal.

Assist in the formation of spin-out /start-up companies by identifying competitive technologies and introducing them to the US and international markets through training, internships, and network building

Focus on US market access and business development by using industry sector experts

Promote joint business ventures in the US and internationally

Research structures and processes for industry-university collaboration, from funding specific researchers to S&T consortia including:

• Sharing best practices between corporate (commercialization) professionals and academics
• Researching how different models for collaboration may shape different expectations on the part of key players and therefore harbor different criteria by which success can be defined and evaluated
• Devising metrics for university-industry collaborations that will assist the Portuguese government in granting funds such as knowledge transfer grants linked to specific outcomes. Given the increased prevalence and importance of university-industry collaborative research partnerships it is important that corporate managers, university scientists, and decision makers better understand how to evaluate these endeavors in terms of the causes for successful or unsuccessful partnerships. Quantifiable metrics for such private-public collaborations are difficult to devise; however, they are important to assess the impact of governmental funding as well as for benchmarking for universities and corporations engaged in such collaborations.

Leveraging the benefits of Portugal’s existing incubators and science and technology parks as integrated environments for the growth of companies

Having participating Portuguese universities demonstrate the increased importance of knowledge transfer for wealth and job creation and societal impact through educational benefits, workshops, conferences, and publications as well as the creation of wealth and jobs, and career development

Gaining financial benefit for participating universities to help:

• Fund knowledge transfer activities and research
• Sustain the universities ability to commercialize internally developed research

Establishing gateways and networking for clients that want access to university expertise and/or technical services and/or reinforcing existing structures that already undertake such functions

Promoting the improvement and sharing of university policies that affect knowledge transfer to commercialization, such as intellectual property concerns including patenting and financial gains for faculty and the university