Researchers from LASIGE: Diogo Marques, Tiago Guerreiro and Luís Carriço and University of British Columbia (UBC), recruited 102 individuals and asked them to recall a past situation in which they accessed the phone of someone they know, or someone they know accessed theirs. Participants were asked to describe the events leading up to the incident, how the snooping was conducted and what happened to the relationship afterwards.

Carlos Duarte was Program Chair of the Web4All conference (http://www.w4a.info/2019/) that took place between May 13 and 16 in San Francisco.

Carlos Duarte also presented two papers reporting work on web accessibility (Combining Semantic Tools for Automatic Evaluation of Alternative Texts; Carlos Duarte, Carlos M. Duarte, Luís Carriço) and TV accessibility (Personalised and Accessible TV Interaction for People with Visual Impairments; Daniel Costa, Carlos Duarte).

LASIGE post-doc researcher João Sousa has been announced as the winner of the DSN 2019 William C. Carter award for his dissertation on "Byzantine state machine replication for the masses"

Vawlt, the spin-off from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and LASIGE (unit R&D), created by Alysson Bessani, Ricardo Mendes and Tiago Oliveira, raised 500 thousand euros to develop its product, which will allow companies to have full control and privacy over their data stored in a cloud-of-clouds.

LASIGE and NEC Labs Europe have started a collaboration for designing a new generation of more secure, efficient and performant blockchains. Alysson Bessani and João Sousa have started a year-long funded project to design and implement an efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols for permission blockchains.

Pedro Ferreira and Ibéria Medeiros are members of the organizing committee of the first Workshop on Mahine Learning for CyberSecurity (MLCS 2019 - http://mlcs.lasige.di.fc.ul.pt/).

The Workshop will take place on September 20 2019, in Wurzburg, Germany, and is co-located with the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD 2019).

Alexey Ignatiev and António Morgado, LASIGE integrated researchers, are organising a Summer School on the topics of SAT, SMT and Automated Reasoning in Lisbon this July.

LASIGE participated at FCUL’s job fair Jobshop Ciências 2019 on April 11. JobShop Ciências aims to be a preferential forum of access of students and graduates to the job market.

We were represented by members of our different research lines and the team of one of our start ups (Vawlt). LASIGE professor and investigator Ana Paula Afonso acted as our ambassador and made a general presentation of our unit to a captivated audience.