If you are interested in research in Interactive Digital Media, if you want to understand how to use interactive media to craft transformative and socially engaging experiences, if you want to engage with an international community of world class researchers and academics, the MDMI is what you are looking for.
The MDMI teaches you about digital interactive media, games and interactive storytelling, social and critical aspects of technology at the University of Madeira in the beautiful setting of Madeira island, in close collaboration with the Madeira-ITI international research centre. The MDMI gives direct access to PHD programs with several Portuguese leading universities and the international partnerships with CMU and UT Austin.
This course aims to be a core course, connecting the different fields covered by the master program, such as, interaction design, multimedia, human-computer interaction and digital media. It will include an historical and critical approach as well as a theoretical and practical dynamic. It will allow the study of interactive media on different perspectives, including technological, design and digital content production. It aims to promote the understanding of the complexity and multidisciplinary of the interactive media that will be taught in detail in each course of the program. In
addition, the course aims to provide the same knowledge skills to all students, even if they have different backgrounds, such as media design, visual arts or engineering/science.
– Basic geometric modeling methods, using CSG, boolean operations, and various types of geometric modifications.
– Advanced geometric modeling methods, using mesh modeling and modifications at sub-object level.
– Texture design and texture mapping.
– Lighting and camera work.
– Camera movements and object animation.
This course is intended to make students effective, professional system designers and analysts. This course builds upon students’ backgrounds in a few specific ways:
Work from data – Many of us have good intuitions about design, but we all need to ground our work on the real needs of users and the obstacles they perceive in achieving their goals.
Work in teams – Whatever our skills are, we will need the skills of others to be effective.
Communication – Even when we know what should be done, many contexts demand that we convince others using numbers, pictures, or stories.
To choose among Design of Technologies for Health and Wellness, Artificial Intelligence & Game Design, Human Factors, Interfaces & Interaction Design, Multimedia Systems
This course is a combination programming course and design studio, and is for those who wish to express their interactive ideas in working prototypes. Students will learn how to use programming languages, how to design and implement effective GUI interfaces, and how to perform rapid, effective iterative user tests. They will also explore advanced interaction and interface techniques. The course will cover usability testing of interactive prototypes. It will also cover important subjects related to distribution of software products, selling in determinate vs. indeterminate markets, case studies and contextaware apps.
This course designed to cover elements of narrative, interactive media, digital art installations, service and experience design drawing from the above mentioned disciplines goals and methodologies. In
interactive art the audience plays an active role in the fruition of the work and the link with a service experience gets
even stronger. Interactive narrative art projects happen in a context and involve many stakeholders. The interactions can happen at many levels, from people to people, to people to machine and machine to machine. Mixing art, design and
service design tools can give a fuller role to the context and the audience of the art work. Identifying all stakeholders and
involving them in the process can also guarantee the sustainability and full expression of the art work and open the
doors to new kind of format for art projects as well as service models.
The aim of this curricular unit is to prepare students for a career that involves the development of computer games and other interactive experiences. Students in this curricular unit will read and write about games design and develop their own games. This is not to be confused with a computer games development course. The curricular unit focuses on the rules and methods for the design of the game, that remain relatively constant regardless of the technology used to develop a game. While technology plays an important role in our studies, technical details will not be our focus. The student will study and design all types of games: card games, dice games, sports games, history, and yes, even video games. How to design games, project them as well, and how to track their projects to completion it’s whar the student will be studying.
To choose among Service Design, Interfaces & Interaction Design, Virtual Realities, Embodied Interaction, Advanced Topics in Informatics.
This course is designed to help students apply the skills as creative interactive Narrative developers, acquired in the previous semester, across a variety of forms, including short fiction, creative nonfiction, to the field of new digital media forms. The emphasis in this course will be on learning through experimentation: experimentation with writing style, voice, tone, and so on. The readings for this course will reflect this experimental focus, being drawn from a broad crosssection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, and visual and online forms (Twitter fiction, serials, multimedia narratives, blogs).
To choose among Design of Technologies for Health and Wellness, Human Factors, Artificial Intelligence and Game Design, Interfaces & Interaction Design, Multimedia Systems.
A final master thesis is required for the students to graduate in DMI. The thesis will consist of some practical and theoretical work, ending up in a written document according to the Univesity regulations below. The thesis topic is negotiated with a Faculty member at the end of the second semester, before the summer break. Faculty should compile and sign the Declaration of thesis acceptance upon agreement of the topic and title with the student. The Regulations on the Master Thesis requirements and the declaration of acceptance can be found at: orientacao e dissertacao regulations and the declaracao de aceitacao.
A final master thesis is required for the students to graduate in DMI. The thesis will consist of some practical and theoretical work, ending up in a written document according to the Univesity regulations below. The thesis topic is negotiated with a Faculty member at the end of the second semester, before the summer break. Faculty should compile and sign the Declaration of thesis acceptance upon agreement of the topic and title with the student. The Regulations on the Master Thesis requirements and the declaration of acceptance can be found at: orientacao e dissertacao regulations and the declaracao de aceitacao.
The main objective of this course is to take students to a deeper level of understanding regarding the various conceptual aspects involved in creating environments based on virtual reality techniques, adopting a culturally based critical point of view. This means understanding the ways in which, in various historical periods, spatial experiences and formal approaches are informed by cultural streams that carry the brand of contemporary social, political and economical ideologies. But also means developing an informed conscience about the way we think these problems today. This doesn’t concern only the construction of an abstract conceptual model to deal with the problem of understanding our activities in the domain of creating structured virtual universes. It also has very concrete consequences in the design of virtual universes and it is the knowledge and understanding of these consequences to their own work that are to concern the students of this course.
The purpose of this course is for graduate students to gain a breadth of understanding in the toolbox of AI approaches employed in digital games. This involves learning/reinforce some basic topics covered in other AI courses, but with a focus on applied knowledge within the context of digital games.
Ability to identify, formulate and solve problems.
Understanding of professional and ethical responsibilities.
Recognize the need and have the capacity for learning throughout life.
Explore the fundamentals of interfaces and interaction design process while learning about fundamental concepts, methods, and practices of interaction design. Explore the ideas of “form follows interaction” and “be the user”. Explore the role that interaction with products plays in mediating relationships between people and people, people and places, and people and products. Improve your ability to present your design ideas. This course is composed by studio class with a few theoretical lectures. The goal is to work on a series of design assignments, and actively participate in exercises and peer evaluations. The assignments are mostly group work and results will be critiqued in class throughout the course.
The aim of this course is to give students direct contact with the recent technologies and techniques, addressing a broad range of research topics in the areas of software engineering, humancomputer interaction, artificial intelligence, information and multimedia systems.
The proposed activities and the invited lecturers are chosen to give students direct contact with the recent technologies and techniques from the areas of study that are relevant for the degrees where this course is taught.
This course aims to provide a strong knowledge on multimedia systems and its different components, such as, methodologies and technologies of information representation, compression and processing; media transmission; authoring tools; multimedia interaction and applications. It will be composed of theoretical and practical components, providing to the student a strong and solid background knowledge on the different multimedia systems paradigms. The practical component will include the implementation of a multimedia system prototype.
This course aims the study of interactions that use both physical and tangible computing as communication interfaces between the user and physical and social contexts. It aims to provide knowledge of how technology can be used as a tool of communication and awareness of the social (e.g., personal communication) and the physical (e.g., interaction with a map) contexts as well as the user as an actuator in these contexts, directly (e.g., sharing of professional information) or indirectly (e.g., the representation of emotional states on the working environment). It will include theoretical and practical knowledge and will involve the development of an embodied interaction prototype.
This course is designed to:
1.To introduce students to theoretical aspects of human factors, cognitive science, and social science that will assist them in understanding and designing the interactions of humans with the world, tools and technology.
2. To assist students investigate and understand problems that arise out of the interaction of humans with systems;
3. To introduce students to methods and principles for analyzing problems that involve human factors, such as: perception, cognition, decision making and human errors;
4. To introduce students to physical and cognitive ergonomics;
5. To teach students to consider human factors for technology design;
6. To teach students to understand problems and apply human factors knowledge to analyze them, find sources of error, and propose the design (or redesign) of systems in order to improve human system interactions.
During this course students will learn how to think systemically and holistically about services. Students will learn how to map the territory of their design brief and extract models that will help them to illustrate, create and analyse their design concept.The students will then learn how to communicate their concept, prototype it, refine it and deliver a final presentation to the client. Students will also learn how to draft a basic business model.
The goal of this course is to expose students to the engineering, medical, and social issues faced by individuals with special needs through the design, development and use of technology for health and wellness. Students will learn about the challenges and realities of people with disabilities; understand principles and complexities of technology for health and wellness design and engineering; and critically select appropriate user-centered design methods and engineering skills to design/develop/evaluate technologies for health and wellness.
The main objectives of the course are to cover these four key areas:
I – Develop an effective mastery of the concepts, languages and methodological structures associated with the world of design, allowing consequent development of the ability to apply them contextually;
II – Provide a qualified environment for practice and consequent systematization of fundamental methodological principles of creative processes associated with the design;
III – Provide contextual development for the ability to analyze specific problems, select appropriate strategies and apply the most effective methodologies for solving typical problems in the context of design;
IV – Provide an effective work experience in multidisciplinary project teams, efficiently developing communication skills and integration of individual skills and creative ability into an efficient collective effort.
The project develops an applied study module at the intersections of ART, SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY, combining methodologies and practices that intertwines the academic sphere closely with the industry realms of the Culture and Creative Sectors. Nurturing a competent perspective on the historical, economical, social and above all cultural relevance of this interdisciplinary blend within the new digital shift, the MAST project applies innovative, ICT-enhanced teaching and learning methods.
Read more about MAST here: https://mastmodule.eu/
This cycle of studies aims at providing a Master’s level education in Interactive Media Design.
Candidates for the cycle of studies must be in possession of a degree in the main area or in a related area. In addition to this requirement is not required frequency or the completion of a Postgraduate course or professional experience in any area. It is recommended that candidates demonstrate creative ability in one or more areas, such as interactive media design, programming, 3D modeling, animation, or otherwise, without obligation to comply with the conventional classifications and are able to demonstrate a systematic and consistent interest in their work, knowing how to self motivate themselves, and also demonstrate the ability to develop dynamic and critical thinking.
Applications are submitted online, exclusively, through the address https://applications.uma.pt.
Applications are open from:
1st application phase: until February 17th
2nd application phase: 3rd to 25th of April
Required documents (in PDF format)
After registration, students will be contacted to present the original certificates.
Tuition (lowered this year):
European students – 1070€ (year)
International students – 2000 (year)
(Scholarships available for international students)
Contact the student support office for more details (apoioaoestudante@uma.pt).
Currently, I am an Associate Professor (tenure) at the University of Madeira, where I teach for the Informatics and Interactive Media Design Masters; researcher of the NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics, and president of the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation. I received my Msc. in telecommunications engineering from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) and a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETHZ).
I have pursued research at several institutes in Europe and the USA, including the Laboratoire de Production Microtechnique at the EPFL (Lausanne), the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the ETHZ (Zurich), at the Institute of Audiovisual Studies at the Tecnology Department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), where I was a Juan de la Cierva research fellow and head of the Robotic Systems Laboratory at the laboratory for Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS), and the Quality of Life Technologies and Entertainment technology centers of the Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh).
My scientific goal is to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of biological systems and to exploit them using real world artefacts, with special emphasis in neuro-rehabilitation systems, interactive technologies, and robots.
Pedro Campos is an Associate Professor of HCI at the University of Madeira, Portugal, and Senior Researcher of the Interactive Technologies Institute. He is also Associate Researcher at the Visualization and Intelligent Multimodal Interfaces Group at INESC-ID Lisbon. He is currently Chair of IFIP’s Technical Committee 13.6 on Human Work Interaction Design, National Representative for the TC13 and serves the editorial board and program committee of several HCI journals and conferences.
Bachelor of Fine Arts / Sculpture, National Diploma in Fine Arts / Printmaking – Crawford College of Art and Design, Republic of Ireland – Doctorate in Art Sciences / Aesthetic Education by the University of Madeira. He began teaching in Higher Education at the Institute of Art and Design, teaching courses in Visual Arts and Design, in the areas of Sculpture, Drawing, Engraving and Descriptive Geometry. With the integration at the University of Madeira, he taught 1st and 2nd Cycle courses in the areas of Visual Arts, Design and Cultural Management, having served as Course Director and President of the Department of Art and Design. He participated in the curricular restructuring and creation of new Cycles of Studies within the scope of the Bologna Process, in the areas of Visual Arts and Teaching of Visual Arts. With the implementation of the 1st Cycle in Interactive Media Design, in which he participated, he joined the current Faculty of Exact Sciences and Engineering, exerting management and teaching activity at the level of this course, in the areas of Visual Communication and Graphic Modeling 2D And 3D. He regularly researches and exhibits in the field of visual arts, particularly in the field of sculpture, painting and digital imaging. In recent years he has presented two cycles of exhibitions devoted to themes related to insular identity: the Insulana cycle and the Em Louvor d’Orfeu cycle. He is the coauthor of a volume of digital image poetry – Circular Poem – and animation – Sensos, On the Bright Track of Haiku. At the level of the illustration, he collaborates regularly with the Portuguese Society of Mathematics and integrates the projects: DEM – Encyclopedic Dictionary of Madeira / Infantojuvenile Version, ensuring the full illustration of the first volumes, and, likewise, an ongoing project by Bertrand / Círculo de Readers, connected to History.
Associate Professor with “Agregação”, Department of Informatics Engineering and Interactive Media Design – FCEE – University of Madeira; PhD in Computer Science, University of Buenos Aires; PhD in Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, Supervisor: John Cantwell; From 2013 Member of NOVA LINCS, Faculty of Science and Technology of the New University of Lisbon (FCT/UNL); From 2016 Head of Department of Informatics Engineering and Interactive Media Design – FCEE – University of Madeira.
Area of Research: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Logics for Artificial Intelligence, Belief Revision.
My focus of research is the area of Belief Revision (Logic of Theory Change): BR theory studies the impact of acquiring new information. It is a fundamental activity of human intelligence, and it defines an exciting and significant research area in philosophy, logic and computer science. Belief revision theory provides sound modellings for changes of beliefs in response to new information.
In the logic of theory change, the AGM model has acquired the status of standard model (Alchourrón, Gardenfors, and Makinson 1985). The AGM model aims to characterize the dynamics of beliefs of a rational agent. A change consists in adding or removing a sentence from a set of beliefs to obtain a new set of beliefs. This change obeys the following principles: 1. Primacy of new information: the new information is always accepted. 2. Coherence: the new set of beliefs has to be logically consistent. 3. Minimal change: a minimal loss of information contained in the previous beliefs, that is it attempts at retaining as much of the old beliefs as possible. Even though, the AGM model is considered a standard model, it seems to be inadequate in many contexts. Consequently, in the last 30 years extensions and generalizations of AGM has been proposed (Fermé and Hansson 2011).
My main work in the area consists in define new models for belief change, based in the AGM model, extending or modifying the standard model in order to adequate it to different situations. In particular my work was to define new models for belief bases, for non-priorityzed belief change, for iteration and for multiple belief change.
The main results of my work was published in the journals Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Studia Logica, Logic Journal of the IGPL and Journal of Logic and Computation. In terms of Conferences/Workshops, my work was presented in ECAI – KR – WOLLIC as well as specific workshop of the BR community in Dagsthul and Madeira.
An outcome of my work was published (with Sven Ove Hansson) a special issue for the 25 years of the AGM theory (2011. “Special Issue on 25 Years of AGM Theory” – Journal of Philosophical Logic Volume 40, (2)) and a review of the literature of the belief revision area in the last 25 years (2011 “AGM 25 Years: Twenty-Five Years of Research in Belief Change” Fermé and Hansson. Journal of Philosophical Logic 40, (2) : 295-331.). This review was the basis for a 4 hour tutorial in the IJCAI 2013: “Belief Revision: From 1985 to 2013”, Beijing.
Mónica is an Assistant Professor and researcher at the University of Madeira (UMa) and integrated member of the NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS). She is the current Director of the PhD Program in Informatics Engineering of UMa. In the past she worked as research assistant at the SPECS Laboratory of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH-Zürich, Switzerland; and was visiting scholar at the Quality of Life Technologies center of Carnegie Mellon University. Since Mónica arrived in Madeira in 2011, she has been co-principal investigator and co-founder of the NeuroRehabLab research group, an interdisciplinary research group that investigates at the intersection of technology, neuroscience and clinical practice to find novel solutions to increase the quality of life of those with special needs. Mónica has been particularly involved in the development and clinical assessment of Virtual Reality(VR) technologies for stroke rehabilitation, exploring specific brain mechanisms that relate to functional recovery to approach motor and cognitive stroke rehabilitation by means of non-invasive and low-cost technologies. Her research addresses aspects such as serious gaming, personalization of training, integrative motor-cognitive tasks, and physiological computing. In 2016, Mónica has been awarded the ISVR Early Career Investigator Award, an award granted by the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation to recognize and acknowledge outstanding contributions by early career scientists whose research relates to virtual rehabilitation. Since 2020, Mónica is a member of the Ethics Committee of UMa. |
Marko is the Invited Assistant Professor at UMA, Faculty of Computer Engineering (Funchal, PT). He is also a founder of a startup TIGERWHALE (Krakow, PL), a grant awarded SME focusing on mobile, wearable and web technologies, and is also a Post-Doc researcher at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI, PT). He holds PhD in Interaction Design (Politecnico di Milano, IT), MSc double-degree in Communication Design (Politecnico di Torino and Alta Scuola Politecnica, IT) and BSc in Computer Engineering (Singidunum, RS). He has participated on more than 5 EU projects and is a Cross-Cultural Ambassador at UNESCO Club (Sorbonne, FR). His portfolio includes designing and developing UX/UI applications for Yahoo! and Whirlpool. His research is on aquatic user interfaces and their impact on biodiversity using LoRa, mobile IoT applications.
Mara has just recently graduated from her PhD in Digital Media, her research work was about understanding how to best leverage mobile transmedia entertainment to raise tourist awareness towards local cultural and natural heritage. During her work designed an experience to improve the tourist’s knowledge of the local culture can provide a memorable experience and still bring awareness to a more eco-friendly tourism.
Mara holds both a Bachelor and Master degree in Informatics Engineering at the University of Madeira as well as a Master in Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University.
Mara has collaborated under several European research project such as Madeira Life, Future Fabulators, Beanstalk. Currently, she is collaborating as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Interreg project, Intertaguas and she is an Invited Assistant Professor at UMA teaching the courses of Interactive Narratives I and II, part of the Master of Interactive Media Design at the University of Madeira.
Her research interests intersect the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Storytelling, and Entertainment technologies.
Mary is currently Invited Assistant Professor at the University of Madeira, where she teaches Multimedia Systems, Interaction Design, Requirements Engineering and Interactive Systems and Technologies.
Her research interests include Child-Computer Interaction, Assistive Technology, Energy literacy, Eco-feedback Technologies, Environmental sustainability. The major goal being the adoption of a user-centered approach in each project to address usability problems, lack of user empowerment, and increase the user’s voice as much as possible. She has collaborated in international research projects such as SINAIS (Sustainable Interaction with social Networks, context Awareness and Innovative Services), and SMILE (Smart Islands energy Systems), and H2020 ongoing demonstration project.
She received her PhD in Informatics Engineering in the domain of Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Madeira, where she conducted studies in the evaluation of eco-feedback technologies for families. Prior to that she pursued her Professional Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from the HCII Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Madeira.
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The Interactive Media Design course aims at the fundamental objective of training and qualifying active agents, aspiring or established professionals as well as researchers and academics in the creative field of interactive media providing students with cutting-edge knowledge related to interactive digital media and developing simultaneously skills necessary for their future application. Through involvement in projects, students have the opportunity to develop practical skills and gather experiences, while developing contacts that will be invaluable in accessing research networks and the labor market, in various sectors of industry, creative and technological, as creators, producers, designers, managers or entrepreneurs. Capitalizing on the experience gained with the partnership between the MITI and the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, through the Master of Entertainment Technology, an effective approach to new creative fields of digital media is made possible to a wider range of students.
Paid internships will be available for students to get involved in existing research projects. This will provide them with the opportunity to apply the skills they have learned while developing new skills in a practical environment. Students will be engaged to participate in a wide range of experiences such as the design and development of tools for social inequalities, social justice, radical politics, biocybernetic systems, and creativity support, amongst many others.
The projects include international partners such as Carnegie Mellon University, University of Las Palmas De Gran Canaria, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Rutgers University, and regional partners such as the Madeira promotion association, Funchal City Hall, Industry Of Funchal.
Besides, the Master Module in Art, Science and Technology (MAST) project consortium, offers mobility and learning opportunities with its large network of partners: University of Nova Gorica, School of Arts (Slovenia), Graz University of Technology, Institute of Spatial Design (Austria), Kersnikova Institute (Slovenia), Culture Action Europe (Belgium/EU), Croatian Cultural Alliance / Unicult programme (Croatia) and a long list of Associated Partners.
MDMI Students have the opportunity to access cutting edge technology through the Challenge Lab.
It is a laboratory that has been designed to support our teaching activities and MDMI thesis with a portfolio of technologies and setups that enable quick experimentation and prototyping at the intersections of Art, Science and Technology, combining methodologies and practices that intertwine the academic sphere closely with the Culture and Creative Sectors.
Some of the available technologies include a Head-Mounted Display (Oculus Rift S), a Multitouch Interactive Table and a Mixed Reality Exergame platform.
The Challenge Lab is one of the outcomes of the Creative Euro project MAST: Master Module in Arts, Science and Technology in which the Master of Interactive Media Design and the University of Madeira participated.
Check out the Challange Lab on the news!
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