In a time of social distancing, the AIR Centre brought people back together by launching a series of Wenbinars that take place every Friday, from 1pm to 2 pm UTC. During these relaxing Networking Fridays, researchers, technology innovators, representatives of multilateral organizations, government officials, and social entrepreneurs present and discuss with the audience their current work and, most importantly, explore ways of future collaboration. Our goal is to keep our network active, connected and informed of interesting activities going on around the Atlantic region. Let’s inspire each other and thrive through all this together.

On June 5th, always at 1-2 PM UTC, we met Yasser Omar, Professor at IST – Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He presented LEA – Listening to the Earth under the Atlantic, a pioneering project aiming at developing real-time sensing at the bottom of the Atlantic, namely to monitor the oceanic environment and its relation to climate change, as well as to sense submarine earthquakes live, opening way to novel and more reliable solutions for the early-warning of tsunamis, civil protection, and coastal resilience. The session was moderated by Jose Barros, Director of External Affairs of ANACOM, which is the Portuguese National Regulatory Authority for communications.

Yasser Omar works in quantum information science and in the physics of information. He studied Physics at IST and obtained his PhD at the Centre for Quantum Computation at the University of Oxford, in the UK. He is the founder and leader of the Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group, at IT  – Instituto de Telecomunicacoes. His research interests lie in quantum computation, quantum information theory, and the physics of information. He is also the founder and director of the Doctoral Programme in the Physics and Mathematics of Information at IST, University of Lisbon. In the last 7 years, he was won 1 American and 7 European research projects related to quantum information. Since 2018, he has been interested in disruptive new solutions permitting underwater seismological and environmental sensing in real time, as well as their applications to better understand climate change and to improve the reliability of tsunami early-warning systems. In this context, he has been at the inception of project LEA – Listening to the Earth under the Atlantic, a joint venture of Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), IPMA – Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera, and IDL – Instituto Dom Luiz, launched in May 2020.

We will continue with the Networking Fridays in the next months. More information about future sessions as well as presentations and videos from previous sessions can be found here. Twitter Hashtag: #netfridays. Expect some very exciting afternoons, or mornings or evenings, depending on where you are…

If you need any additional information please send an email to Jose Luiz Moutinho.