PDEEC - Doctoral Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP) offers a Doctoral Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering (PDEEC), covering the major areas of Electrical and Computer Engineering. PDEEC has a duration of 4 years, being the first year organized into 8 courses of 7.5 ECTS of advanced mandatory and elective courses distributed by two semesters. The other 3 years correspond to the development of the Ph.D. thesis research work.

The research environment is composed of DEEC and the following research institutes associated with FEUP:

• INESC TEC (Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science – inesctec.pt),
• IT (Instituto de Telecomunicações – it.pt)
• SYSTEC (Research Center for Systems and Technology – http://systec.fe.up.pt)
• INEB (Biomedical Engineering Institute – ineb.up.pt).

CISTER (Research Centre in Computing Systems - www.cister.isep.ipp.pt/) is a host Research Centre associated with PDEEC.

FEUP and DEEC have on-going cooperation programs with the following USA Universities: CMU - Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and UTA - University of Texas at Austin. With CMU offers a double Ph.D. degree (www.cmuportugal.org).

Courses organization:

PDEEC courses are organized in two semesters, corresponding to 60 ECTS. The students have to select the mandatory courses Seminars, Research Plan and Special Topics (22.5 ECTS). These courses have double occurrence, in the 2 semesters, but students can only enrol in them once. Seminars precedes the other two. Other courses totalling 37.5 ECTS, need to be selected from a set of optional courses offered by PDEEC. Any other doctoral course from U.Porto can be selected.

Seminars is a 7.5 ECTS course organized into modules offered by the programme Transferable Skills for Engineering (TSE)  http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~lea/transferable-skills-for-engineering-eng/. The students need to complete 6 ECTS from TSE. The other 1.5 ECTS correspond to work with supervisor or tutor.

Special Topics (7.5 ECTS) course aims at offering new fields of study not available in the curriculum. It needs a program defined by a supervisor/tutor approved by PDEEC Scientific Committee (SC). SC may also credit 7.5 ECTS to this course to students involved in teaching activities, as Teaching Assistant (TA) in DEEC/FEUP. This is in line with the deliberation issued by the “Comissão Coordenadora da FEUP” in January, 2009. Teaching activity is also a requirement in the dual PhD program with CMU. It needs a program and a tutor. The course will be evaluated based on the activities, a report the opinion of the tutor.

Research Plan course has the following main objectives: 1) define the scope and topic of the PhD research; typically, this consists in identifying the state-of-the-art material, and developing a draft research plan. 2) The output of work carried out within the scope of this course is the Thesis Research Plan (TRP) to be submitted for oral exam. At the beginning of the course the student must have a supervisor. The student must write a report (about 20 to 25 pages) with a state-of-the-art survey on the topic of the Ph.D. thesis, identifying the subject of the thesis, together with some preliminary results, if they exist, and a draft of the work plan. During the semester, each student should make one presentation of his/her work.

General information

Study Plan

Certificates

Predominant Scientific Areas

Previous Courses/Cycles of Study