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. The first year is organized in 8 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 made available to PDEEC students comprises the physical and human resources of DEEC and of a number of 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).

The 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. A double degree (PhD) in ECE is offered with the University of Carnegie-Mellon under the CMU|Portugal Program. (More information may be found in www.cmuportugal.org).

Courses organization:

PDEEC courses are organized in two semesters, corresponding to 60 ECTS, and the students are required to take three mandatory courses: Seminars, Research Plan and Special Topics (22.5 ECTS). These courses have double occurrence (may be taken in any semester), but students can only enrol in them once. Seminars and Special Topics typycally precede Research Plan, which is normally taken in the second semester. Optional courses, totalling 37.5 ECTS, need to be selected from a set of courses offered by PDEEC. Any course from a doctoral program of U.Porto can be selected, subject to aproval by the PDEEC Secientific Committee.

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 4.5 ECTS from TSE. The other 3 ECTS correspond to work with the supervisor or a tutor.

The Special Topics course (7.5 ECTS) aims at offering new fields of study not available in the curriculum. It needs a program defined by a supervisor/tutor approved by the PDEEC Scientific Committee. The Scientific Committee may also credit 7.5 ECTS in this course to students involved in teaching activities, as Teaching Assistant (TA) in DEEC/FEUP.

The objective of the Research Plan course (7.5 ECTS) is to help the student define the scope and topic of the PhD research, identify the state of the art, outline the main techniques to be used and major milestones. The output of the work to be carried out within the scope of this course is the Thesis Research Plan (TRP).  This is a 20-25 pages long report that is presented and discussed with the student's PhD Committee (Comissão de Supervisão) for review and advice. During the semester, each student is expected to make an oral presentation of his/her work.

General information

Study Plan

Certificates

Predominant Scientific Areas

Previous Courses/Cycles of Study