1. Flexible thermoelectric textiles for low temperature waste heat recovery
University of Minho, Center for Textile Science and Technology
Location: Guimarães, Portugal
About the Organization: The Center for Textile Science and Technology (2C2T), a research unit in the field of fibrous materials with high requirements for biological, chemical, and physical analyses and material development and functionalization. 2C2T has several laboratories with numerous equipment for the analysis and development of fibrous materials. Currently, 2C2T involves 47 collaborators and 31 integrated researchers organized into 5 thematic groups: i) high-performance engineering textiles; ii) advanced textile processes; iii) sustainable and regenerative fibrous materials; iv) textile design and fashion; and v) smart textiles, within which this latter the candidate will be integrated.
Project Description: The work will be based mainly on the incorporation of carbon (nano)materials into insulating common fabrics for the production of functional textiles with enhanced thermoelectric properties. The potential of the developed textiles as wearable power generators from the temperature difference between the human body and surrounding environment will be evaluated. Specifically, the candidate will learn different methodologies to produce functionalized textiles (e.g. dip coating, screen-printing), thermoelectric characterization techniques (e.g. electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, thermal conductivity), and materials characterization techniques (e.g. FTIR, RAMAN, XPS, etc.).
2. Investigation of Recommendation Systems based on Social travel communications
Hostelworld Group, Growth - Machine Learning Science
Location: Porto, Portugal
About the Organization: Hostelworld is the leading global online travel booking engine for hostels and connecting people who want to hang out with others when traveling. It has close to 300 employees worldwide and has partner hostels in over 180 countries. Head offices are in Dublin, Ireland, with the second largest office in Porto, the location of the company's technical centre of excellence. Hostelworld is investing in machine learning science as part of a strategy to expand on its social travel platform.
Project Description: This machine learning science project is to develop a v1 of a recommendation engine for travelers on the conversations they should join in. The intern will define the machine learning strategy on mining the existing data of social conversations and converting them into embeddings or leveraging LLMs. The intern will then develop a first version of a conversation recommendation system, to be trialed live on the site.
