The University of Minho (UMinho), founded in 1973, is renowned for the quality of its teaching, the quality of its students, the public recognition given to its alumni, and for its intervention and strong links with the local community and the surrounding region. UMinho has a student population of 16,000, out of which 1,900 are postgraduate students. Throughout the years the University has achieved a high reputation as an institution of learning and leadership, combining strategic vision with a capacity to innovate, and rigorous scientific, academic, administrative and financial management.

The University of Minho is organized by schools and Institutes. These permanent organic units assure teaching, research and other specialized services in their respective field of scientific knowledge. There are 5 schools representing computing disciplines:

• LEI - 600 students
• LCC - 300 students
• LEEIC - 600 students
• LTSI - 400 students
• LECOM - 200 students

UMinho ACM Student Chapter was founded at the end of 2004 by local students at the Braga campus, one of two campuses affiliated with the university, hence the majority of our activities are strongly driven towards the academic community . In addition to our six officers, there are 20 student chapter members. This chapter has striven to keep local students aware of ACM's presence and causes, as well as to draw their attention towards research and the work of the ACM community of scholars. In the past few years this chapter has had many activities, with the goal of helping students in all disciplines gain more knowledge about research in general and targeting computer science in particular. News on this area appears on the front pages of the newspapers on a daily basis. It is a big task to keep ourselves updated and so we put a big effort in this duty. We organize several tutorials/workshops/presentations about subjects that we found interesting and related to this field, on the behalf of the local community.

Titles of recent events include:
April 26, 2007: Rough Sets, a Tool for Representing Imprecise Knowledge
March 19, 2007: Adaptive Labeling for Spam E-Mail Filtering
February 23, 2007: Workshop on Security
February 21, 2007: Student Debate on the Bolonha Process
February 7, 2007: High Performance Transaction Processing

See the full registry of activities by the UMinho chapter

One of our concerns is the new trends and emergent paradigms in the fields of computer and informatics, such as bio-informatics. Consequently, in the last year, we organized a tutorial with two invited speakers, who were responsible to: i) introduce bio-informatics concepts and terminology; and ii) present software applications targeting this domain. Three invited speakers presented; fifty students attended the session. We believe that this kind of activities opens the minds of the students. As matter of fact, we have a student that is trying to get a Ph.D. grant to do research on this area. We have been told that his application was directly motivated by this event.

On the emergent technologies side, we invited Microsoft Portugal engineers to present at a workshop on the Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Foundation. Our goal is to help with disseminating software campus wide. We believe that it is on the best interest of the local community (students and teachers) to be up-to-date on the details of novel software systems. Over 120 students attended the workshop.

Additionally, one of our goals is to motivate bachelor's students to programming contests, which happen yearly and are national. In order to improve our students' problem-solving skills and programming abilities, we decided to organize two programming contests: the dPum and TIUP. Both contests are national in scope, and are a good way to prepare students for international contests. Some of our teams enrolled in TIUP and several were respectfully classified in the top-ten. Winners go on to participate in the MIUP, which in turn sends representatives in the international South Western Europe Regional ACM programming contest (SWERC).

We also invited a Microsoft representative to inform students about the Imagine Cup and motivate them to apply. One of our local teams placed second in the Imagine Cup.

One of our best and most pleasant activities involved a scientific presentation about local on-going academic projects. In the research field, we are trying to fill the void that exists between the work done in academic research performed by University teachers and the lack of awareness with respect to this work by students. There still exists a gap between research and university classes and matters lectured. In this sense, we invited teachers to offer tasks to students within their research projects, so that they become more interested and involved in research. This activity was a success and teachers are pressing and motivating us to make a repeat the event. It brought together local researchers, teachers and students, in which the former presented their work and tried to motivate the latter to participate. Up to twenty projects were presented, by all means a considerable number, and a large number of students attended the event. In the end, almost every project ended up with at least one student allocated to it.

Finally, we organized a separate event in which students were able to directly put questions to the organizers of the new Ph.D. and M.Sc. programs at the university, allowing student chapter members to ask questions and receive clarification about these new programs.