INESC TEC researchers awarded in Fraunhöfer competition

INESC TEC researchers awarded in Fraunhöfer competition

Nuno Moniz, from the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support (LIAAD), and João Monteiro, from the Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics (CSIG), both INESC TEC researchers, were two of the winners of the Fraunhöfer Portugal Challenge 2017. This competition awards research works that demonstrate practicality and promote cooperation between the industry and the scientific community, in two categories (Master’s and PhDs).

31st October 2017

At the doctoral research level, Nuno Moniz took second place with the thesis entitled "Prediction and Ranking of Highly Popular Web Content", developed under the PhD in Computer Science of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto. Luís Torgo, also a researcher at LIAAD, supervised this work.

This thesis aims to improve the ability to anticipate the volume of attention that web content will receive, with emphasis on recent cases of high popularity, thus allowing a faster and more accurate recommendation of such content, taking into account the high diffusion of content online and the growing demand from users for quick and easy access to relevant content.

João Monteiro took second place in the category of master's thesis with the work "HealthTalks - Improving Health Communication and Personal Information Management", developed within the scope of the Master’s Degree in Informatics and Computing Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. Carla Teixeira Lopes, also a researcher at CSIG, supervised the work.

This work focused on the development of a mobile application, HealthTalks, which aims to improve communication between patients and healthcare professionals and help patients manage health information. This application records the audio of an appointment, transcribes the dialogue between the patient and his healthcare professional, and identifies the medical terms used, providing information about each of them. It also allows associating annotations to these recordings, before or after the appointment.

The Fraunhöfer Portugal Challenge is already in the eighth edition and aims to distinguish students from Portuguese universities who are developing Master’s and PhD theses with a practical component in the areas of Information and Communication Technologies, Multimedia and other similar sciences. The objective is to reward students with a practical sense, that is, market-oriented projects with applicability in industry or in the daily life of people.

In total, € 9,000 will be awarded in scientific awards.

The winners were presented at the closing event held on 25 October at the Fraunhöfer headquarters.

The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC, UP-FCUP and UP-FEUP.