Bruno Degardin, from UBI, and Daniel Dinis, from UA, represented IT at this year’s Fraunhofer Challenge.
The 11th edition of the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge recognized IT students’ graduation theses, in the MSc and PhD categories, for standing behind Fraunhofer AICOS’ vision and proposing technological solutions of practical utility, with the potential to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
Bruno Degardin, currently a PhD student at the University of Beira Interior (UBI), ranked third in the Prize for Best Master Thesis for his work, titled “Weakly and Partially Supervised Learning Frameworks for Action Recognition”.
Under the guidance of IT researcher Hugo Proença, his research focused on artificial intelligence and computer vision for the detection of abnormal events, such as crimes and dangerous situations, through video surveillance cameras that operate automatically, without the need for human intervention or complex data annotation processes.
The other award-winning dissertation belonged to Daniel Dinis, an alumnus of the University of Aveiro (UA) who is now working for Airbus, in Southampton (United Kingdom). The former student won third place as well, but within the PhD category, for his thesis “All-Digital Antenna Array Transmitter”, presented at UA in 2019.
Supervised by Arnaldo Oliveira and José Neto Vieira (both from IT/UA), Daniel Dinis’ work demonstrated, within the scope of radio systems, a flexible, fully digital radio architecture that is reconfigurable by software and allows the development of radio systems with multiple antennas in a much more integrated, scalable and flexible way.
His doctoral work had already earned him an honorable mention at the IBM Scientific Award in 2018 and resulted in the publication of four articles in international journals.
Organized since 2010, the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge seeks to encourage cooperation between industry and the scientific community, by rewarding the best ideas based on theses' concepts that clearly demonstrate a concern with the direct applicability of its results in industry and markets.
The winners of this challenge were voted by a jury and a panel of invited experts in the field of technology. The online ceremony took place on October 28th.