Two researchers from Instituto de Telecomunicações won prizes in the 2011 edition of the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge: Navin Kumar won the second place in the PhD category, and Ricardo Fernandes was the winner of the MSc category.

The work from Navin Kumar, VIDAS (Visible Light Communication for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), is a LED-based communication system with potential to revolutionize vehicular road safety concepts. The thesis was supervised by IT researchers Profs. Rui Aguiar and Luis Nero.

Ricardo Fernandes presented a small wireless communication device the runs exclusively on energy that is harvested from surrounding electromagnetic waves, without the need for other power supply. This technology can be extended to larger devices that are used in the daily life (like mobile phones or computers). The thesis was supervised by IT researchers Profs. Nuno Boisges de Carvalho and João Nuno de Matos.

This is the second time that researchers from IT receive an award in this annual competition.