Faculty and researchers from Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, met with representatives from Fidelidade to discuss the challenges of Risk Management and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at another edition of i.Talks@Técnico, held on 10 February at Alameda Campus. These meetings strengthen “ties between the two institutions”, as highlighted by Carolina Cardoso, CSR Project Manager at Fidelidade. The i-Talks bring the School and companies closer together, promoting knowledge transfer and identifying opportunities for collaboration across various topics.
Miguel Teixeira, a professor at Técnico, president of the Pedagogical Council, and coordinator of Técnico’s Capstone committee, started by presenting the Capstone programme, a dissertation-style, multidisciplinary curricular project designed to address real-world challenges. “Capstone projects empower students to apply the concepts they have learnt throughout their academic journey to tackle societal issues, many of which are proposed by companies such as Fidelidade,” he explained.
The programme combines collective work, through the 2nd Cycle Integrated Project curricular unit (PIC2), with individual work within the scope of the dissertation, being one of the main instruments enabling collaboration between Técnico and companies. Fidelidade presented four project proposals that were made available for students to apply and whose development will take place in the next academic year.
Beatriz, Actuary at Fidelidade, presented the topic “Characterisation of Seismic Vulnerability and Electrical Risk of the National Building Stock”. The company seeks to engage academia, through Capstone programme, in identifying factors that influence the severity of seismic and electrical risks, going beyond the information usually considered. “Our objective is to better understand the factors that influence these risks, so that we can differentiate them more accurately in the simulation and construction of an insurance policy”, she said. “In this way, we can price more fairly for everyone”.
The topic was also addressed by Tiago Ferreira, a professor at Técnico and researcher at the Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability (CERIS), who focused on parametric methodologies to characterise building vulnerability, making it possible to estimate damage and impacts under different seismic scenarios, as well as to assess accessibility and safety in affected urban areas.
Ricardo Quinteiro, Data Scientist at Fidelidade, presented the results of a dissertation conducted in a corporate environment on multimodal document representation learning. “There are several processes at Fidelidade that involve different types of documents and we want to make their organisation easier and more scalable”, he explained. Fidelidade aims to optimise document classification so that, when a new document or set of documents is submitted to the system, the classification automatically adjusts to these new cases.
Nelson Nunes, Head of AI Engineering at Fidelidade, highlighted an ongoing project (“Improving Retrieval Augmented Generation Using LLMs”), focused on optimising the company’s internal platform, Node.AI. The goal is to improve the corporate chatbot, ensuring that the AI “provides accurate and high-quality answers based on the analysis of tables and other structured data, strengthening the reliability of the system and the effectiveness of the tool”.
Fidelidade joined the Técnico Partner Network in 2022 and, since then, has strengthened collaboration with the School through participation in career fairs and student engagement initiatives, including awarding merit prizes, promoting dissertations in a corporate environment by granting research scholarships, and supporting Capstone projects.
