Francisco Maria Calisto and João Santinha, PhD students and researchers at Instituto Superior Técnico, took their research projects to the finals of the 7th edition of the Altice International Innovation Award, an innovation competition that aims to recognise and support the technological talent of PhD finalists and startups. The two researchers were nominated in the ‘Academy’ category and attended the awards ceremony, held on 21st November at the Convento do Beato, in Lisbon.
Francisco Maria Calisto presented the “Human-Centred Design of Personalised Intelligent Agents in Diagnostic Medical Imaging” project, which promotes the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, specifically in radiology. The project proposes AI agents that assist clinicians by providing second-reader diagnostic support adapted to each clinician’s workflow and level of experience. “Improving diagnostic accuracy, especially in critical areas such as breast cancer detection, can lead to early detection and better outcomes for patients,” explains the researcher. The project, which is part of his doctoral thesis, is supervised by Nuno Jardim Nunes, from the Interactive Technologies Institute, and Jacinto Nascimento, from the Institute for Systems and Robotics, both Técnico professors.
João Santinha developed the “Methods for Improving Generalisability and Robustness of Medical Imaging AI Models” project. Focussing on improving healthcare through AI-powered diagnoses, the researcher believes that “developing solutions to create more robust models is crucial”. The methods referred to in the title of his project “are very important, since the artificial intelligence models currently created are not capable of guaranteeing an ability to deal with variations in healthcare systems”. This PhD project is supervised by Mário Figueiredo, Técnico professor at researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações.
The award winner in the ‘Academy’ category is Emanuel Marques, a student at the University of Coimbra, for his project on electric vehicles. The Altice International Innovation Award intends to recognise innovative projects in technological areas such as AI, machine learning, 5G, the Internet of Things, smart cities, big data, eHealth, security, blockchain and quantum technologies, among others.
