Pedro Lobo, former INESC-ID master’s student, received the Best Thesis Award 2026 from APDC – Associação Portuguesa para o Desenvolvimento das Comunicações (Portuguese Association for Communications Development).

The award recognises the value and relevance of his master’s thesis work, titled “Towards removing undef values from LLVM IR”. An article detailing the results was accepted at the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) conference and the resulting technology was recently incorporated into the LLVM compiler, which is used in Android and iPhone apps. “From now on, every mobile phone in the world will use a technology developed by Pedro”, states Nuno Lopes, INESC-ID researcher in high-performance computing architectures and systems and Pedro’s supervisor.

Pedro is the founder of the R&D team at FuriosaAI in Portugal, following the establishment of the company’s European headquarters in Lisbon, directed by Nuno Lopes (read more here).

The award ceremony took place on 6 May at the Future Voices Stage in the Fórum Tecnológico da Lispolis, as part of the APDC Congress. The event, a national forum for strategic reflection on the digital future, included a session, “Frontier Technologies: the race Europe cannot lose”, featuring INESC-ID researchers Arlindo Oliveira and Nuno Lopes.

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