Ana Sara Costa receives Doctoral Dissertation Award
Ana Sara Costa, an early career researcher who finished her PhD in Engineering and Management at Instituto Superior Técnico in 2020 (supervised by Professor José Figueira from CEG-IST and Professor José Borbinha from INESC-ID) has recently received the Doctoral Dissertation award at the 26th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (University of Portsmouth, UK 26 June – 01 July 2022).
Currently a researcher at CEG-IST and an Invited Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Costa wrote her thesis — A multiple criteria integrated approach for nominal classification problems: Methods and applications — with a very clear purpose: according to Costa, “to developed multicriteria decision support methods for classification problems with nominal categories [which can group objects/concepts together based on a given characteristic or property] without any order of preference between them.” These were implemented in DecSpace, an online platform where Costa provides several methods and demonstrated their applicability through three studies with different objectives and contexts: housing assignement for refugees (contributing to the definition of an urban strategy and the decision aiding process as it relates to the accommodation system) and the cultural adaptive reuse of abandoned buildings, both in the city of Turin, and a recruitment process in the Special Forces of the Portuguese Army.
“The methods we developed make it possible to model the preferences and judgments of decision makers when comparing two decision objects in terms of similarity and dissimilarity,” Costa explains, “and it is possible to consider the effects of interaction between two criteria and the structuring of the criteria in a hierarchy. The methods have potential for application across several areas in decision-making situations that involve classification into nominal categories, considering different criteria, which can bring value to decisions in organizations.”
What does this award mean for Ana Sara Costa? “[It] represents a recognition of the merit of my doctoral thesis, which I had the privilege of developing under the guidance of Professor José Rui Figueira and Professor José Borbinha, as well as the relevance of their contributions to the area of MCDM [Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding].”
And what about the future? “The plan is to continue performing research and teaching in this area,” Costa told us. As a true academic, she concluded “as I consider my contribution to the construction of students’ knowledge and their motivation for research to be very gratifying.”
Upcoming Events
Educational Workshop on Responsible AI for Peace and Security (UNODA)
On June 6 and 7, The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are offering a selected group of technical students the opportunity to join a 2-day educational workshop on Responsible AI for peace and security.
The third workshop in the series will be held in Porto Salvo, Portugal, in collaboration with GAIPS, INESC-ID, and Instituto Superior Técnico. The workshop is open to students affiliated with universities in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa, Oceania, and Asia.
Date & Time: June 6 a 7
Where: IST – Tagus Park, Porto Salvo
Registration deadline: April 8
Summary: “As with the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) on people’s day-to-day lives, the impacts for international peace and security include wide-ranging and significant opportunities and challenges. AI can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but its dual-use nature means that peaceful applications can also be misused for harmful purposes such as political disinformation, cyberattacks, terrorism, or military operations. Meanwhile, those researching and developing AI in the civilian sector remain too often unaware of the risks that the misuse of civilian AI technology may pose to international peace and security and unsure about the role they can play in addressing them. Against this background, UNODA and SIPRI launched, in 2023, a three-year educational initiative on Promoting Responsible Innovation in AI for Peace and Security. The initiative, which is supported by the Council of the European Union, aims to support greater engagement of the civilian AI community in mitigating the unintended consequences of civilian AI research and innovation for peace and security. As part of that initiative, SIPRI and UNODA are organising a series of capacity building workshops for STEM students (at PhD and Master levels). These workshops aim to provide the opportunity for up-and-coming AI practitioners to work together and with experts to learn about a) how peaceful AI research and innovation may generate risks for international peace and security; b) how they could help prevent or mitigate those risks through responsible research and innovation; c) how they could support the promotion of responsible AI for peace and security.”