INESC-ID doctoral student awarded Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo Award
Maria Catarina Botelho, an Early Stage Researcher at INESC-ID, has been awarded one of the Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo Awards (Prémios Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, this year in their sixth edition) in the “Young Alumna” category.
A graduate from the Integrated Masters program in Biomedical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Botelho is now a doctoral student in the Human Language Technologies Research Area at INESC-ID, where she is developing her thesis on the use of speech as a biomarker for speech affecting diseases under the supervision of INESC-ID faculty Isabel Trancoso and Alberto Abad, as well as Tanja Schultz (University of Bremen).
Asked what this award meant to her, Botelho recognized that “For me, receiving this award symbolizes the recognition of the effort and goals I have been striving for and achieving over the more than 9 years that I have belonged to this school. It is also an incentive to keep going!”
The Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo Awards were delivered to its three winners today, 18 November 2022, at Instituto Superior Técnico.
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.”