On International Girls in ICT Day, Ana Teresa Freitas, INESC-ID researcher and President of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) at Instituto Superior Técnico, published an opinion article in Público that highlights a persistent and often overlooked issue in the digital transformation: the underrepresentation and under recognition of women in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
The researcher, that has been actively involved in this subject, begins by reminding readers that the history of ICT is rich with the contributions of pioneering women. From Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm, to programming pioneers like Grace Hopper, Ida Rhodes, Jean Bartik, Kathleen Antonelli, and many others, women have played a foundational role in shaping the digital world. Yet their names are often left out of the narrative, and their legacies remain under-celebrated.
Despite this long-standing contribution, Ana Teresa points out that women and girls continue to be a minority in ICT, not because of a lack of ability or interest, but because of structural and cultural barriers that persist in education, hiring, promotion, and workplace environments. Too often, efforts to address this imbalance have focused on encouraging women to adapt to male-dominated models of behaviour and success—what she calls “fixing the women.” Instead, the author argues, we must fix the system.
“The rules of the game need to be rewritten,” Ana Teresa insists, “so that success no longer depends on fitting into outdated moulds but on valuing diverse profiles and work styles.” Diverse teams, she explains, are more innovative and better equipped to design solutions that reflect the needs of diverse populations. In a sector where talent is scarce, attracting and retaining women isn’t just about fairness, it’s a competitive imperative.
There are, however, reasons for optimism. In 2024, 40% of PhD theses defended at DEI were presented by women.
“Talent has no gender, and the technology of the future needs every brilliant mind. It’s up to all of us to fix the system so that this talent is not wasted, but empowered.”
Our contribution will be on the project’s software ecosystem, in collaboration with INESC TEC, with a focus on optimizing performance for RISC-V architectures – an open-source, modular instruction set architecture that enables anyone to design custom processors without licensing fees, promoting technological independence and innovation. And also integrating HPC and AI applications, and enabling co-design approaches between hardware and software teams.
Backed by €240 million in funding from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the project marks a strategic step toward reducing Europe’s dependence on non-EU hardware and software in the fields of High-performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), DARE SGA1 will design and develop next-generation processors and a full software ecosystem based on RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture. The initiative’s goal is to create a fully European HPC technology stack to support scientific research, industrial innovation, and public-sector digital infrastructure.
“INESC-ID’s long-standing expertise in computer architecture and HPC positions us well to support this ambitious European initiative,” said Leonel Sousa, INESC-ID researcher, responsible for the Portuguese participation in Dare, and professor at Instituto Superior Técnico.
The first three years of DARE SGA1 will focus on building three RISC-V-based chiplets: a general-purpose processor (led by Codasip), a high-precision vector accelerator (led by Openchip), and an AI inference engine (led by Axelera AI). These components will form the backbone of Europe’s future supercomputing systems, offering greater energy efficiency and scalability than traditional monolithic chips.
“There’s no AI without HPC”, notes Leonel Sousa. “At the core of the project lies Europe’s ambition to become self-reliant in semiconductor and chip design. It’s crucial to reduce our dependency on foreign chip supply”, underlines the researcher.
DARE SGA1 is the first phase of a six-year roadmap to secure Europe’s digital autonomy in HPC and AI infrastructure. The project is expected to lay the groundwork for the EU’s first fully sovereign supercomputing system by the end of its initial phase.
INESC-ID is proud to release its latest Annual Report, compiling the main achievements of 2024.
Inside the report, you can read the story of our organisation, along with an overview of our structure, mission, strategy, and the latest facts and figures that showcase the continued growth and evolution of our institute.
The spotlight, however, is on the activities and accomplishments of our researchers and support offices. From national and international projects, publications, awards and recognitions to collaborations and outreach initiatives. The report reflects our ongoing commitment to scientific excellence, internationalisation, knowledge transfer, societal impact, and talent development.
The report is available in Portuguese here. Take a look and get to know us better!
Organized by the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law, in collaboration with FGV Direito Rio (Brazil), the event brought together national and international experts to discuss pressing challenges in digital regulation. Topics ranged from emerging technologies to the legal and ethical frameworks shaping our digital future.
Ahead of a panel discussion on the topic, Isabel Trancoso and also Mário Figueiredo, professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, delivered keynote talks on Artificial Intelligence and the societal challenges it presents
Participation in this high-level forum underscores INESC-ID’s active role in shaping public dialogue around the intersection of technology, ethics, and policy. Entry to the event was free, subject to prior registration.
An AI-powered robot dog, a European-made high-performance chip, a sustainability-focused game co-designed with People with Intellectual Disabilities (PID), a small AI robot that helps identify dangerous mushrooms, and even a tool that video-tracks camouflaged sea creatures — these are the projects INESC-ID presented at this year’s Técnico Open Day, held on April 5, drawing in curious minds of all ages.
Just past 9 a.m, the nervous buzz among the team of INESC-ID researchers and volunteer students was palpable. With support from the Communication and Outreach Office, connections were tested, key topics mentally rehearsed and final touches applied at what was INESC-ID’s largest-ever presence at a science fair, featuring three booths and a demonstration arena. Everything was ready to welcome the record-breaking 2700 attendees entering Instituto Superior Técnico’s central pavilion, from aspiring engineers to knowledge-seeking families and science fans of all ages.
Robots and games that teach and inspire
At the first booth, Inês Lobo, a PhD student from the AIPS scientific area (at GAIPS group), introduced visitors to Todos Sustentáveis (All Sustainable), a co-designed game that empowers People with Intellectual Disabilities (PID) to be sustainable citizens. Originally created for this community, the game is now also being adopted in schools – and judging by the line of children waiting their turn, it will be a big hit.
“A father even thanked me for being able to rest for half an hour while his son played the game”, shared an amused Inês.
Next to her, fellow PhD student Sandra Andrade, demonstrated the adorable AI robot ELMO and the Mushroom Game – an engaging way to explore how trust influences AI assisted decision-making – perfect for sparking discussions about AI and even teaching a little mycology along the way. “I was surprised by the age range of the participants, from babies to grandparents, all very interested in artificial intelligence and robots”, Sandra noted.
Meanwhile, in the adjacent demonstration arena, Miguel Belbute, also from GAIPS, and the GO2 Robot Dog from the CARMA project delighted crowds. Designed to support emergency responders in disaster zones, the athletic robot impressed visitors with its agility, so much so that it had to pause several times to recharge.
“When the children gathered around me and the robot, asking endless questions after the last demo”, Miguel recalled, “I felt like we were looking at the next generation of engineers!”
European Innovation in Chips and Computing
At the next booth, INESC-ID researchers Pedro Tomás, Tiago Rocha and Nuno Neves, from HPCAS, showcased a major achievement: a high-performance, energy-efficient chip developed under the European Processor Initiative (EPI). This powerful computer chip is helping Europe stay competitive and ahead in high-tech fields like artificial intelligence and scientific simulations.
Using a real-time remote connection to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the researchers demonstrated the chip’s capabilities, while answering questions from young students fascinated by the technology, as well as from visitors interested in the impact of these efforts on Europe’s future. “It surprised me both the number and diversity of people who stopped by,” noted Pedro Tomás, taking part in the event for the first time.
AI Meets Marine Biology
Finally, at our maritime-themed booth, IDSS researcher Sofia Pinto’s Master’s students Tomás Gomes and Guilherme Gonçalves (also first timers in outreach events) showcased their thesis research using AI-assisted video tracking to help biologists at the Lisbon Oceanarium. Their systems can detect camouflaged or hidden animals in aquarium video feeds, helping marine scientists better understand behaviour, stress and health of aquatic life in captivity.
“It was a great feeling to be able to go out into the field and apply computer science to help animal welfare” said Tomás, who took valuable time away from thesis writing to volunteer. “This is definitely something I want to do again.”
A full day of demos. Dozens of questions. Hundreds of sparked minds. A smiling (if tired) INESC-ID team packed up, already looking forward to the next one.
Featured Projects by INESC-ID:
A chip that puts Europe ahead in computing(Pedro Tomás, Nuno Neves, Tiago Rocha – HPCAS)
Autonomous robots for emergency assistance(Miguel Belbute – AIPS)
Mushroom Game: AI for decision assistance (Sandra Andrade – AIPS)
“Todos Sustentáveis” (All Sustainable): a game for sustainable citizens (Inês Lobo – AIPS)
Can computer science help study Oceanarium animals? (Sofia Pinto, Tomás Gomes, Guilherme Gonçalves – IDSS)
About Técnico Open Day
Técnico Open Day is an annual event, organised by Instituto Superior Técnico, that brings together students, professors, researchers, staff, student groups, departments, and associated institutes for a day of over a hundred activities for all ages. With free admission, it includes a science fair with associated research centres and institutes, student groups, laboratory visits, conversations with scientists, course presentations, experimental games, lectures, and much more.
Located on the 6th floor of the Alves Redol building, room 617 started as a storage room, with spare furniture lying around. In the past few months, however, it was subject to a complete makeover. Under the guidance of the Communications and Outreach Office, students from the PhD Volunteer team measured the space, mapped it out and brainstormed ideas for furniture, decoration and even board games. After a year-long long process, and counting with the strong support from the Board of Directors, the new exclusive PhD Students Room was finally ready, waiting for the big inauguration.
On April 2nd, around 30 people attended the symbolic ceremony, which included two members of the Board, João Paulo Carvalho and Helena Galhardas who, along with PhD Volunteer Daniel Gonçalves cut the ribbon placed at the door. Together, they shared the importance of having a space especially dedicated to PhD students, where they can study, socialize or take a breather from a day’s work. Enjoying the music being played and the snacks provided, the students were left to chat and enjoy their brand-new space.
Connecting with like-minded individuals, listening to each others’ stories and challenges, sharing knowledge and new ideas, are part of what makes community building crucial for a successful PhD journey. With this in mind, the Communications and Outreach Office of INESC-ID has been developing a series of community building initiatives for our PhD students, with the latest one being the much-anticipated PhD Room. This room, managed by the PhD Volunteer team, is now open for any PhD student who wants to use it.
INESC-ID has been awarded the highest possible rating—“Excellent”—in the latest national evaluation of Research and Development (R&D) Units by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT). Our research center achieved the maximum score in all evaluation criteria, highlighting the quality, merit, and societal relevance of its research activities.
INESC-ID stood out as one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. With a research community that includes more than 200 research associates, and almost 200 PhD students, the unit develops cutting-edge research aligned with four thematic lines of high societal relevance: Societal Digital Transformation, Life and Health Technology, Energy Transition, Security and Privacy.
The FCT evaluation panel praised INESC-ID for its outstanding international-level research, excellence in scientific publications—including work in Nature, NeurIPS, and ICSE—and its contributions to both theoretical and applied domains. Groundbreaking projects such as Gravitron (trusted execution environments in GPUs, adopted by NVIDIA and Microsoft) and Alive (compiler verification tools, used by Google, Apple, and Qualcomm) were recognized as proof of the unit’s technological leadership.
In addition to scientific output, the panel highlighted INESC-ID’s strong role in international collaboration, industry partnerships, and public engagement, as well as its firm commitment to ethical research practices and gender equality. Currently, 10 spin-offs operate based on INESC-ID technologies, showcasing its impact on innovation and the broader economy.
“This result is a recognition of the collective work of our entire community,” said Inês Lynce, President of the Board of Directors of INESC-ID. “It reflects our commitment to excellent research, our focus on societal challenges, and our long-standing values of collaboration, inclusion, and scientific integrity. We are proud to lead a center that not only advances knowledge but also strives to shape a better future for all.”
Miguel Pupo Correia, President of the Executive Committee, notes that “INESC-ID’s Excellent rating by FCT confirms the effectiveness of the strategy we have been pursuing — and intend to continue — based on four main pillars: scientific excellence, internationalization, technology and knowledge transfer, societal impact, and talent development.”
Looking forward, INESC-ID will place a strong emphasis on talent development, adding a new strategic pillar to its institutional mission. This includes empowering young researchers through initiatives such as PhD representation, tenure-track-like programs, and ongoing investments in ethics, training, and career progression.
“Most of the institution’s activity consists of self-funded research projects and service provision. However, the funding received as part of this evaluation is crucial for the implementation of our strategic plan, particularly in terms of improving working conditions for researchers. This includes support for project proposal preparation and project management”, ads Miguel Pupo Correia.
The panel also emphasized the need for robust computational infrastructure—including GPU clusters and specialized labs—to support the center’s ambitious goals in machine learning, embedded systems, and robotics. INESC-ID’s solid plan for the upcoming years positions the unit to continue delivering high-impact, technically challenging, and socially meaningful research.
The evaluation, which determines the allocation of €634.9 million in public funding for the 2025–2029 period, reviewed a total of 336 R&D units. Of these, 313 received funding, with only one withdrawal. The rigorous process also noted that 79 units improved their classification compared to the previous evaluation.
Two papers co-authored by INESC-ID researchers, professors, and students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) at Instituto Superior Técnico were distinguished at EuroSys 2025, a leading European conference in computer systems, held in Rotterdam from March 30 to April 3.
The work presents HawkSet, an innovative tool for detecting concurrent bugs in Persistent Memory (PM) systems. PM enables the development of fast, persistent applications without relying on expensive HDD/SSD-based I/O operations. However, due to the volatile nature of caches and CPU memory reordering for performance optimization, developers must use low-level instructions to ensure data consistency in case of crashes—especially in concurrent environments, where new classes of bugs can emerge.
HawkSet stands out for being automatic, application-agnostic, and highly efficient. It employs lockset analysis and automatic binary instrumentation to detect all bugs found by state-of-the-art tools, as well as seven previously unknown bugs. It achieves this without requiring application-specific knowledge, debugging artifacts, or guided executions. HawkSet also delivers significant performance improvements—up to 159x faster detection—and consistently uncovers hard-to-reach bugs that depend on rare interleavings.
The paper describes Borg, Google’s cluster management system that runs hundreds of thousands of jobs from thousands of applications across clusters with tens of thousands of machines.
Borg achieves high resource utilization through a combination of admission control, efficient task-packing, over-commitment, and process-level performance isolation. It supports high-availability applications with runtime features that reduce fault-recovery time and scheduling policies that lower the risk of correlated failures. For users, Borg offers a declarative job specification language, integration with name services, real-time monitoring, and tools for system analysis and simulation.
EuroSys, the European Conference on Computer Systems, is one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of systems research—particularly relevant to the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) research area at INESC-ID.
When Ricardo Rei started his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering, he already knew he wanted to work in AI. But it was the people who led the former INESC-ID researcher to pursue his master’s in dialogue systems and chatbots. Under the supervision of João Graça, Unbabel’s CTO at the time — a company Ricardo discovered during Semana Empresarial e Tecnológica — he came into close contact with automatic translation algorithms. It was then he realised how hard it was to evaluate the quality of chatbots or, as we may put it, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It soon became clear that this would be the topic of his Ph.D. thesis, titled “Robust, Interpretable and Efficient MT Evaluation with Fine-tuned Metrics.” A thesis he completed in less than the usual four years — and one that has earned strong recognition from both industry and academia through citations, conference presentations, and awards. The latest of these is the Anthony C. Clarke Best Thesis Award by the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) — the first time a scientist working in Portugal has received this distinction.
“I am not surprised at all!” says INESC-ID researcher and proud supervisor Luísa Coheur — who co-supervised the work with Alon Lavie from Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s a very robust thesis, with many publications and no fragility,” she adds.
The Cross-lingual Optimized Metric for Evaluation of Translation, or COMET — the most visible outcome of Ricardo’s work — has been widely adopted for evaluating translation engine outputs. It’s now integrated into the Unbabel portfolio, a company specialising in AI-driven translation with human assistance, where Ricardo has worked ever since completing his master’s. He currently holds the position of Senior Research Scientist.
“Our models are public,” he notes, “but if they are being used for commercial purposes, they must be paid for.” COMET is used to determine whether a machine translation needs human review and correction. “It ended up being adopted as the main evaluation metric,” Ricardo explains.
Luísa recalls the same enthusiasm and dedication in Ricardo when he was just a first-year student, crediting that strong connection and drive for his remarkable achievements. As for Ricardo, it’s no surprise he uses a beach metaphor to describe how he completed his Ph.D. so quickly and smoothly: “When I started my Ph.D., I already knew my corner of the beach.” After all, he’s a former surf champion.
The award, named after a former member of EAMT, of “exceptional human qualities”, notes INESC-ID researcher and current President of EAMT, Helena Moniz, will be delivered on a ceremony in June.
In an effort to reduce the time spent correcting errors in coding, Pedro Orvalho, who recently concluded his PhD thesis, at INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, and is now at the University of Oxford, has developed the artificial intelligence tool MENTOR, which has earned him the third edition of the award “Vencer o Adamastor” (“Overcoming the Adamastor”). On winning this recognition, the researcher shared that “it is an honour for me to receive this award, as it recognises the impact, both at a scientific and societal level, of the research work I developed during my PhD in collaboration with my supervisors, Vasco Manquinho here at INESC-ID, and Mikoláš Janota at CIIRC, at the Czech Technical University in Prague.”
The MENTOR system helps to automatically identify errors in computer programs, offering instant, personalised feedback to the students, while encouraging them to solve the problem themselves, as the system doesn’t provide solutions. This reduces the amount of simpler doubts and questions asked to the teachers, allowing their time to be dedicated to more complex or conceptual student issues, improving pedagogical support.
Tests have been carried out in Computer Engineering courses at Instituto Superior Técnico, with positive feedback. However, its use will not be exclusive to university level – according to Pedro “looking to the future, with the increasing digitalisation of society, programming will soon become a common subject at all levels of education, from basic to university. The MENTOR system thus appears as a learning tool that can help in the construction of this path, where each student can learn to program more autonomously.”
The award ceremony will take place tomorrow, April 11, at 17h00, at Técnico Innovation Center, attended by Rogério Colaço, president of Instituto Superior Técnico, Arlindo Oliveira, president of INESC, Luís Ferreira, Rector of the University of Lisbon, and Fernando Alexandre, Minister of Education, Science and Innovation.
The Prize “Vencer o Adamastor” (“Overcoming the Adamastor”), established by INESC and the newspaper “Público”, aims to reward “innovative works by young scientists, developed in Portugal, in the fields of electrical engineering , computing and the like, which reveal not only scientific excellence, but also potential for developments that benefit society”.
