Award
The Adamastor Award
4th Edition
The award ceremony for the 4th edition will take place on July 6 in the Ferreira da Silva Auditorium at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto
The Adamastor Award — €20,000 — recognises innovative work by young scientists developed at a Portugal-based institution, in electrotechnics, computing, and related fields. The awarded work must demonstrate not only scientific excellence but also the potential to generate meaningful impact for society.
Motto
In Camões’ 16th-century epic Os Lusíadas — Portugal’s foundational literary work, which recounts the age of discovery and the sea voyage to India — the Adamastor is the giant that embodies the obstacle: the fear of the unknown, the limits imposed on those who dare venture into uncharted territory. When INESC was founded in 1980, Portugal faced a deep scientific and technological lag. Its founders adopted “Vencer o Adamastor” — Conquer the Adamastor — as their motto, because they believed Portugal could reach the frontier of science and technology despite that lag. Forty-five years later, the prize that honours the young scientists carrying that work forward bears the same name.
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The institutions of the INESC group, and many others that followed adopting similar models, have since played a significant role in the Portuguese science and technology system. But Portugal is not yet the country we would all want it to be — a leader in science and technology, where scientists and innovators are seen as role models and inspire new generations. The Adamastor Award was established to give visibility to exceptional work by young scientists who are Portuguese or have been based in Portugal for at least three years, and who demonstrate scientific excellence, vision, and leadership capacity.
Laureates of Past Editions
Sérgio Jesus's work starts from the uncomfortable observation that most of what is known about the effect of artificial intelligence on human decisions has been studied under artificial conditions, and those findings do not translate to what happens when systems are deployed in the real world. To demonstrate this, he developed an evaluation methodology inspired by clinical trials and tested it at scale with professional fraud detection analysts. The results show that experts assisted by AI with correct explanations make faster decisions but more errors, challenging the assumption that human oversight and automatic explanations are sufficient safeguards.
As part of this research, Sérgio Jesus contributed to the development of two open-access resources now in use worldwide: Bank Account Fraud, the largest public dataset for testing whether AI models discriminate based on characteristics such as gender or ethnicity, and Aequitas Flow, a platform for systematically assessing that risk. Both have been integrated into Feedzai's software and account for more than 250,000 transfers.
Sérgio Jesus holds a PhD from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, where he conducted his research in partnership with Feedzai, a Portuguese financial fraud prevention company where he is an Advanced Research Data Scientist.
Pedro Orvalho's work addressed a concrete problem in programming education: correcting code errors consumes a significant part of teachers' time, often on basic-level issues. MENTOR identifies the error, delivers personalised immediate feedback to the student, and encourages them to solve the problem on their own, without offering the solution. Students learn more and teachers are freed up for the questions that truly require human attention.
Pedro Orvalho is currently an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at IIIA-CSIC, in Barcelona.
Manuel Goulão's work addressed how to use sensitive data from multiple sources jointly without exposing it, using protocols that allow multiple parties to perform operations on shared information without any of them accessing each other's data. The work was developed with the threat of quantum computing in mind, knowing that current encryption systems will become vulnerable as quantum computers grow sufficiently powerful.
Manuel Goulão is currently a researcher at INESC-ID, in Lisbon.
Gonçalo Correia's work addressed two of the most pressing problems in AI models: opacity - the inability to explain their own decisions - and computational cost, which carries significant energy and environmental impact. His solution trains the model to ignore what is not relevant, rather than processing everything with equal weight. The result is a model that is more compact, more efficient, and easier to interpret.
Gonçalo Correia is currently Head of AI at Priberam and Visiting Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon.
Jury of the Adamastor Award
José Manuel
Tribolet
IST/University of Lisbon and INESC
(President of the Jury)
Estela Guerreiro
Bicho
University of Minho
Henrique
Madeira
University of Coimbra
Isabel
Trancoso
IST/University of Lisbon
João Peças
Lopes
University of Porto and INESC TEC
José Carlos
Marques dos
Santos
University of Porto and INESC TEC
Luís
Caires
IST/University of Lisbon
Luís Oliveira
e Silva
IST/University of Lisbon
Mário
Figueiredo
IST/University of Lisbon
Pedro Guedes
de Oliveira
University of Porto and INESC
Susana
Sargento
University of Aveiro
Carla
Ferreira
NOVA School of Science and Technology
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Partnership
In Partnership with Jornal Público
To promote the visibility of the award, its winner, and the importance of scientific development in its fields, INESC established a partnership with Jornal Público — Portugal’s leading quality newspaper — to be realised through mutual collaboration in the following phases:
1. Creating the award’s visual identity;
2. Publicising the award during the call for applications;
3. Covering the public award ceremony;
4. Disseminating the awarded scientific work and related technologies.