“A Recommender System for Biological Control Agents in Agriculture” was developed by Daniel Carvalho, through LASIGE’s Summer of Research programme, under the supervision of Márcia Barros (LASIGE integrated member), as part of the PlantPathoRec project.

Daniel brought together regulatory data from Portugal, Spain, France, and the European Union and developed a prototype to rank biological control agents for specific crop-pathogen combinations. The system retains links to commercial products and their authorization records, making the information behind its recommendations traceable.

Using the Portuguese catalogue, the prototype recovered 93.6% of held-out biological control agents within its top five recommendations across 109 crop-pathogen combinations. These results demonstrate its ability to retrieve recorded associations, while biological effectiveness remains a question for future validation. The poster for this work was presented at LASIGE Welcome day 2026. Daniel’s work also received Outstanding Research Project recognition from LASIGE, acknowledging his contribution to the PlantPathoRec project, which focuses on recommender systems for sustainable agriculture.