The 9th edition of the LASIGE workshop took place last Wednesday, April 10, 2024, showcasing the vibrant research activities within the unit. This year, the event featured four insightful talks delivered by distinguished members of LASIGE, drawing attention to the high-quality research being conducted. The speakers included leaders of LASIGE’s Research Lines of Excellence (RLEs): Bruno Loff (Theory of Computing), Carlos Duarte (Inclusive Human-Computer Interaction), and Nuno Neves (Dependable and Secure Decentralized Systems). Their presentations focused on illustrating the impact and lasting value of their research. Additionally, the workshop counted with a talk by Márcia Barros that spotlighted her journey since concluding the PhD, offering valuable perspectives on navigating the early stages of a research career.

A highlight of the event was the award ceremony, which celebrated the achievements of LASIGE members over the past year. Awards were distributed across several categories, recognizing contributions that spanned from societal impact to academic excellence:

Best Outreach Initiative 
Filipa Rocha was distinguished for her innovative approach to teaching programming concepts to children with visual impairments. Her creation, a specialized kit, was featured in Core A* conference paper and earned her the second prize in the European Patent Office’s 2023 Young Inventors Award, and an honorable mention in the category of Social Responsibility of the Exame Informática’s ‘As Melhores & As Maiores do Portugal Tecnológico’ awards.

Best PhD Student
Rita Sousa received the top honor, with Filipa Rocha and David Gonçalves receiving honorable mentions for their exceptional contributions.

Best Early Career Researcher
André Rodrigues was recognized for his achievements, with Andreia Sofia Teixeira and Nuno Garcia receiving honorable mentions for their outstanding work.

Distinguished Publications
This category highlighted research published in top-tier journals and conferences, underscoring LASIGE’s commitment to excellence in research.

1. Alexandre Silva, Carlos Pereira dos Santos, João Pedro Neto, and Richard J. Nowakowski. Disjunctive sums of quasi-nimbers. Theoretical Computer Science, 945, 2023.
2. Ana Rodrigues, Nuno Rodrigues, João Santinha, Maria V. Lisitskaya, Aycan Uysal, Celso Matos, Inês Domingues, and Nickolas Papanikolaou. Value of handcrafted and deep radiomic features towards training robust machine learning classifiers for prediction of prostate cancer disease aggressiveness. Scientific Reports, 13, 6206, 2023.
3. Andreia Mordido, Janek Spaderna, Peter Thiemann, and Vasco T. Vasconcelos. Parameterized algebraic protocols. In The 44th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2023), Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Vol. 7, Issue PLDI, pages 1389-1413. ACM; 2023.
4. Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Yiannis Giannakopoulos, Alexandros Hollender, Philip Lazos, and Diogo Poças. On the complexity of equilibrium computation in first-price auctions. SIAM Journal on Computing, 52:80-131, 2023.
5. Catarina Gamboa, Paulo Canelas, Christopher Timperley, and Alcides Fonseca. Usability-oriented design of Liquid Types for java. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023), pages 1520-1532. IEEE, 2023.
6. Claudio Reginaldo Alexandre and João Balsa. Incorporating machine learning and a risk-based strategy in an anti-money laundering multiagent system. Expert Systems with Applications, 2023.
7. David Gonçalves, Manuel Piçarra, Pedro Pais, João Guerreiro, and André Rodrigues. “My Zelda Cane”: strategies used by blind players to play visual-centric digital games. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’23). ACM, 2023.
8. David Gonçalves, Pedro Pais, Kathrin Gerling, Tiago Guerreiro, and André Rodrigues. Social gaming: a systematic review. Computers in Human Behavior, 2023.
9. Diana F Sousa and Francisco M Couto. K-RET: knowledgeable biomedical relation extraction system. Bioinformatics, 2023.
10. Diogo Azevedo, Ana Maria Rodrigues, Helena Canhão, Alexandra M. Carvalho, and André Souto. Zgli: a pipeline for clustering by compression with application to patient stratification in spondyloarthritis. Sensors, 2023.
11. Diogo F. Soares, Rui Henriques, Marta Gromicho, Mamede de Carvalho, and Sara C. Madeira. Triclustering-based classification of longitudinal data for prognostic prediction: targeting relevant clinical endpoints in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Scientific Reports, 2023.
12. Eduardo N. Castanho, João P. Lobo, Rui Henriques, and Sara C. Madeira. G-bic: generating synthetic benchmarks for biclustering. BMC Bioinformatics, 2023.
13. Erica Tavazzi, Enrico Longato, Martina Vettoretti, Helena Aidos, Isotta Trescato, Chiara Roversi, Andreia S. Martins, Eduardo N. Castanho, Ruben Branco, Diogo F. Soares, Alessandro Guazzo, Giovanni Birolo, Daniele Pala, Pietro Bosoni, Adriano Chiò, Umberto Manera, Mamede de Carvalho, Bruno Miranda, Marta Gromicho, Inês Alves, Riccardo Bellazzi, Arianna Dagliati, Piero Fariselli, Sara C. Madeira, and Barbara Di Camillo. Artificial intelligence and statistical methods for stratification and prediction of progression in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a systematic review. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2023.
14. Filipa Rocha, Filipa Correia, Isabel Neto, Ana Cristina Pires, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, and Hugo Nicolau. Coding together: on co-located and remote collaboration between children with mixed-visual abilities. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’23). ACM, 2023.
15. Georges Bedran, Hans-Christof Gasser, Kenneth Weke, Tongjie Wang, Dominika Bedran, Alexander Laird, Christophe Battail, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Catia Pesquita, Håkan Axelson, Ajitha Rajan, David J. Harrison, Aleksander Palkowski, Maciej Pawlik, Maciej Parys, J. Robert O’Neill, Paul M. Brennan, Stefan N. Symeonides, David R. Goodlett, Kevin Litchfield, Robin Fahraeus, Ted R. Hupp, Sachin Kote, and Javier A. Alfaro. The immunopeptidome from a genomic perspective: establishing the noncanonical landscape of MHC class I–associated peptides. Cancer Immunology Research, 11:747-762, 2023.
16. João Oliveira, Soraia M. Alarcão, Teresa Chambel, and Manuel J. Fonseca. MetaFERA: a meta-framework for creating emotion recognition frameworks for physiological signals. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2023.
17. João Guerreiro, Yujin Kim, Rodrigo Nogueira, Seung A. Chung, André Rodrigues, and Uran Oh. The design space of the auditory representation of objects and their behaviours in virtual reality for blind people. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 29:2763-2773, 2023.
18. Luísa Marote Costa, João Colaço, Alexandra M. Carvalho, Susana Vinga, and Andreia Sofia Teixeira. Using markov chains and temporal alignment to identify clinical patterns in dementia. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2023.
19. Miguel G. Silva, Sara C. Madeira, and Rui Henriques. Actionable descriptors of spatiotemporal urban dynamics from large-scale mobile data: a case study in Lisbon city. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2023.
20. Muhammad Asif, Hugo F. M. C. Martiniano, Andre Lamurias, Samina Kausar, and Francisco M. Couto. DGH-GO: dissecting the genetic heterogeneity of complex diseases using gene ontology. BMC Bioinformatics, 2023.
21. Prantik Chatterjee, Jose Campos, Rui Abreu, and Subhajit Roy. Augmenting automated spectrum based fault localization for multiple faults. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023), pages 3140-3148. 2023.
22. Pedro Barbosa, Rosina Savisaar, Maria Carmo-Fonseca, and Alcides Fonseca. Computational prediction of human deep intronic variation. GigaScience, 12, 2023.
23. Pedro Rosa, André Souto, and José Cecílio. Light-SAE: a lightweight authentication protocol for large-scale IoT environments made with constrained devices. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 20:2428-2441, 2023.
24. Qihong Chen, Rúben Câmara, José Campos, André Souto, and Iftekhar Ahmed. The smelly eight: an empirical study on the prevalence of code smells in quantum computing. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023). 2023.
25. Ricardo M. S. Carvalho, Daniela Oliveira, and Catia Pesquita. Knowledge Graph Embeddings for ICU readmission prediction. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2023.
26. Rita T. Sousa, Sara Silva, and Catia Pesquita. Explainable representations for relation prediction in knowledge graphs. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2023), pages 635–646.
27. Rita T. Sousa, Sara Silva, and Catia Pesquita. Supervised biomedical semantic similarity. IEEE Access, 11:60635-60645, 2023.
28. Saeed Osat, Fragkiskos Papadopoulos, Andreia Sofia Teixeira, and Filippo Radicchi. Embedding-aided network dismantling. Physical Review Research, 2023.
29. Soraia M. Alarcão, Vânia Mendonça, Cláudia Sevivas, Carolina Maruta, and Manuel J. Fonseca. Annotate smarter, not harder: using active learning to reduce emotional annotation effort. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 1-14, 2023.
30. Szymon Talaga, Massimo Stella, Trevor James Swanson, and Andreia Sofia Teixeira. Polarization and multiscale structural balance in signed networks. Communications Physics, 2023.
31. Vasco V. Branco, Luís Correia, and Pedro Cardoso. The use of machine learning in species threats and conservation analysis. Biological Conservation, 2023.

The event also featured a poster session, where attendees voted for the best posters:

Best Poster
The first place was awarded to “The Trick is to Stay Behind?: Defining and Exploring the Design Space of Player Balancing Mechanics” by David Gonçalves, Daniel Barros, Pedro Pais, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, and André Rodrigues. The runner-up was “Development of a knowledge graph for a recommender system for biological control agents against plant pathogens” by Francisco Vicente, Ricardo Ramiro, and Márcia Barros.

All the posters are available here.

The workshop concluded with the announcement of Fábio Silva as the Advent of Code 2023 winner, celebrating his achievement in this competitive coding challenge.

LASIGE workshop not only highlights the unit’s cutting-edge research but also fostered a sense of community and collaboration among its members.