Every year MaxData acknowledges the best student of each of the Department of Informatics’ courses. The award is presented at the Ciências ULisboa anniversary ceremony.

This year several LASIGE students were distinguished for their academic (BSc and MSc) record and research work (PhD) during the 2020/2021 academic period.

Pedro Ruas’ research accomplishments on the designated period were distinguished with the MaxData Informatic Excellence award for a PhD student. Ruas’ research focuses on improving the task of biomedical Named Entity Linking, more concretely the candidate generation, ranking and model evaluation. The candidate generation is improved by dealing with unlinkable entities and the candidate ranking by relation extraction approaches. The evaluation is improved by novel human-annotated datasets that are multilingual and focused on the biomedical domain.