The ceremony for the 2nd edition of the Vencer o Adamastor Award was held at the Técnico Innovation Center on 23 July.
The Vencer o Adamastor 2024 Award was presented to Manuel Goulão, for his work ‘Post-Quantum Secure Multi-Party Computation: Cryptography Fighting for a More Private and Egalitarian Future’.
The ceremony began with words from the president of Instituto Superior Técnico, Professor Rogério Colaço, who emphasised that despite this being the second edition, the Vencer o Adamastor Award has already gained relevance among those who carry out research.
This was followed by a speech by Professor Arlindo Oliveira, President of INESC, who explained how throughout its history, INESC has always faced the ‘Adamastor’ of technological lag in Portugal, which it has tackled, including through this award.
During his speech, Professor Arlindo took the opportunity to reveal that applications for the 3rd edition of the prize are now open.
The speech by Marta Moitinho Oliveira, deputy director of Público, focused on the importance of the science journalism practised by Público, which is one of the reasons why this initiative is so important to the newspaper.
The award was presented by Professor José Tribolet, founder of INESC, after which Manuel Goulão presented his work and emphasised the importance of ensuring that cryptography works in the face of the growing capabilities of quantum computing.
After the award ceremony, Professor Luis Ferreira, rector of the University of Lisbon, took to the stage and stressed the importance of initiatives such as the Vencer o Adamastor Award in communicating to society the research carried out in Portuguese research centers and by Portuguese researchers abroad.
About the Award:
This award, a partnership between the INESC holding company and the Público newspaper, aims to highlight innovative projects in the areas of computing, electrical engineering and computers.
The 1st edition of the Vencer o Adamastor Award, which took place in 2023, was presented to Gonçalo Correia for his doctoral thesis ‘Learnable sparsity and weak supervision for data-efficient, transparent, and compact neural models’.
About the Winner:
Manuel Goulão, graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico and is currently a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.