News details

  • NOVA LINCS PhD student, Diogo Lavado, distinguished by REN and Fraunhofer Portugal
  • Nov 2023
  • Diogo Lavado, NOVA LINCS PhD student, was distinguished by REN Award and the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge Master Thesis Award, for his master thesis “Detection of Power Line Supporting Towers Via Interpretable Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds”.

    His thesis aims to contribute to improving the inspection and maintenance work of power transmission networks. The innovative proposal represents an important advance in the sector, aiming replace traditional physical and manual inspection approaches with more efficient, technologically advanced and lower-cost methods.

    The Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge is an idea contest promoted by Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS with the objective of motivating and rewarding research of practical utility, through the attribution of scientific prizes to MSc students and researchers from Portuguese higher education institutions in the scientific areas of Human-Centred Design, Artificial Intelligence, and Cyber-physical systems. The Challenge includes a scientific prize category of Master Thesis Award for the best ideas presented by MSc students and researchers that were developed having ‘Research of Practical Utility’ in mind and are based on graduation theses.

    The REN Award, one of the oldest scientific awards in Portugal, is attributed, each year, to the best Master's theses on energy developed in Portuguese universities, with the purpose to contribute to the development of the energy sector in Portugal.

    The award-winning thesis was supervised by NOVA LINCS Intelligent Systems Group researcher Claudia Soares, and Alessandra Micheletti, from Università degli Studi di Milano.