ACIA 2020 awards ceremony

The Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (ACIA) has delivered the ACIA 2020 awards on December 2. The ceremony, which has been broadcast virtually through the Zoom platform, is part of the ACIA 2020 Conference. Due to the pandemic, the CCIA2020 annual congress has been cancelled and in its place, the association has carried out this act including the delivery of awards and a conference.

The event began with the conference entitled "COVID-19: data, computing, models, NLP and AI in the BSC", by Professor Alfonso Valencia, researcher at ICREA and director of the Life Sciences Department  Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC). The presentation was about projects related to the application of artificial intelligence techniques in the investigation of COVID-19.

Afterwards, the ACIA award was given to the best final master's thesis, which went to the project "Handling variable shaped & high resolution images for multi-class classification problem", from the graduate of the master's degree in Artificial Intelligence, Yiannis Sotiropoulos. Sotiropoulos has done his master's thesis at the BSC, specifically in the High Performance Artificial Intelligence department, and the director has been Dr. Dario Garcia.

Finally, the Marco Esteva Vivanco award for the best doctoral thesis went to Dr. Gerard Canal, postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, with his thesis “Adapting robot behaviour to user preferences in assistive scenarios”. The directors of this thesis have been Dr. Guillem Alenyà and researcher Carme Torras.