FIB professor Sergi Nadal, 2020 Award for Scientific Research into Urban Challenges

The Barcelona City Council has delivered on Tuesday, 16 March, the Awards for Scientific Research into Urban Challenges in the City of Barcelona 2020, announced last October to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and published in the Resolution of 30 December 2020.

The ceremony, broadcast on YouTube, took place in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council and was chaired by the mayor of the city, Ada Colau, together with the Deputy Mayor for Culture, Education, Science and Community, Joan Subirats, and the delegate of Municipal Policies for Science and Universities and president of the jury, Júlia Miralles de Imperial.

A total of 65 projects were submitted to the call for these awards, most of which have been created by women scientists, and eventually 15 have been the winners. Sergi Nadal Francesch, professor at the Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB) and member of the DTIM - Database Technologies and lnformation Management Group, has been one of the winners thanks to his project “An Automatic Data Discovery Approach to Enhance Barcelona's Data Ecosystem”. For this project, the FIB professor has been awarded 72,113.03 €.

Nadal's proposal suggests the creation of a platform run by the Barcelona City Council that is based on the city's open data to support data scientists in the process of developing smart applications. Professors Cristina Gómez and Oscar Romero, both from the Department of Service and Information System Engineering (ESSI) are also part of the project.

On the other hand, five more researchers from the UPC have been awarded for providing solutions to the challenges posed by the pandemic and for globally reformulating the city model. They are Carme Barba, Marta Domènech, Marta Serra, Còssima Cornadó and David López, from the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV) and the Barcelona School of Civil Engineering (ETSECCPB).

The Barcelona City Council aims to promote scientific research at a local level through these awards in order to investigate solutions to the city challenges from various thematic areas, such as social or humanistic sciences, natural and experimental sciences, exact and formal sciences or engineering and applied sciences. In addition, there is a clear commitment to young Barcelona talent, since the call is addressed to those people from the scientific community up to 40-year old.

The awards are part of the Barcelona Science Plan 2020-2023, an initiative to promote science and knowledge in the city and to claim Barcelona as the European capital for research and innovation.

More information:

Barcelona.cat

Barcelona City Council 

UPC Press