FIB student Asier Gutiérrez, awarded at the VIII AECOC Academic Prizes

Within the framework of its 4th Employability Conference, the Spanish Commercial Coding Association (AECOC) has delivered the VIII Academic Awards in a ceremony held on 4 March in a hybrid format from the Barcelona and Madrid headquarters that rewards the most outstanding academic works carried out by young talents from universities across the country. The President of AECOC, Francisco Javier Campo, and the Secretary General for Universities, José Manuel Pingarrón, have chaired the award ceremony, which was led by Guillermina Bastida, head of the AECOC University-Company Project.

Asier Gutiérrez Fandiño, FIB student of the Master in Artificial Intelligence and research engineer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center–Centro Nacional de Supercomputación, has won the second prize in the Applied Technology category thanks to his final master's thesis. "Explainability on Recommender Systems Using Contextual Data" is the winning thesis and has been tutored by professors from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, la Universitat de Barcelona i la Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

The VIII AECOC Awards recognise the best bachelor and master’s thesis that promote the improvement of business competitiveness in the mass consumer sector. The awards are classified into four categories (marketing, supply chain, applied technology and Pepsico-Sustainability) and their prizes are 3,000 euros for the author, 1,000 for the tutor and 1,000 for the second prize. This year, the call has had about 150 applications and ten of the works have been awarded.

The AECOC University - Company programme, of which the Academic Awards belong to, was launched in 2012 and 69 university centres and 1,700 young people currently participate in its annual activities.

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