LIP student wins 3rd place in “3-Minute Thesis” competition
"Íris Damião was awarded for her work on impartiality in search engines and digital platforms."
PhD student Íris Damião, a member of LIP’s SPAC group, won 3rd place in the final of the 3rd edition of the “3-Minute Thesis” competition at the University of Lisbon. The event, which challenges young researchers to present their PhD projects in just three minutes, took place on 22 May at the Pavilhão de Portugal in Lisbon.
Íris’s presentation focused on the neutrality - or lack thereof - of search engines and digital platforms such as Google, Bing, and ChatGPT. Her research aims to understand whether the results provided by these tools are truly impartial, or if they influence users based on personalised profiles, reinforcing information bubbles. To investigate this, she uses an innovative approach with bots programmed to simulate different user profiles and analyse, in parallel, the results returned for identical searches.
The project is part of the research lines of LIP’s SPAC group, which uses large-scale computational tools to study complex societal challenges. With a multidisciplinary approach that combines physics, data science, and artificial intelligence, the group focuses on topics such as disease dynamics, human behaviour, and public policy, while also anticipating the ethical risks of these technologies and proposing responsible guidelines for their use.
The competition, promoted by the University of Lisbon in partnership with the newspaper PÚBLICO and the Luso-American Foundation for Development (FLAD), awarded the top three projects among over a dozen finalists. First place went to Patrícia Bernardo, a PhD student from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Lisbon, for her project on creating meat products made with herbal infusions. Second place was awarded to Ana Sofia Carmo, a PhD student from Instituto Superior Técnico, whose project aims to predict epileptic seizures. The winners were selected by a jury composed of researchers and science communication specialists.
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[Photos: © André Farias Filipe, ULisboa]
Íris’s participation highlights the relevance of the research developed at LIP, particularly in the emerging field of complexity science and so-called “social physics”, where methods from statistical and particle physics are applied to study social and cognitive phenomena.
Congratulations Íris, on the well-deserved recognition!