The award recognizes Miriam Santos' contribution to more robust and reliable AI models, applicable to areas such as healthcare and justice.
The award recognizes the work of researcher Miriam Santos and her contribution to more robust and reliable AI models applicable to areas such as health and justice.
Miriam Seoane Santos, a professor at the Faculty of Sciences, won the ERCIM Cor Baayen 2025, a prestigious international award for early-career researchers in the field of computer science and applied mathematics. Miriam is the first Portuguese woman to win this award, which recognizes her work in the area of data quality for the responsible development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
The award, worth €5,000, recognizes Miriam's research, which began at the University of Coimbra and continues at the University of Porto, namely at INESC TEC, where she is a researcher.
“For me, this award is a recognition of fundamental research,” says the professor from the Department of Computer Science at FCUP. The professor has been studying how data characteristics, such as lack of representativeness, absence of information, or intrinsic complexity, influence AI models. According to the researcher, there is a greater focus on models rather than on the data itself, and it is also important to study them. “My goal is to contribute to more robust and reliable AI that can be applied in areas such as health, justice, finance, or telecommunications,” she explains.
For Miriam, this award is also an “incentive to continue promoting more equitable, fair, and transparent technology.”
Alongside this work, the researcher is also dedicated to promoting digital literacy and empowering the community with regard to AI. Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used, and the FCUP professor wants to help people “understand, create, and use technology responsibly and knowledgeably, for the benefit of society as a whole.”
Miriam already has plans for the future. Her next steps will be to develop practical methods and tools to help researchers and companies translate ethical and regulatory principles into concrete technical guarantees—all in the name of more responsible AI. She also wants to continue her work on inclusion and diversity in technology and continue to raise awareness among her students and companies about the importance of developing technological products with responsibility and social awareness.
At the end of October, the FCUP professor will officially receive the award and present her work at the ERCIM Fall Meeting, which will take place in France on October 30.
About the ERCIM Cor Baayen Award
The Cor Baayen Early Career Researcher Award is a highly respected annual award in computer science and applied mathematics, granted by ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics). It was created in 1995 to honor Cor Baayen, the first president of ERCIM. The names of the candidate researchers are proposed by the institutions associated with this entity, and the selection criteria for this award consider scientific quality, originality and rigor, impact (scientific and/or societal), and international visibility.
About Miriam Seoane Santos
Assistant professor at FCUP since March 2024 and researcher at INESC TEC, Miriam Seoane Santos holds a master's degree in Biomedical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra.
For several years, she was a researcher at the Center for Informatics and Systems at the University of Coimbra (CISUC), having also worked as a research fellow at the Center for New Technologies in Medicine (AIBILI) and at CI-IPO-Porto Research Center (CI-IPOP). In 2020, she founded the digital inclusion project “Raparigas do Código” (Girls of Code).
She was also a guest assistant at the Miguel Torga Higher Institute and the University of Coimbra.
Renata Silva / FCUP