Ana Catarina Gomes' work is among the four winners of the “IEEE Portugal Outstanding MSc Thesis Award 2025”
The Portuguese chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest professional association in the field of technology, recently awarded Ana Catarina Gomes, a Master’s graduate in Data Science from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), with the IEEE Portugal Outstanding MSc Thesis Award 2025, an award for the best master’s dissertations in Portugal in the technical areas covered by the IEEE.
Ana Catarina Gomes’s dissertation, titled “Active Inference against Federated Learning: Attacks and Solutions”, addresses data privacy in machine learning models, particularly in distributed learning mechanisms such as Federated Learning (FL), a solution designed to mitigate privacy concerns related to training data through decentralization.
“My work proposed new active attacks against FL to infer privacy-sensitive attributes, such as whether a smartphone user is at home. This study shows that techniques designed to preserve privacy, such as FL, introduce new and still largely unexplored vulnerabilities, and that models with strong generalization capabilities can create a false sense of security,” explains the current student of the Doctoral Program in Computer Science.
In her dissertation, she therefore presents alternative proposals for detection and mitigation techniques for active attacks that go beyond existing ones by balancing the trade-off between privacy and utility, and proving effective against underestimated active threats. This is an increasingly critical area given the exponential growth of artificial intelligence.
The work of the young researcher, one of four recognized by the IEEE, was supervised by FCUP lecturer and INESC TEC researcher João Vilela.
This is not the first time Ana Catarina Gomes has been recognized for her performance. She recently received the award for the highest GPA in the Master’s in Data Science at the 5th edition of FCUP’s Awards and Distinctions Ceremony.