Speaking at Conferência .IA, organised by ECO at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Arlindo Oliveira, President of INESC, argued that Portugal’s five million euro bet on Amália has already paid off, just not in the way most people would expect. He also pointed to SAIL, INESC-ID‘s centre of excellence, as a working example of how Europe can respond to the pressure for technological sovereignty.

For Oliveira, Amália’s value has little to do with the model itself. What matters is the dozens of people in Portugal who now know how to configure and train large AI models, expertise that would likely have left for northern Europe or the United States without a project to build it around.

He also challenged ECO’s partner companies to explore technology transfer partnerships with SAIL, INESC-ID’s centre of excellence in responsible and sustainable AI. SAIL includes a joint doctoral programme with Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität and industry technology transfer projects, backed by 27.2 million euros from Horizon Europe, the Portuguese government and INESC.

Jorge Sá Silva, researcher at INESC Coimbra, coordinates SHIELD-EU, funded by FCT under the DEFENCE + SCIENCE 2025 call for exploratory research at the intersection of science, technology and defence.

The project develops a defence architecture built on intelligent Internet of Things technologies, Edge AI and cognitive, emotional and behavioural models, to strengthen resilience against hybrid warfare threats, where digital, informational, psychological and operational dimensions interact. A central focus is supporting decision-making and response in high-pressure environments, processing critical information faster and more securely without relying on centralised infrastructure.

SHIELD-EU is developed in collaboration with the Portuguese Air Force.

Sérgio Jesus, a researcher at Feedzai and a PhD graduate in Computer Science from the University of Porto’s Faculty of Sciences, has won the 4th edition of the Adamastor Award, worth 20,000 euros. His award winning work develops a methodology to evaluate the fairness and explainability of AI systems used in real world decisions, such as fraud detection. The team also released two open source resources, the Bank Account Fraud dataset and the Aequitas Flow library, now incorporated into the Feedzai Fairness Suite. The ceremony takes place this Monday at the Ferreira da Silva Auditorium at FCUP, attended by the President of the Republic, António José Seguro.