Alexandra Mendes (Assistant Professor at FEUP and researcher at INESC TEC) and João F. Ferreira (Associate Professor at Técnico and researcher at INESC ID), two former participants of the CMU Portugal “Visiting Faculty & Researchers” initiative, are among the winners of the Fall 2024 edition of the Amazon Research Awards.
The highly competitive award has distinguished 70 honorees from 44 universities across 10 countries, chosen by Amazon scientists for their excellent research proposals, based on scientific quality and potential societal impact.
Current and past recipients include researchers from leading institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. For the first time, Portuguese researchers based in Portugal have received this distinguished award, placing their institutions, INESC ID and the University of Porto, alongside these global academic leaders.
In the 2024 Fall cycle, awards were granted across five distinct calls for proposals: AI for Information Security, Automated Reasoning, AWS AI, AWS Cryptography, and Sustainability.
Alexandra Mendes, a participant in the 2023 edition of the Visiting Faculty & Researchers program, received an award in the Automated Reasoning area, for her proposal “Overcoming Barriers to the Adoption of Verification-Aware Languages”. Alexandra will focus on identifying and addressing barriers to the adoption of verification-aware programming languages, in particular Dafny. In addition to the funding support provided by this award, the collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) will help bridge research and industry needs, ensuring practical impact of this work.
João F. Ferreira, a participant in the 2024 edition of the Visiting Faculty & Researcher program, was awarded in the same area, with the proposal “Polyglot Automated Program Repair for Infrastructure as Code”. Building on recent advances by João and his team, the proposal seeks to extend and generalize automated repair techniques for Infrastructure as Code. The funding provided by this award will help accelerate the development of practical tools that enable organizations to maintain more secure, resilient, and maintainable IT infrastructure.
Winners receive a cash prize and access to over 700 Amazon public datasets, Amazon Web AI and Machine Learning services, an Amazon research contact for consultation, and opportunities to engage in Amazon events and training.
More information about the Amazon Research awards here.