by The moment was ceremony and awards: researcher Gonçalo Correia received the Vencer o Adamastor prize for a project in the field of artificial intelligence. Present in this tradition, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa took the opportunity to draw attention to an “Adamastor” in the country: “Portugal is more than a decade behind in terms of investment in research and development.” The President of the Republic was referring to the fact that in Portugal research and development represents about 1.7% of GDP and that already in 2013 the European average was about 2.6% of GDP invested in research and development (R&D). This delay is a “North wind“ which must be earned.
But Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was not the only one to mention the ‘Adamastor’ of the science funding problem. During the award ceremony, Luís Ferreira, dean of the University of Lisbon, focused on exactly this issue and explained the need for investment. “Science takes time, it needs its own time and continuous funding,” he pointed out. “Not done [dar] millions [de uma só vez] and for the next three years it does not exist. This is fatal for science and we have experienced this environment a lot in Portugal, sometimes we have a lot and we use it, sometimes we go through years of hardship in a row.”
Luís Ferreira never tired of pointing out that science presupposes a slow environment, “a meditative environment,” which is a word that originally comes from Greek and which etymologically means “making honey,” he noted. “Making honey is about taking the little things, metabolizing them before taking them back and giving them to others,” he thought. “Science is made as honey is made, with the necessary time and which cannot be interrupted by a fire that burned this whole region [onde estava uma colmeia] or due to lack of funding”.
For this very reason, he proposed the challenge to look at the funding structure of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT): “When we look at human resources and what is called ‘international relations’, more than 50% of the budget and projects have 17% . It’s the exact opposite of what we had in the 90s when we made the big leap in research.” The rector of the University of Lisbon proposes to reverse this logic again.
Guillermo Vidal
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa devoted part of his intervention precisely to addressing the issue of funding in science. Before, he noted the development in the country: “In recent decades, in terms of science and education, Portugal has tried to move in the right direction, with persistence and which has led us to excellent results.” One of these results concerns the employed population with tertiary education, which is already over 30% of the population.
However, beyond simply observing this “quantitative explosion”, which began with the democratization of Portuguese society in terms of access to higher education, the President of the Republic noted: “It is much more important to invest in science and fundamental research. I’m thinking about the government and the companies.”
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa thus launched a challenge for the country and proposed to be “more daring, more decisive, more demanding, more competitive, in relation to itself”, managing to retain highly qualified people. How to get all this? One of the tools will now be the effective execution of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR). “This is a unique opportunity that our country has access to.” But this should not be the only reference to increased investment in science: “Indicative spending in the PRR on R&D, at least 2% of GDP by 2025, does not reflect a strong investment in science and research and is not in line with needs of modern times. You have to look at it [quadro comunitário de apoio] Portugal 2030 and ensuring the sustainability of science funding’.
Another “Adamastor” winner in the room was what the host of the award did with his work. Gonçalo Correia himself reported that he tried to beat a Northwind “by taking neural models and trying to make them more transparent and more compact and efficient, and this was done through sparseness”.
Priberam researcher proposed a new method to make machine learning models more compact and efficient. For now, Gonçalo Correia says his work is already having an impact on articles that have developed sparser methods, focused on the transparency and efficiency this brings. He also said he hopes it will contribute to a more responsible artificial intelligence that has a smaller ecological footprint, as well as more transparency. “I hope that many of the new, more responsible models will be created in the Center for Responsible AI consortium, now in Portugal.” This is one of the largest responsible AI consortia in the world and Portugal recently joined.
Fighting the north winds
This was the first time this award was presented, which resulted from the collaboration of the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering (INESC) and the newspaper PÚBLICO. And the name was not in vain, as pointed out by Arlindo Oliveira, president of Inesc: “About four decades ago, Inesc, then a new initiative of José Tribolet and João Lourenço Fernandes, conceived the slogan “defeat Adamastor” . “
In the 1980s, the creation of this institute was “aimed at overcoming the country’s chronic backwardness in areas such as science, technology and education,” said its current president. “In this case, ‘Adamastor’ was the monster of underdevelopment that characterized a country that featured prominently at the tail end of Europe in many scientific and educational indicators. The model proposed by Inesc, of non-profit private foundations dedicated to the development of science and technology and innovation, has been realized in Portugal.”
Today, pointed out Arlindo Oliveira, “the country has a solid system of scientific institutions and many of them are inspired by the Inesc model”. And he gave as an example some of the current achievements of the Portuguese: scientists publish in the best scientific journals or compete for the most competitive programs of the European Commission.
Guillermo Vidal
The terrain of science is, after all, favorable for combating the North Winds. “Science is beating the North Winds every day,” also emphasized Rogério Colaço, president of the Instituto Superior Técnico. “Adamastor represents danger, difficulty, threat, the unknown. To discover is simply to know the unknown and to make the unknown known. Defeating the large, deformed monster – the Adamastor – is nothing more than overcoming the fear of the unknown. Who is designing science and who is doing it, scientists and researchers.”
The ‘Adamastor’ of underdevelopment cannot be defeated alone and, throughout the award ceremony, there were several interventions that highlighted PÚBLICO’s role in the battle against this ‘monster’. One of the statements was exactly that of Manuel Carvalho, director of the newspaper: “Since its foundation, we have understood PÚBLICO not only as a newspaper that has the duty to provide a public service in the field of information, but also to collaborate itself with all causes which in a clear, categorical and positive way are next to the big plans of the national interest”, he said about the collaboration with Inesc for this award. Science is one of those interests and, therefore, the paper highlights science journalism in the country: “We have a long tradition of science journalism in Portugal. We are the only newspaper that has a nationally recognized scientific section.”
The same was noted by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, noting that PÚBLICO in its own way also wins Adamastores every day and emphasized: “It is excellent to see that it has a section dedicated specifically to science and the environment, giving a central role. in knowledge, education, skills and innovation”.
