Former LASIGE’s PhD student (and currently, LASIGE researcher) André Rodrigues was awarded by FCiências.ID. His PhD thesis, titled “Human-Powered Smartphone Assistance for Blind People”, completed in 2020, was recognized by the institution as outstanding research. Before the conclusion of his PhD studies, Rodrigues’ work had already received the Maxdata Informatics Award of Excellence in the two previous academic years (2017/2018 and 2018/2019).

The FCiências.ID Awards recognizes exclusively, since 2019, doctoral theses of proven excellence from graduate students of the 3rd cycle of FCUL completed in the previous calendar year and was presented at the Ciências ULisboa anniversary ceremony.

Rodrigues’ explored how the adoption and use of smartphone by blind people can be facilitated through a human powered approach. His research successfully demonstrated how to leverage non-experts users to create effective assistance impacting blind users perceptions of their smartphone self-efficacy. Learn more about it here.

Since the ending of his PhD studies, the researcher became, in 2020, a LASIGE integrated member and is part of the IDEA-FAST project team.