Out of 505 candidates, a DCC professor is chosen and will receive up to R$700,000 to invest in a research project for the next three years
The Serrapilheira Institute announced the selection of the project by Professor Jefersson Alex dos Santos, from the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (DCC/UFMG) and coordinator of the PATREO Laboratory. The research competed with 505 other candidates and was, with 11 others, chosen in the selection process of the 4th public call for support for the Institute’s science. New and innovative projects were chosen with questions that contribute to essential understanding in natural sciences, computer science and mathematics. The study will receive an investment of up to R$700,000 over the next three years.
The selection consisted of three stages, the final being an interview carried out by international researchers. According to Cristina Caldas, director of Science at Serrapilheira, those chosen will also receive a “diversity bonus”, which are additional resources to be used in training and including people from underrepresented groups in their teams. “Training scientists is expensive and takes time. We need to ensure that the talents already trained, whose excellence was evident in the selection, have continuous access to resources, and that the public and private sectors think together about how to offer better conditions for doing science in Brazil”, he stated.
Jefersson will investigate how to make large-scale geographic mappings, through supervised learning, from a few annotated pixels. According to the professor, the study aims to develop new computational approaches that fill some gaps that exist between recent literature in the area and what real-world applications really require. Among the applications, three stand out: detection of rural roads in the Amazon and cerrado; mapping of urban areas with potential for Dengue infestation, in addition to the recognition of native species and indicators of climate change.
To achieve this, the project has both researchers in Computer Science and renowned partners in other areas of knowledge, such as UFMG professors Raoni Rajão, from the School of Engineering, Francisco Chiaravalloti, from the Faculty of Public Health at the University of São Paulo ( FSP/USP) and José Marcato, from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), in addition to DCC professors Fabrício Murai, Heitor Ramos and Renato Assunção and DCC graduates Hugo Oliveira (IME-USP) and Keiller Nogueira (University of Stirling).
This article appeared on the DCC/UFMG website and was reflected in several media.