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The Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA) has awarded the 2024 Best PhD Thesis in Artificial Intelligence to Miguel Abreu for his work titled “Symmetry, hierarchical structures and shallow neural networks: Advancing reinforcement learning for humanoids”.

The thesis, supervised by Luís Paulo Reis (FEUP) and Nuno Lau (University of Aveiro / IEETA), explores innovative approaches to reinforcement learning that advance the development of humanoid robotics, combining symmetry, hierarchical modeling, and shallow neural networks to enhance learning efficiency and performance.

The award was officially presented during the gala dinner of the 24th EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2025), held on October 2nd, 2025, in Faro.

The APPIA Best PhD Thesis Award is presented annually to recognize exceptional contributions to AI research. Notably, this is the second time a thesis co-supervised by Nuno Lau has received the award – in 2021, David Simões won the prize for his thesis on “Coordination Learning in Multi-Agent Systems.”

This distinction reflects the growing impact of IEETA’s contributions to advancing AI and robotics research at both the national and international levels.