Andrea Cascallar adds with the Frances Allen award a new recognition to her thesis, developed at CiTIUS
The researcher graduated from the center, currently in the private sector, received today a new distinction for her doctoral work at the Congress of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA 2024).
The CiTIUS graduate researcher Andrea Cascallar has been awarded today with the Frances Allen Prize 2024 for her doctoral thesis, entitled 'Fuzzy Quantified Protoforms for Data-To-Text Systems: a new model with applications'. The recognition, which highlights the excellence of women in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, was awarded during the Congress of the Spanish Association of Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA 2024), held this week in A Coruña, and joins the EUSFLAT Award for the best thesis in Europe obtained by the researcher in 2022.
With the Frances Allen Award, the AEPIA (Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence) aims to give greater visibility to women researchers in the area of Computer Science in general, as well as Artificial Intelligence in particular.
The institution stresses in its foundations that "it should be the task of public bodies and computer science associations to promote the presence of women in the classrooms of our centers and in research". Therefore, they add, "this award seeks to promote the great work of scholarship holders, teachers and researchers to serve as an example to future students of Computer Science studies".
The Frances Allen Award is named after the renowned American scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen, the first woman to win the Turing Award in 2006. An expert in compilers, code optimization and parallelization, her name is intended to pay tribute to pioneering women in computer science research and work, which is often identified with a predominantly male domain.
In 2008, shortly after receiving the Turing Award, the American scientist visited the University of Santiago de Compostela as a guest of the ConCiencia program. Her visit marked a milestone in the history of the program, being the first and only time that a Turing Award winner has participated. Subsequently, the program has counted with the presence of Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners.
Andrea Cascallar's thesis, directed by researchers Alberto Bugarín (linked researcher at CiTIUS) and Alejandro Ramos, CSO in the spinoff of the Inverbis Analytics center, had already received the EUSFLAT 2022 Award for the best thesis in Europe, consolidating itself as a reference in the field of Artificial Intelligence and natural language generation. His research addresses the challenge of incorporating imprecision into natural language generation in Data-To-Text (D2T) systems.
Among the outstanding contributions of his thesis are the creation of the linguistic realization library 'SimpleNLG-GL' (which facilitates the generation of texts in Galician), and the development of D2T systems applied to cardiovascular health and environmental information, such as the ICA2Text system to provide textual information on the Air Quality Index. This work has been carried out in cooperation with the Instituto da Lingua Galega (ILG), the Cardiology Service of the Complejo Hospitalario Universitario de Santiago, the company Balidea Consulting and Programming and Meteogalicia.
Andrea Cascallar, who currently works as Senior Data Scientist at the company DXC Technology, highlighted "the importance of receiving these awards in a field in which traditionally the presence of women has not been very high", stressing the need to "make visible the work of women in science to inspire new generations to devote themselves to STEM disciplines" (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).