CiTIUS dazzles at the national conference of the scientific society SISTEDES, which awards two scientific works and recognizes a thesis of the center as the best of the year

Success of CiTIUS at the SISTEDES Scientific Conference, an annual meeting organized by the Society of Software Engineering and Software Development Technologies, which in its 2023 edition concludes with an extraordinary balance for the center: Award for the best thesis of the year (David Chapela , graduated researcher); Best Paper Award (Efrén Rama) and Best Student Paper (Pedro Gamallo), CiTIUS doctoral students and first authors of the award-winning works, under the direction of the center's also researchers Manuel Lama Penín and Juan Carlos Vidal.

Nearly 300 people have participated in the 2023 edition of these conferences, a figure in which the high participation of the younger scientific public stands out (around 30% of those attending were doctoral students). The event is presented as a plural meeting point , which brings together the scientific community around three national conferences of respective disciplines; Software and Database Engineering(JISBD) , ServiceScience and Engineering(JCIS) and Programming and Languages(PROLE) .

It was precisely the framework of the conference on Science in Service Engineering (JCIS) where the work of Efrén Rama and Pedro Gamallowas recognized . The young CiTIUS researcher found out about the award for the best paper of the conference ('Best Paper Award') during the return trip, which had to be brought forward to the closing ceremony of the conference. The first author of the work says that " receiving this award has been a true surprise and an immense honor; Throughout my research I faced several challenges that pushed me to constantly improve myself, and seeing that all that effort has been recognized fills me with gratitude and satisfaction",  he noted. Efrén wanted to give special thanks "to my mentors and colleagues at CiTIUS, who supported and guided me at every stage of this path." "This award not only represents the fruit of my work, but that of an entire team committed to excellence and innovation",  he said, hoping that "our research can contribute significantly to advancing this discipline and opening new avenues of exploration for future researchers ». On his behalf, Manuel Lama Penín , co-author of the article and director of Efrén's thesis,came to collect the award , who also wanted to highlight the award and the quality of his doctoral student's work: "the work opens new avenues to address predictive monitoring in process mining, since the use of graph-based neural networks has proven to be a clear advance in the results currently obtained by the main state-of-the-art techniques",  he stated. For his part, the researcher Pedro Gamalloalso celebrated the award for the best predoctoral work (' Best Student Paper'), awarded within the framework of the JCIS 2023 conference, stating that " it is always a joy to be recognized for the work done." ...to receive this award from such an important community at the national level, while still in the early stages of the thesis and with a work that emerged from the TFM" (Master's Thesis), "which I presented last year, is an very positive stimulus to continue facing the doctoral years with enthusiasm and optimism", he reflected.

SISTEDES 2023 was also the setting for the presentation of the Best Doctoral Thesis of the Year Award to David Chapela, a CiTIUS graduate researcher, who thanked the members of the jury for this distinction: "for considering I deserved this award," he said. He also thanked "my supervisors, Manuel Lama and Manuel Mucientes, for their supervision and guidance, as well as for their support and freedom to explore the paths that seemed most interesting and fruitful to me". The postdoctoral researcher - today a member of the Institute of Informatics at the University of Tartu (Estonia) - also took the opportunity to send a message of encouragement to all those who are doing a doctoral thesis: "finishing a thesis is a long and hard process, full of emotional ups and downs that make it even more difficult," he said. "We must learn to normalise the fact that sometimes motivation is non-existent, or that we feel, perhaps, that this is not the place for those of us who do not feel that "romanticised passion" for research. Learning to see it as a job, a dynamic that we may find interesting, but nothing more, should not make us feel less capable or less valid," he argued during his speech.