The goal of the “Researcher-Entrepreneur Competition”, which was organised for the first time in 2014/2015, is to encourage researchers at INESC TEC to come up with new technology and science-based projects that will eventually lead to spin-offs. The Centre wants to promote multidisciplinary ideas that can be applied in industry.

The three winning projects address three different areas: breast cancer, music, and digital marketing. The ideas were selected according to several indicators: market potential, feasibility, relevance, originality, and creativity.

Led by Hélder Oliveira, the work “A Serious Games Approach for Upper Body Morbidity Assessment and Prevention of Breast Cancer Patients” aims to develop new methodologies to study and assess morbidity in the upper body, as this is something that affects patients who underwent breast cancer treatment. The proposal presented by Rui Penha, “Bridging the gap between performers and the audience using networked smartphones”, aims to develop a solution to explore smartphones on a large scale at music concerts, bringing artists closer to the audience. Finally, Kelwin Correia and his team presented the project “Real-Time Bidding for Public Spaces”. Using computational vision algorithms, the goal with this work is to create metrics based on the reactions of the public to digital outdoor advertising that will help increase sales in real time.

The idea is for researchers to mature these ideas until September, and then start the prototype development stage. Each project received five thousand euros for development.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: FEUP and INESC Porto.

INESC TEC, January 2015