Íris Damião, a student in the PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, secured third place in the University of Lisbon’s “3 Minutos de Tese” (3MT) competition.

Her presentation, held on the 22nd of May at the Pavilhão de Portugal, focused on the neutrality - or lack thereof - of search engines and digital platforms such as Google, Bing, and ChatGPT. Her research seeks to determine whether the results provided by these tools are truly impartial or if they influence users based on personalized profiles, thereby reinforcing information bubbles. To this end, she employs an innovative approach using bots programmed to simulate different user profiles and simultaneously analyze the results returned for the same queries.

Íris Damião's research was conducted as part of her work at the Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física de Partículas.

The University of Lisbon’s 3MT academic competition aims to help PhD students develop the ability to communicate complex ideas simply and creatively to diverse audiences, in just 3 minutes and using a single slide.

(image: ULisboa)