Professors André Martins and Alberto Abad from DEI are leading two research teams in the development of AMALIA (Assistente Multimodal Automático com Inteligência Artificial).

AMALIA will be the first Portuguese Large Language Model (LLM), designed from the ground up to reflect and preserve the richness of the Portuguese language and identity. It is being developed to understand, process, and generate content in European Portuguese, capturing the nuances of both the language and culture.

Supported under Portugal’s Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR) and coordinated by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), the AMALIA project is being developed by a national consortium made up of top academic and research institutions. This consortium includes the Universidade de Lisboa through Instituto Superior Técnico, NOVA University, the Universidade do Porto, the Universidade de Coimbra, the Universidade do Minho and the national laboratories NOVA LINCS, IT, INESC TEC, CISUC/LASI, and ALGORITMI/LASI. Experts from the Universidade da Beira Interior and the Universidade de Évora are also contributing.

The team led by André Martins, professor at DEI and DEEC and researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), is responsible for coordinating and developing AMALIA’s core model, which will enable the generation of accurate and contextualized textual responses.

The team led by Alberto Abad, professor at DEI and researcher at INESC-ID, is in charge of the multimodal integration of spoken language to give “ears” to AMALIA. This will allow the model not only to interpret text but also to receive and process spoken instructions.

Related news HERE and HERE.

(image: INESC-ID)