Ana Sara Costa, Invited Assistant Professor at DEG and finished her PhD in Engineering and Management at Instituto Superior Técnico in 2020 (supervised by Professor José Figueira from DEG and Professor José Borbinha from INESC-ID) has recently received the Doctoral Dissertation award at the 26th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (University of Portsmouth, UK 26 June – 01 July 2022).

Her thesis — A multiple criteria integrated approach for nominal classification problems: Methods and applications - was written for the purpose of

to developed multicriteria decision support methods for classification problems with nominal categories [which can group objects/concepts together based on a given characteristic or property] without any order of preference between them.

These were implemented in DecSpace, an online platform where Costa provides several methods and demonstrated their applicability through three studies with different objectives and contexts: housing assignement for refugees (contributing to the definition of an urban strategy and the decision aiding process as it relates to the accommodation system) and the cultural adaptive reuse of abandoned buildings, both in the city of Turin, and a recruitment process in the Special Forces of the Portuguese Army.

What does this award mean for Ana Sara Costa?

[It] represents a recognition of the merit of my doctoral thesis, which I had the privilege of developing under the guidance of Professor José Rui Figueira and Professor José Borbinha, as well as the relevance of their contributions to the area of ​​MCDM [Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding].

The other two finalists at the Doctoral Dissertation Award of 26th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making were Gökhan Ceyhan - "A study of the day-ahead energy market auctions from a multi-objective perspective" and, also a DEG's Invited Professor Miguel Alves Pereira - "Efficiency and public policy of the Portuguese healthcare sector: A look at the pressing issues".