In a very demanding year, marked by the uncertainty generated by the pandemic COVID-19, it is crucial to highlight strategic initiatives and the positive development results of the Polytechnic of Porto (P.PORTO).
Among these, the activities of the Porto Center for Research, Technology and Innovation stand out | PORTIC, the research, innovation and technological development hub of P.PORTO.
In 2020, in its first year of operation, PORTIC saw the approval of ten research and development (R&D) projects, which together represent more than € 2M in R&D funding for the Polytechnic of Porto in the next three years. The projects are financed by regional funds, within the scope of national and European project calls, focusing on two major areas of PORTIC development: cybersecurity and health technologies, but crossing several application domains.
Of these, highlights for the project “CYBERSecurity SciEntific Competences and Innovation Potential”, a North 2020 project led by P.PORTO, with a financing of more than 600 thousand euros for PORTIC, which aims to reinforce scientific skills and the potential for innovation in the North, to face the challenge of cybersecurity; the project “Mental Wellbeing Management and Productivity Boosting in the Workplace”, a project of the European ITEA program, in which P.PORTO is a national coordinator, which aims to integrate heterogeneous data sources to improve well-being in environments business work; and the project "Scaling up of Prevention and Sustainable Optimization of COVID-19 Diagnosis", a project by P.PORTO that contributes in an innovative and sustainable way to the improvement of several technologies in the different stages of the diagnostic workflow, allowing an increase in the response COVID-19 screening and diagnosis.
In addition to the teams based at PORTIC, the projects include groups, teachers and researchers from P.PORTO Schools (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto | ISEP, Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto | ISCAP, Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão | ESTG, Escola Superior de Saúde | ESS and the Escola Superior de Hotelaria e Turismo | ESHT), reinforcing an environment that encourages synergies, the fertile crossing between areas of knowledge, skills and teams, thus promoting cooperation and the formation of joint projects, in a space of knowledge, science and transfer aligned with the best international practices.
