The Maria de Maeztu Strategic Research Program at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at UPF is centered around the methodologies and technologies that support the data-driven research carried out in many scientific disciplines and the data-processing tools supporting many practical applications.

An objective of the Strategic Research Program is “to increase the impact of our research by increasing the impact of the publications, datasets and software tools, and take advantage of this impact to establish and consolidate partnerships”. It includes actions to promote that the research results, datasets and tools are discoverable, interpretable and reusable, including the publication of the data and software together with the publications.

In this context, and with the aim to promote the discussion and implementation of mechanisms that foster the reproducibility of research, the program launched the Prize for Reproducibility in PhD research, for work presented in the 4th Doctoral Student Workshop of the Department. 

7 finalists were shortlisted (see below), who could already successfully demonstrate that they were considering and / or giving steps towards promoting reproducibility. However, none of them succeeded in fully demonstrating that it met all requirements to be considered, in its current status, a sample showcase for reproducibility of research. It was decided to grant an award to each of them upon the improvement / fulfillment of issues before September (progress to be presented in next Maria de Maeztu Workshop scheduled to take place June 28-29):

• Amit Ahire, "Interactive Character Animation With Hybrid Approach"
• Pablo Aragón, "Boosting Online Democracy through Social Computing"
• Juanjo Bosch, "Melody extraction in symphonic music recordings: dataset, method and visualisation tool"
• Mónica Domínguez, "Acoustics and Linguistics: The Natural Blend for expressive Speech in Human-Machine Interaction"
• Georgi Dzhambazov, "Keyphrase spotting of lyrics in acapella recordings using probabilístic modeling"
• Sergio Oramas y Luis Espinosa-Anke, "Music Meets NLP: Datasets and Challenges"
• Windhya Rankothge, "Data Modelling for the Evaluation of Virtualized Network Functions Resource Allocation Algorithms"

News:

• Summary of the event (UPF news, in Catalan and Spanish)
• Gallery of pictures (Flickr)