Professor Mário Figueiredo and professor José Bioucas-Dias were included in the Clarivate Analytics 2018 Highly Cited Researchers list released last week. Both professors were already part of this list: professor Mário Figueiredo has been named in the last five years and professor José Bioucas-Dias was included in the 2015 Highly Cited Researchers list.

The two Técnico professors are “extremely pleased” and “very proud” to be part of this list, because it means that “our work has had a significant impact and influence in the scientific community”, says professor José Bioucas-Dias. “I was very pleased that my colleague and friend José Bioucas-Dias was once again included in the Highly Cited Researchers list because it’s a recognition of his excellent and important work in the field of remote sensing”, says professor Mário Figueiredo. Although they work in different fields, professor José Bioucas-Dias (Geosciences) and professor Mário Figueiredo (Engineering) are part of the same research group – Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) – and they have already worked together in several research projects.

Professor Mário Figueiredo has become a worldwide reference in computational methods for image reconstruction, applicable to areas such as magnetic resonance imaging for medical diagnosis and to satellite images. His work focus on the development of algorithms that allow to solve problems of restoration or reconstruction of signs and images, for example, noise removal, restoration of blurred images, etc. According to professor Mario Figueiredo, the reason for being included five times in this list is “ to work on relevant problems that fascinate us, to collaborate with colleagues and students and to be very demanding in what concerns the quality of work: both the scientific content and the (written) presentation of scientific articles”.

Professor José Bioucas-Dias has been focus his work on multi-band images obtained from satellite or in the laboratory, aiming to restore or reconstruct high quality images from low quality images through processing algorithms. For example, professor José Bioucas-Dias has developed algorithms that reconstruct 3D terrain altitude maps from radar image pairs captured by a satellite. In the case of hyperspectral images (images with hundreds or thousands of colors), the algorithms developed by the IT researcher allow, for example, to detect certain pathologies or to identify materials accurately. “The scientific innovation is mainly based on the models used to formulate restoration and reconstruction problems and on the processing algorithms to estimate the original images”, says the professor.

14 Portuguese researchers are included in the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers, and 4 of them are from Universidade de Lisboa. It’s very prestigious that Técnico is represented by two professors. “Técnico’s scientific output has been increasing and so the number of researchers included in HCRs list”, stresses professor José Bioucas-Dias. Professor Mário Figueiredo agrees, but highlights that “there is a lot of other high quality research carried out at Técnico, but due to the statistical particularities of HCR selection criteria are not included in the list”.