On September 18, student Dimitrios Dimou successfully defended his thesis entitled “Conditional Postural Synergies for Dexterous Grasps Using Variational Autoencoders”, under the supervision of Professor Plinio Moreno López, and was awarded the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. The defense took place online.

The examination committee was chaired by Professor Pedro Manuel Urbano de Almeida Lima, Full Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. The committee also included Professor Norman Hendrich, Assistant Professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany; Professor Lino José Forte Marques, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Coimbra; Professor Francisco António Chaves Saraiva de Melo, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon; Professor Alexandre José Malheiro Bernardino, Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon; and Dr. Plinio Moreno López, Assistant Researcher at the Institute for Systems and Robotics.