Henrique Dias Pereira dos Santos won Latin America Research Awards 2020
Renata Vieira and Henrique Santos / Photo: Personal archive
For the third consecutive year, Henrique Dias Pereira dos Santos, a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Computer Science, won the Latin America Research Awards (LARA), an award given by Google. This is the eighth edition of the program. It has been designed to boost innovation in the region and reward academic projects seeking to identify and propose technological solutions to real problems in people’s everyday lives.
The project Validation of the Identification of Adverse Events by Machine Learning in Real Situations, advised by School of Technology professor, Dr. Renata Vieira, gave birth to startup NoHarm.ai, a commercial non-profit research-oriented company. Developed in conjunction with Grupo Hospitalar Conceição’s pharmacist, Ana Helena Ulbrich, the startup seeks to streamline and ensure security in Clinical Pharmacy at hospitals.
“The way I see it, it is a tool that aggregates several intelligences, reducing the bureaucracy in the process of reviewing drug prescriptions,” she says. NoHarm.ai is now operating in eight hospitals in the cities of Porto Alegre, Passo Fundo, Belo Horizonte, Aracaju and Rio de Janeiro.
Among the projects that have been selected by LARA in 2020, 13 are from Brazil, two from Chile, four from Argentina, one from Peru, one from Colombia and one from Mexico. Since its beginning, in 2013, the program has awarded as much as 3 million dollars to more than 146 projects spearheaded by universities all over the region.
“Google awards were fundamental to validate the project’s scientific contribution to computer science and to materialize, in financial terms, a research project into a product that delivers value to the health system”, Santos celebrates.
