The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellowships (IF) action supports excellent postdoctoral fellows from Europe and beyond through international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral mobility, and is an essential part of the European Research Area. It targets the training of postdoctoral researchers to work in excellent individual projects involving academic and industrial partners. For the MSCA-IF 2020 call, the Research Executive Agency (REA) received a total of 11,573 project proposals, which represented a 17% increase compared to the previous call in 2019. With finance totalling 328 M€, the EU will support 1,630 experienced postdoctoral researchers working at top universities and research organisations in Europe and the rest of the world, as well as in the private sector and SMEs. This represents a success rate of 14% for this postdoctoral action in 2020.
On 8 February 2021, the 2020 call results were released. Portugal will receive 34 MSCA grantees in the 2020 call, with a total of more than 5 M€ of investment. With one of them, Joaquín Torres-Sospedra will continue his main research career at the School of Engineering of the University of Minho (Guimarães, PT).
Joaquín Torres-Sospedra obtained his PhD in 2011 from Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain). His research interests from 2003 to 2013 included neural networks, ensemble models, robotics and interoperability. In 2013, he joined the Geospatial Technologies Research group (GEOTEC), where he applied his experience in neural networks and machine learning to the research and evaluation of smartphone-based indoor positioning systems for seven years. He is currently working at UBIK Geospatial Technologies, focusing on the development of applications with location components. He is an active member of the Indoor Positioning community, promoting high-quality evaluation through diverse open data sets and organizing international competitions every year.
Joaquín Torres-Sospedra will join the Urban Computing laboratory of the Algoritmi Research Centre (University of Minho, Guimarães, PT), with Adriano Moreira as supervisor, to work in the project ORIENTATE. ORIENTATE has been conceived as an innovative training-trough-research project, which will introduce a novel technology for positioning in industrial facilities (factories and warehouses), as well as enhance the grantee innovation skills. Secondments at Centro de Computaçao Gráfica (Guimarães, PT) and Tampere University (Tampere, FI) are scheduled to ease the technology transfer and commercialisation of the developed technologies.
For Joaquín Torres-Sospedra, “The MSCA-IF grant is the way to fill the biggest gap in my CV, lead a promising research line with a high probability of technology transfer to industry. I chose UMinho because of the well-known reputation of the Algoritmi Research Centre and its perfect location, next to the relevant industrial partners for the project.”