João Nuno Gonçalves, a lecturer at FFCS and coordinator of the Applied Data Science degree, was awarded the MDS Best Paper Presentation Award in Social Sciences at the 4th International INSURE.hub Conference on Innovation, Sustainability, and Regeneration, held on 29-30 October at the Portuguese Catholic University, Porto Regional Centre. This award is intended to recognise scientifically relevant and innovative work in the field of Social Sciences.

The award-winning work, entitled ‘Boosting supply chain simulation processes using multi-target machine learning’, explores a new approach based on multi-target machine learning that allows different scenarios generated by a simulation model to be learned and generalised. The proposed approach avoids the continuous execution of computationally demanding simulation models whenever different model input parameters are to be tested.