Hugo Plácido da Silva
Lisbon, Portugal
Hugo Plácido da Silva received his MSc degree in Electrical and Computers Engineering in 2007 from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Technical University of Lisbon (UTL). Since 2004, he is a member of the Pattern and Image Analysis (PIA) group at the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), where he has been developing research on biosignal analysis, pattern recognition and systems engineering. In 2012 he was awarded with a grant from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), to develop part of his research work at the University of Florida, integrated in the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory (CNEL), and collaborating with the Center for the Study of Attention and Emotion (CSEA).
Hugo is one of the co-founders of PLUX - Wireless Biosignals, a company focused on creating cutting edge technologies for the healthcare sector, where he was Chief Operations Officer from 2007 to 2010, and where he is currently a Board Member and Innovation Advisor. Both at a technical and scientific level, he has actively contributed to and participated in more than 15 national and European projects, funded by grants from the Seventh Framework Programme (EU-FP7), the National Strategic Reference Framework (QREN/NSRF), the FCT, and several other private and public institutions (e.g. Vodafone Foundation, Portugal Telecom Foundation, etc.).
His work has been recognized in several occasions, which include the 1st place out of ~6500 applications in 2013 (together with his fellow researchers at PIA) at the Acredita Portugal innovation competition with the project “Vitalid: Your Heart (h)as a Key!”, the Best Paper Award at USAB 2011, with the paper "Clinical Data Privacy and Customization via Biometrics Based on ECG Signals'', the Life Sciences Award in 2010 (together with the co-founders of PLUX) at a venture competition co-promoted by the MIT with the product "bioPLUX clinical: The Future of Physiotherapy Now", and the "Caixa Geral de Depósitos Award'' from 2003 to 2005 for recognized academic merit (equivalent to summa cum laude in 2004 and 2005, and magna cum laude in 2003).