Project List

  AI-driven facial recognition technologies (FRTs) are rapidly proliferating across domains once thought distinct—public security, digital governance, and increasingly, health and medicine. As facial classification becomes a tool for both surveillance and diagnosis, we face urgent ethical questions: Who is visible and on what terms? What forms of consent, care, or control are made possible or foreclosed? How do we ensure public trust and accountability in technologies that encode bias and social hierarchies? The originality of this project lies in its cross-pollination of empirical ethics and critical social science to address AI’s sociotechnical entanglements. Rather than treating ethics as an external check on technology, this approach foregrounds ethics as co-produced with technical design, social imaginaries, and institutional power. Its impact potential spans multiple arenas: enhancing public participation in AI governance; shaping debates on AI in health; informing inclusive regulatory frameworks; and contributing to the emerging field of AI ethics with grounded, cross-national perspectives.    

The Entidade das Contas e Financiamentos Políticos (ECFP), of the Tribunal Constitucional, attributes to CEI-Iscte the studies of evidences carried out by groups of monitors in municipalities, with the objective of validating the campaign expenses of political parties, comparing these spending with the budgets submitted to the ECFP, and eventually highlight the differences between budgets and campaign acts put into practice by the different candidacies during the 2025 municipal election campaign. The study intends to analyse scientifically the type and evolution of the campaign actions in municipal elections and also serves the purpose of evaluating these campaign actions.

Greta Thunberg sparked the global Fridays for Future movement and catalyzed a significant expansion of youth climate activism. In this context two groups of young activists are distinguished. The first group consists of eco celebrities who are internationally recognized youth climate activists. The second group consists of ordinary youth climate activists in Portugal. This project collects and analyzes their social media posts published between 2022 and 2024 and compares the discursive strategies used to promote activism in the digital sphere. The study unfolds in three stages. First it identifies the online communities and thematic clusters in which the activists participate. Second it analyzes and compares the visual information and emotional expressions conveyed in the posts of each group. Finally it evaluates the emotional influence on followers through comment analysis in order to understand how young activists cultivate bonds with their audiences and reinforce a sense of belonging and collective identity. In doing so they contribute to more sustainable climate action and promote climate justice. Supervisor Team: Gustavo Cardoso