Sudarshan Kadam, PhD researcher at the University of Aveiro, is undertaking an Erasmus+ MindPhD Mobility at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
His mobility focuses on advancing research into interactive and shoppable video strategies, conducting surveys and expert interviews in the Spanish market, and exploring opportunities for a controlled experiment through UAB. He is also contributing to the development of a joint ECIU Seed Program proposal to strengthen research collaboration between UAB and UA.
This initiative exemplifies the Erasmus+ program’s commitment to enhancing academic excellence, internationalization, and cross-border research in New Media studies.
Sudarshan Kadam is a Phd student in New Media, supervised by Professor Jorge T. Ferraz de Abreu and Professor Telmo Silva.
Catarina Feio, a student in the Doctoral Program in New Media, participated in the eighth biannual meeting of the “Overcoming Differences” section of ECREA’s Interpersonal Communication and Social Interaction . The event was co-organized by the Culture and Society Institute and the School of Communication at the University of Navarra. This event took place between September 24 and 26 at the University of Navarra in Pamplona. The PhD student presented the paper: “From Headlines to Influencers: Understanding Youth Hybrid News Consumption Practices,” which focuses on the question of the new opinion leaders on social media and their role as broadcasters of information and opinion to a young audience.
During the Aveiro Tech Week 2025, held from 6th to 12th October, the PhD student Lucius Filho presented his doctoral project entitled “Guidelines for the Design of Gaze-Based Musical Interfaces,” funded by Foundation for Science and Technology. The presentation session took place on October 11, as part of the event’s program dedicated to the game.
Visitors had the opportunity to try out an interactive prototype developed as part of the Master’s in Digital Game Development, a research area that the doctoral program continues to explore. The prototype allowed volunteers to create a digital musical composition using their gaze through an eye tracker.
DigiMedia has a new column in the local newspaper Diário de Aveiro. The article “Fronteira Digital” can be read on the first Wednesday of every month in the printed version. This is an opportunity to show the local community the themes we work on and the research carried out at DigiMedia.
Our first article was written by Raquel Magalhães, a PhD student in Information and Communication in Digital Platforms.
Between September 15 and 17, the PhD student Silvino Martins took part in the II Encontro Psiquiatria e Saúde Mental Região Centro, held in Leiria, with a poster titled: “Integração de Elementos Narrativos e Lúdicos na Exposição Terapêutica a Fobias em Realidade Virtual: Protocolo de Estudo de Caso para Fobia Específica de Voo”.
The work features the case study protocol developed as part of the student’s doctoral research, which explores the use of a virtual reality tool to support phobia treatment in clinical psychology settings.
The poster received the Best Poster Award at the end of the event.
The Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro hosted the first summer school of the Erasmus+ ABRAXAS project, an event focused on sharing knowledge and results under the theme “VR for Designers”. This initiative, organized by DigiMedia members Rui Raposo and Mário Vairinhos, aimed to test and validate the teaching materials and virtual reality applications developed within the project.
Students, faculty, and researchers from the University of Aveiro, Lodz University of Technology, the University of Vigo, and the Miguel Hernández University of Elche participated in this week-long summer school, from September 8th to 12th.
This event provided a dynamic and practical learning environment, where participants had the opportunity to interact with the new content and applications, participating in exercises and workshops. In addition to the practical sessions, the agenda included seminars by the PhD students in Information and Communication on Digital Platforms, Pedro Reisinho, Silvino Almeida, Rúben Carvalho, and Maria de Jesus Ferreira and a seminar by Bernardo Marques (DETI).
During the week, participants also had time to enjoy the city of Aveiro, socialize, create new friendships, and discuss possible future collaborations. They highlighted the inspiring atmosphere and valuable exchange of experiences, and the organizers believe the experience contributed to the improvement of the ABRAXAS project’s content.
For more information about the project, please visit the website.
Rita Gomes, a researcher at Digimedia and a PhD candidate in the New Media doctoral program at the University of Aveiro, participated as a speaker at the 12th edition of the Urban Creativity conference. The event took place at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, from July 3rd to 5th, 2025.
Her participation aimed to present key findings from a part of her doctoral research, while simultaneously strengthening ties with the academic community and fostering dialogue on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage in urban art.
The researcher presented the article entitled “Cultural Mapping in Street Art: A Systematic Literature Review,” in which she sought to offer a comprehensive overview of current cultural mapping practices, exploring the benefits, possibilities, and experiences resulting from the application of this methodology to urban art. The research highlighted the application of cultural mapping to various urban resources and artistic expressions, such as graffiti, public art, and photography, emphasizing the potential of this approach in documenting community interaction with urban space and enhancing the sense of place.
For Rita Gomes, the conference was an “excellent opportunity to meet other researchers who share the same passions as me, with whom I had the chance to validate the findings of my study, which underscore the urgent need for greater representation of graffiti and street art in academic research.”
Rita Gomes adds: “Cultural mapping is a powerful tool to give visibility to this art form and to safeguard cultural heritage before it’s too late — and it is crucial that the academic community, including Digimedia as an institution that contributes to the study of digital media, comes together to bridge this gap.”
The Urban Creativity 2025 conference, which adopted a fully hybrid model, is internationally recognized as a crucial forum for discussing and exploring topics related to urban creativity, design, public art, and the impact of artistic interventions in cities.
Renata Frade, a DigiMedia researcher and PhD Student of the Doctoral Program in Information and Communication on Digital Platforms and researcher, will present her PhD thesis “Storytelling in training, empowerment, and female inclusion in IT: Modeling and prototyping the impact on communities” on September 3, 2025, at 2:30 p.m., in Room 07.1.108 – Carlos Borrego Amphitheater, Department of Environment and Planning, University of Aveiro.
The research was supervised by Professor Mário Vairinhos, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro, and had financial support from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
Abstract: The primary objective of this research is to develop a technologically mediated communication model that enables the framing of characteristics of Portuguese and Brazilian technological feminist activism (TFA) through communities on digital platforms (DP). The model will connect women’s technology organizations that communicate and interact through digital platforms, transmedia communication strategies with storytelling, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It will be based on analyzing fieldwork surveys of these organizations and case studies involving technology development design.
This research aims to make relevant contributions to the scientific areas of Communication and Information Technologies, Communication Sciences, and Information Science, through the theoretical association of transmedia and storytelling, technological feminism, and HCI. The theoretical application, based on communicational and organizational modeling, in the development of a functional prototype in a community of women in technology, will represent an important social legacy in terms of diversity, inclusion, training, and education.
Maria Júlia Vieira and Catarina Feio, PhD students in New Media and members of DigiMedia Research Center, attended the 7th Sopcom Young Researchers Meeting, held on July 9, 2025, at the Fernando Pessoa University in Porto.
During the event, Maria Júlia presented a poster entitled “Harassment and Toxic Culture in Video Game Live Streaming: Challenges and Proposals for a More Inclusive Environment”. Her presentation was featured in the poster session, which showcased innovative research into communication, digital culture and inclusion.
Catarina Feio presented the communication: “Youth, News and Social Media – the News Consumption Practices of Young People in Portugal”, part of her PhD research. The talk was part of the session on “Audiences and News”.
The meeting brought together young researchers from all over the country, encouraging the exchange of knowledge and debate on emerging communication issues, with sessions dedicated to visual culture, digital literacies, journalism and society.
The participation of Maria Júlia and Catarina Feio highlights the commitment of DigiMedia and the PhD Program in New Media in promoting research with social impact and relevance.
Malmö University in Sweden hosted the 7th edition of the AI and Games Summer School. Among the participants was Cláudia Vale Oliveira, a student in the New Media PhD Program and a researcher at DigiMedia, who participated in this edition marked by innovation, creativity, and critical reflection on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in gaming.
During five days, engineers, programmers, researchers, and game designers from both academia and industry shared knowledge and discussed the latest trends and influences in the use of AI in game development. The researcher from the University of Aveiro (UA), in addition to perspectives on player experience and interaction with agents through natural language processing, particularly highlighted the role of generative AI in the creative process and the ethical issues and challenges that artificial intelligence raises in game development. Issues such as authorship, boundaries, and ethical responsibility reinforce the importance of training professionals who are aware and critical of the possibilities and risks of AI integrated into interactive design. She also emphasized that it was “an incredible and inspiring week,” an experience she found “both engaging and challenging.”
In the final days of the event, participants were challenged to participate in the Game Jam. In this context the researcher Cláudia Oliveira and her team developed the Baloonce prototype, a collaborative game that aims to create balance, combating the sedentary lifestyle and burnout associated with professions like gaming developers, designers, and researchers, exploring the importance of moving and coordinating the body in a world where the mind and digital world are pushed to their limits. The project stood out among the participating teams, being selected as the best project of the Game Jam, a recognition that highlights the talent and capabilities of those involved. The project will soon be shared on Github.
This event was guided by leading figures in the field, such as Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, co-authors of the book Artificial Intelligence and Games, and Antonios Liapis. It was made possible thanks to the support of King, the UA, and DigiMedia, which provided the doctoral student with the opportunity to participate in this international summer school.
For the UA community, this participation represents not only an opportunity to enrich the student’s curriculum, but also a contribution to the development of new lines of research in the fields of new media, immersive games, experience design, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
