A UAB project receives the ECIU Team Impact Award 2026

The international challenge "Analysing images with Artificial Intelligence (A-EYE)", led by Dr Adriana Monroy Galindo and Dr Òscar Coromina, lecturers in the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), has been awarded the ECIU University Team Impact Award 2026, the highest annual distinction granted by this alliance of twelve European universities. The award was announced during the ECIU University Forum 2026, held in Aveiro (Portugal) on 16–17 June 2026, and recognises the team that has demonstrated the greatest levels of collaboration, creativity and commitment in addressing a global challenge with a tangible and positive impact on communities.

The award was received by the two academics together with three student representatives from the team — Tom Hillbruner (Hamburg University of Technology), Lucía Rubio and Stefano Giuseppe (UAB) — and Rosa Cabezas, from the Communication Library and General Newspaper Archives (UAB), who attended the ceremony as a representative of one of the project’s key stakeholders.

 

A Living Archive as a Starting Point

The challenge did not originate in a laboratory but from a real-world issue faced by UAB Libraries. During the digitisation of the historical collection of Radio Barcelona Scripts (1925–1953), traces of Francoist censorship — crossed-out passages, annotations and handwritten corrections made by censors — were at risk of being lost. The Communication Library and General Newspaper Archives (UAB), the custodian of these materials, was the crucial partner that enabled the challenge to address a concrete and urgent problem.

Through this collaboration, students worked with authentic archival documents and, together with archivists and researchers, developed a computer vision-based prototype capable of detecting, classifying and interpreting these visual traces of repression — a problem that researchers had been attempting to solve for more than two years without success.

 

Technology in the Service of Memory

The project illustrates how collaboration between teaching, research and library services can generate an impact that extends far beyond the classroom. Artificial intelligence was not used as an end in itself, but as a tool in the service of historical justice and cultural memory: recovering what censorship sought to erase.

The Team Impact Award recognises precisely this capacity for meaningful transformation: an interdisciplinary endeavour rooted in a living archive that demonstrates how the ways we search for, organise and access the past shape how we imagine the future.

The A-EYE challenge forms part of the educational portfolio of ECIU University, a European alliance of research-intensive universities of which UAB is a founding member.

The award-winning initiative brought together students from universities in nine countries within the ECIU Consortium: Germany (Hamburg University of Technology), Spain (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), France (University of Toulouse), Finland (Tampere University), Ireland (Dublin City University), Italy (University of Trento), Lithuania (Kaunas University of Technology), Poland (Lodz University of Technology) and Sweden (Linköping University). The programme combined online collaboration with an intensive on-campus DeepScan week at UAB from 26 to 30 January 2026. Twenty students took part in this final stage of the challenge, having successfully passed a rigorous and highly competitive selection process from a pool of ninety applicants.

The principal investigators leading this international challenge plan to continue developing the project and exploring new applications for historical archives through interdisciplinary research that brings together communication studies and computer engineering within a human-centred framework.