Catarina Barata

Catarina Barata is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. Her research focuses on machine learning, computer vision, and medical imaging, particularly in dermatology and healthcare applications. She teaches courses such as Machine Learning, Signals and Systems, and Big Data Processing.

Her work emphasizes skin lesion analysis and automated diagnosis systems, with contributions to domain generalization, explainable AI, and clinical decision support. She has pioneered techniques like artifact-based domain adaptation for skin cancer models and sparse motion fields for trajectory prediction.

Barata's research spans interdisciplinary collaborations, including robotic therapy for autism spectrum disorder, real-time attention classifiers, and fire/smoke detection using weak supervision. Her studies on biomarkers in melanoma and BRAF mutation detection highlight her impact in precision medicine.

She actively contributes to international initiatives like the ISIC conference and the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC), promoting ethical AI standards and consensus guidelines for dermatological applications. Her work balances technical innovation with clinical relevance, addressing challenges in dataset bias, counterfactual explanations, and multimodal medical data integration.