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- Digital Twin for Regional Water Consumption Simulation and ForecastingPublication . Galvão, Matheus Rigoni; Rici, Pedro; Lopes, Rui PedroWater scarcity is a global concern due to population growth, climate change, and industrialization. Accurate water consumption simulation and forecasting are essential for understanding consumption patterns and predicting future demand. The control and visualization of how different aspects such as precipitation, season, and population affect water consumption can be a way for public agencies to plan actions that minimize waste and assist in the correct use of water. Technology, and especially Machine Learning and Digital Twin, can be used as tools for this. In light of this, this project aims to develop a system for simulating and forecasting water consumption in the Bragan¸ca region using a Digital Twin. In order to accomplish this, a comprehensive analysis is conducted to determine the necessary requirements for designing the system. This analysis encompasses the evaluation of hardware, software, data, machine learning models, web interface, as well as security and performance requirements. Furthermore, the architecture of this system and how it will be configured is analyzed, proposing a system with Training Data Sources, Training Process, Updated Data Sources, Digital Twin, Web Interface and Monitoring System. The system described in this article is under development and it is hoped to achieve as a result the full design of the Digital Twin and User Interface systems.
- The ethical assumptions in higher educationPublication . Lopes, Rui Pedro; Mesquita, Cristina; Durán-Sánchez, Amador; Coca, Juan R.Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have been challenged to rethink their action and to adequate their mission to new contemporary realities. These challenges have been posed by the characteristics of democratic societies which led to the expansion of compulsory schooling, increased cultural, ethnical and gender diversity of students, and also the volatility, internationalization of labour market, and by the ephemerality of knowledge caused by accelerated scientific and technological development. Considering this perspective, it is the responsibility of HEI to support the development of knowledge and skills that allows young people to make free and ethic choices, based on shared values, including respect and participation. Living in society, at the macro, meso or micro level, requires technical and scientific knowledge, enabling individuals to pursue a profession, contribute for their integration, independence and autonomy, and to contribute to the social and economic development. This requires complex competences that empowers them to take ethical decisions in their profession and in their lives, assume and share responsibilities, to respect diversity and differences of perspective, to negotiate, to build consensus and relations of reciprocity. HEIs should include these ethical assumptions in their actions and organizational practices, making visible the values of freedom, equality, equity and solidarity. The incorporation of these ethical principles becomes more challenging at micro level, in the context of the classroom. This chapter describes the ethical challenges that teacher/researcher faces during the teaching-learning process and his interaction with all the actors and how they can be applied in a teaching-learning activity. A case study is also presented, with two teachers and 40 students of an Informatics Engineering and 35 students of Basic Education programme. It highlights the importance of supporting pedagogical innovation in higher education, based on strong ethical foundations and on the development of collective learning goals and a shared vision.
- Eye Importance in Facial Expression RecognitionPublication . Rodrigues, Ana Sofia Figueiredo; Lopes, Júlio Castro; Lopes, Rui PedroThe human face is a powerful tool for nonverbal communication, capable of conveying a wide range of emotions. Previous research has shown that facial expressions contribute significantly to interpersonal communication, indicating that 55% of information is conveyed through facial expression alone. Despite advancements, Facial Expression Recognition (FER) technology faces challenges, particularly in scenarios involving occlusions. Instances during the COVID-19 pandemic and in Virtual Reality (VR) environments highlight these challenges, where mask usage and head-mounted displays obstruct facial features critical for accurate recognition. This paper aims to investigate the importance of the eyes in facial expression recognition by using four models: ResNet-18, VGG-19, EfficientNet-B1, and an Ensemble model. Utilising the FERPlus dataset, scenarios with and without occlusion were examined. In scenarios without occlusion, ResNet-18 emerged as the top-performing model, achieving 86.1% accuracy. However, when occluded by goggles, the Ensemble model demonstrated superior performance with 82.8% accuracy. Furthermore, in the presence of mask occlusion, EfficientNet-B1 exhibited the most robust performance, achieving an accuracy of 71.2%. Despite challenges, the results of this paper reaffirm the enduring importance of the eyes in facial expression recognition, emphasizing their pivotal role in conveying emotions even amidst technological obstacles.
- Full-speed scalability of the pDomus platform for DHTsPublication . Rufino, José; Pina, António; Alves, Albano; Exposto, José; Lopes, Rui PedroDomus is an architecture for Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) tailored to a shared-all cluster environment. Domus DHTs build on a (dynamic) set of cluster nodes; each node may perform routing and/or storage tasks, for one or more DHTs, as a function of the node base (static) resources and of its (dynamic) state. Domus DHTs also benefit from a rich set of user-level attributes and operations. pDomus is a prototype of Domus that creates an environment where to evaluate the architecture concepts and features. In this paper, we present a set of experiments conduced to obtain figures of merit on the scalability of a specific DHT operation, with several lookup methods and storage technologies. The evaluation also involves a comparison with a database and a P2P-oriented DHT platform. The results are promising, and a motivation for further work.
- Portuguese twitter dataset on COVID-19Publication . Jonker, Richard A.A.; Poudel, Roshan; Fajarda, Olga; Matos, Sérgio; Oliveira, José Luís; Lopes, Rui PedroOver the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected hundreds of millions of people around the world. As in many crises, people turn to social media platforms, like Twitter, to communicate and share information. Twitter datasets have been used over the years in many research studies to extract valuable information. Therefore, several large COVID- 19 Twitter datasets have been released over the last two years. However, none of these datasets contains only Portuguese Tweets, despite the Portuguese Language being reported as one of the top five languages used on Twitter. In this paper, we present the first large-scale Portuguese COVID-19 Twitter dataset. The dataset contains over 19 million Tweets spanning 2020 and 2021, allowing the entire pandemic to be analyzed. We also conducted a sentiment analysis on the dataset and correlated the various spikes in Tweet count and sentiment scores to various news articles and government announcements in Portugal and Brazil. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/bioinformaticsua/ Portuguese-Covid19-Dataset
- Webfolio: secure digital portfolio for early childhood educationPublication . Silva, Willian de Oliveira; Beuren, Arlete Teresinha; Mesquita, Cristina; Lopes, Rui PedroIn early childhood education, there are several techniques to understand children’s development in kindergarten. One of these techniques is based on Portfolios that, in early childhood education, allows the understanding of the progress of the child, allowing a shared reflection with the child, teachers, and the child’s parents towards the understanding on the child’s learning process. The work described in this paper has as its main objective the development of a web application, which allows support for the construction of a platform for the storage and sharing of digital portfolios for early childhood education. In addition, it is intended that an access control of users be made so that it is possible to manage access to certain portfolios or sub-parts of them. The system has features such as: creating portfolios, creating notes, and managing user permissions. After the application was implemented, usability tests were carried out, with the participation of teachers. Through the techniques and methodologies used, it was possible to create a web tool to aid in the creation of portfolios for early childhood education, allowing the registering of audio, video, or image files. In addition, the system allows the sharing of portfolios with different users of the system who, in turn, can perform actions in the portfolio according to their role in the system.
- Use of learning management system (LMS): a study in a brazilian and portuguese universitiesPublication . Leone, Roberta de Souza; Mesquita, Cristina; Lopes, Rui PedroLearning Management Systems (LMS) are mainly used as a didactic support for the presential classes. However, because of the tools they provide, they are also essential to support b-learning and e-learning process. Because of this, most universities rely on some LMS through many or all of the courses. This paper describes a study performed in two different universities regarding the students’ perception about the usefulness and the usability of two different LMS: Moodle and Sakai. Through a focus group, students shared their opinion and discussed about their experience. In addition, data from the log of the platforms was also analysed, to assess how teachers use the LMS tools. In general, it can be stated that when the teacher knows how to use the LMS, students feel more comfortable using it and have a better learning experience. Regarding the tools, teachers mostly rely on the repository of documents.
- Solving transactional control in current management frameworksPublication . Roque, Vitor; Oliveira, José Luís; Lopes, Rui PedroPolicy Based Network Management has been presented as a paradigm for efficient and customisable management systems. The IETF has provided a framework to describe the concept but some aspects still open like transactional control. In fact transactional control mechanisms are receiving today great attention in the scope of network management. In here, we identify the lacks of current management paradigms concerning transactional control and we propose a policy-based network management system that allows specify operations over aggregations of agents and that provides high-level atomic transactions.
- Descodificar os “E”: plataforma online de acesso aberto de aditivos alimentaresPublication . Lopes, Bernardo; Padrão, Tiago Filipe Fernandes; Carocho, Márcio; Lopes, Rui Pedro; Ferreira, Isabel C.F.R.Recentemente, a população de países desenvolvidos tem procurado alimentos mais saudáveis, e tem curiosidade em conhecer os seus constituintes e processos de fabrico. Devido a alguma controvérsia na década de noventa e nos inícios do milénio, os aditivos alimentares são ainda olhados com desconfiança pela população, que desconhece grande parte da sua função, origem e segurança. A informação que se encontra na internet é escassa, retalhada, dificilmente acessível ou de fontes pouco fidedignas. Desmistificar e informar a população para os aditivos que são adicionados aos alimentos é uma tarefa que requer um acesso fácil, constante, simples e integrativo, permitindo que o consumidor saiba facilmente aquilo que está a comer. Por outro lado, existem empresas que requerem informações relativas às quantidades legalmente permitidas de aditivos em alimentos, informação essa que está condensada e de difícil acesso na página da European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Este trabalho apresenta uma solução informática que reúne os dados fundamentais dos aditivos alimentares e das suas possibilidades de utilização num portal online de acesso aberto. Esta solução é suportada por uma base de dados relacional que armazena as características mais importantes dos aditivos e das classes a que pertencem, bem como uma lista de categorias alimentares, de modo a especificar os cuidados e as restrições existentes na utilização de certos aditivos em determinadas categorias. Toda esta estrutura facilita a consulta da informação, já que é possível ordenar e filtrar os resultados, relacionando alimentos com aditivos e vice-versa.
- Advertising as a determinant of families and children`s food choicesPublication . Ribeiro, Cristiana; Mesquita, Cristina; Rodrigues, Maria José; Lopes, Rui PedroThe focus of this study is on promoting healthy eating habits and awareness of the influence that advertising has on these choices. Since the second half of the twentieth century, it has been recognized that the eating habits of the entire population have changed. In particular, food includes foods with a higher sugar, fat and salt content. Several factors have influenced this change, among which are the media, the power fast-food type and more sedentary lifestyles. These dietary habits associated with the sedentary lifestyle have caused the increase of the obesity of the children. This problem has received the attention of several entities, among them World Health Organization (WHO). Considering that school plays a fundamental role, helping children to be aware on the marketing and advertising influence, and consequently contributing to the inhibition of harmful eating habits, this study seeks to understand what educational strategies and practices could contribute to the creation of healthier eating habits of children and their families. In this context, the main objective of this study is to understand the influence of the media on the dietary choices of children and their families and to analyse later the impact of educational strategies promoting healthy eating habits in children's awareness. This study was carried out with three groups of children one of the day-care centres with 2 years old, other of preschool education with 5 years old, and another group with children with 6 and 7 years old attending the 1st year primary education. Considering the nature of this study a mixed quantitative and qualitative perspectives were used. The quantitative data were collected from a questionnaire applied to the parents and analysed statistically. Qualitative data were collected using direct and participant observation, field notes recorded in the course of action and children's productions. All these data were submitted to content analysis, to better understand the phenomenon under study. There are several similarities with action research, since it seeks to understand the school and family contexts and implement actions in order to about it, although it does not observe cycles of investigation, because of the short time-horizon in which it was developed. The interpretation was performed through triangulation of the data. The results reveal that there is a set of foods that children's choices but not always that choices are healthy. It is observed that the children are influenced by the media, since, among the most preferred foods appears on media publicity. Another conclusion is that most of the media advertised food are rich in sugar, grease and salt. It turns out that many parents or other caregivers do not recognize such influence, either in themselves or in children. The experiences of learning, the discussion and the reflection have helped children to become more aware of the effects of advertising on their food’s options and on the importance of making the best choices in their diet.