" In search of light": enhancing touristic recommender services with local weather data

Many destinations’ economies strongly rely on tourism. Therefore, it is crucial to meet tourists’ expectations, so they will return to the destination. The geographical formation of certain touristic islands often leads to local climates where it can be rainy and windy on one side of the island, whereas the other part is sunny. In this paper, we present a novel use for a network of sensors, LightBeam, a mobile location-based application aiming to improve the tourists’ experience. The application focuses on providing real-time guidance for tourists seeking sunlight to maximize their holiday experience by suggesting the closest points of interest (POIs) to the user with the “best sunlight”. To achieve this, we implemented and installed a network of geospatial sensors. The data from the sensor network is combined with the current location of the users to provide recommendations. We report on the initial design and prototype of LightBeam.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Vision-based portuguese sign language recognition system

Vision-based hand gesture recognition is an area of active current research in computer vision and machine learning. Being a natural way of human interaction, it is an area where many researchers are working on, with the goal of making human computer interaction (HCI) easier and natural, without the need for any extra devices. So, the primary goal of gesture recognition research is to create systems, which can identify specific human gestures and use them, for example, to convey information. For that, vision-based hand gesture interfaces require fast and extremely robust hand detection, and gesture recognition in real time. Hand gestures are a powerful human communication modality with lots of potential applications and in this context we have sign language recognition, the communication method of deaf people. Sign lan- guages are not standard and universal and the grammars differ from country to coun- try. In this paper, a real-time system able to interpret the Portuguese Sign Language is presented and described. Experiments showed that the system was able to reliably recognize the vowels in real-time, with an accuracy of 99.4% with one dataset of fea- tures and an accuracy of 99.6% with a second dataset of features. Although the im- plemented solution was only trained to recognize the vowels, it is easily extended to recognize the rest of the alphabet, being a solid foundation for the development of any vision-based sign language recognition user interface system

Generic system for human-computer gesture interaction: applications on sign language recognition and robotic soccer refereeing

Hand gestures are a powerful way for human communication, with lots of potential applications in the area of human computer interaction. Vision-based hand gesture recognition techniques have many proven advantages compared with traditional devices, giving users a simpler and more natural way to communicate with electronic devices. This work proposes a generic system architecture based in computer vision and machine learning, able to be used with any interface for human-computer interaction. The proposed solution is mainly composed of three modules: a pre-processing and hand segmentation module, a static gesture interface module and a dynamic gesture interface module. The experiments showed that the core of visionbased interaction systems could be the same for all applications and thus facilitate the implementation. For hand posture recognition, a SVM (Support Vector Machine) model was trained and used, able to achieve a final accuracy of 99.4%. For dynamic gestures, an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) model was trained for each gesture that the system could recognize with a final average accuracy of 93.7%. The proposed solution as the advantage of being generic enough with the trained models able to work in real-time, allowing its application in a wide range of human-machine applications. To validate the proposed framework two applications were implemented. The first one is a real-time system able to interpret the Portuguese Sign Language. The second one is an online system able to help a robotic soccer game referee judge a game in real time

Multiagent Systems in Automotive Applications

The multiagent systems have proved to be a useful tool in the design of solutions to problems of distributed nature. In a distributed system, it is possible that the data, the control actions or even both, be distributed. The concept of agent is a suitable notion for capturing situations where the global knowledge about the status of a system is complex or even impossible to acquire in a single entity. In automotive applications, there exist a great number of scenarios of distributed nature, such as the traffic coordination, routes load balancing problems, traffic negotiation among the infrastructure and cars, to mention a few. Even more, the autonomous driving features of the new generation of cars will require the new methods of car to car communication, car to infrastructure negotiation, and even infrastructure to infrastructure communication. This chapter proposes the application of multiagent system techniques to some problems in the automotive field

Enabling technologies for urban smart mobility: Recent trends, opportunities and challenges

The increasing population across the globe makes it essential to link smart and sustainable city planning with the logistics of transporting people and goods, which will significantly contribute to how societies will face mobility in the coming years. The concept of smart mobility emerged with the popularity of smart cities and is aligned with the sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations. A reduction in traffic congestion and new route optimizations with reduced ecological footprint are some of the essential factors of smart mobility; however, other aspects must also be taken into account, such as the promotion of active mobility and inclusive mobility, encour-aging the use of other types of environmentally friendly fuels and engagement with citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain and Big Data technology will serve as the main entry points and fundamental pillars to promote the rise of new innovative solutions that will change the current paradigm for cities and their citizens. Mobility‐as‐a‐service, traffic flow optimization, the optimization of logistics and autonomous vehicles are some of the services and applications that will encompass several changes in the coming years with the transition of existing cities into smart cities. This paper provides an extensive review of the current trends and solutions presented in the scope of smart mobility and enabling technologies that support it. An overview of how smart mobility fits into smart cities is provided by characterizing its main attributes and the key benefits of using smart mobility in a smart city ecosystem. Further, this paper highlights other various opportunities and challenges related to smart mobility. Lastly, the major services and applications that are expected to arise in the coming years within smart mobility are explored with the prospective future trends and scope

A Review of Environmental Context Detection for Navigation Based on Multiple Sensors

Current navigation systems use multi-sensor data to improve the localization accuracy, but often without certitude on the quality of those measurements in certain situations. The context detection will enable us to build an adaptive navigation system to improve the precision and the robustness of its localization solution by anticipating possible degradation in sensor signal quality (GNSS in urban canyons for instance or camera-based navigation in a non-textured environment). That is why context detection is considered the future of navigation systems. Thus, it is important firstly to define this concept of context for navigation and to find a way to extract it from available information. This paper overviews existing GNSS and on-board vision-based solutions of environmental context detection. This review shows that most of the state-of-the art research works focus on only one type of data. It confirms that the main perspective of this problem is to combine different indicators from multiple sensors

SPD-safe: Secure administration of railway intelligent transportation systems

The railway transport system is critical infrastructure that is exposed to numerous manmade and natural threats, thus protecting this physical asset is imperative. Cyber security, privacy, and dependability (SPD) are also important, as the railway operation relies on cyber-physical systems (CPS) systems. This work presents SPD-Safe—an administration framework for railway CPS, leveraging artificial intelligence for monitoring and managing the system in real-time. The network layer protections integrated provide the core security properties of confidentiality, integrity, and authentication, along with energy-aware secure routing and authorization. The effectiveness in mitigating attacks and the efficiency under normal operation are assessed through simulations with the average delay in real equipment being 0.2–0.6 s. SPD metrics are incorporated together with safety semantics for the application environment. Considering an intelligent transportation scenario, SPD-Safe is deployed on railway critical infrastructure, safeguarding one outdoor setting on the railway’s tracks and one in-carriage setting on a freight train that contains dangerous cargo. As demonstrated, SPD-Safe provides higher security and scalability, while enhancing safety response procedures. Nonetheless, emergence response operations require a seamless interoperation of the railway system with emergency authorities’ equipment (e.g., drones). Therefore, a secure integration with external systems is considered as future work

Estimating the efficacy of mass rescue operations in ocean areas with vehicle routing models and heuristics

Tese de doutoramento, Estatística e Investigação Operacional (Optimização), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2018Mass rescue operations (MRO) in maritime areas, particularly in ocean areas, are a major concern for the authorities responsible for conducting search and rescue (SAR) activities. A mass rescue operation can be defined as a search and rescue activity characterized by the need for immediate assistance to a large number of persons in distress, such that the capabilities normally available to search and rescue are inadequate. In this dissertation we deal with a mass rescue operation within ocean areas and we consider the problem of rescuing a set of survivors following a maritime incident (cruise ship, oil platform, ditched airplane) that are drifting in time. The recovery of survivors is performed by nearby ships and helicopters. We also consider the possibility of ships capable of refuelling helicopters while hovering which can extend the range to which survivors can be rescued. A linear binary integer formulation is presented along with an application that allows users to build instances of the problem. The formulation considers a discretization of time within a certain time step in order to assess the possibility of travelling along different locations. The problem considered in this work can be perceived as an extension of the generalized vehicle routing problem (GVRP) with a profit stance since we may not be able to recover all of the survivors. We also present a look ahead approach, based on the pilot method, to the problem along with some optimal results using state of the art Mixed-integer linear programming solvers. Finally, the efficacy of the solution from the GVRP is estimated for a set of scenarios that combine incident severity, location, traffic density for nearby ships and SAR assets availability and location. Using traffic density maps and the estimated MRO efficacy, one can produce a combined vulnerability map to ascertain the quality of response to each scenario.Marinha Portuguesa, Plano de Atividades de Formação Nacional (PAFN

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC