1,141 research outputs found
A mobile tour guide app for sustainable tourism
Portugal has had a flourishing tourism sector for the past few years. In fact, Portugal’s tourism
boom has made the industry one of the biggest contributors to the national economy and the
largest employer. In the year 2019, Portugal had a total of 27 million tourists, surpassing once
again the record established in the previous year. However, tourism also brings a series of
unintended negative side effects, such as overcrowding. The Santa Maria Maior historic district
in Lisbon is being particularly affected by this problem.
The work undertaken in this dissertation is part of the Sustainable Tourism Crowding project,
that aims to mitigate the overcrowding phenomenon in this district, by fostering a balanced
distribution of visitors while promoting the visitation of sustainable points of interest. This
dissertation focuses on developing a mobile app prototype targeted at tourists, through which
these sustainable walking tour recommendations can be delivered.
To validate the functional requirements of the prototype, more specifically the trip creation
process, a series of unit tests, integration tests, and manual tests were developed. To evaluate
the usability of the prototype, a user-centered approach was adopted during the design stage,
in which two usability techniques were conducted with members of ISCTE’s research center
ISTAR and partners from the Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria Maior, that guided and validated
the decisions made.
The achieved prototype contains mechanisms for measuring tourists’ adherence to the
recommended tours using the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm, which raises new research
opportunities on tourists’ behaviour.O desenvolvimento próspero do setor turístico em Portugal nos últimos anos fez da indústria
um dos maiores contribuintes para a economia nacional e o maior empregador do país. No ano
de 2019, Portugal recebeu um total de 27 milhões de turistas, ultrapassando uma vez mais uma
vez o recorde estabelecido no ano anterior. No entanto, o turismo traz também uma série de
efeitos secundários negativos não intencionais, tais como overcrowding. A freguesia histórica de
Santa Maria Maior em Lisboa está a ser particularmente afetada por este problema.
O trabalho desenvolvido nesta dissertação faz parte do projeto de pesquisa Sustainable
Tourism Crowding, que visa mitigar o fenómeno de overcrowding nesta freguesia, promovendo
uma distribuição equilibrada dos visitantes e incentivando a visita de pontos de interesse
sustentáveis. Esta dissertação foca-se no desenvolvimento de uma aplicação móvel protótipo
destinada a turistas, através do qual recebem recomendações de visitas sustentáveis.
Para validar os requisitos funcionais do protótipo, mais especificamente o processo de
criação de visitas, foram desenvolvidos testes unitários, testes de integração, e testes manuais.
Para avaliar a usabilidade do protótipo, foi adotada uma abordagem centrada no utilizador
durante a fase de conceção, em que foram utilizadas duas técnicas de usabilidade em parceria
com o ISTAR (centro de investigação do ISCTE) e com a Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria
Maior, cujos resultados guiaram e validaram as decisões tomadas.
O protótipo desenvolvido contém mecanismos para medir a aderência dos turistas às recomendações
sugeridas através do algoritmo Dynamic Time Warping, proporcionando novas
oportunidades de pesquisa nesta área
Electric vehicle routing, arc routing, and team orienteering problems in sustainable transportation
[EN] The increasing use of electric vehicles in road and air transportation, especially in last-mile delivery and city mobility, raises new operational challenges due to the limited capacity of electric batteries. These limitations impose additional driving range constraints when optimizing the distribution and mobility plans. During the last years, several researchers from the Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research communities have been developing optimization, simulation, and machine learning approaches that aim at generating efficient and sustainable routing plans for hybrid fleets, including both electric and internal combustion engine vehicles. After contextualizing the relevance of electric vehicles in promoting sustainable transportation practices, this paper reviews the existing work in the field of electric vehicle routing problems. In particular, we focus on articles related to the well-known vehicle routing, arc routing, and team orienteering problems. The review is followed by numerical examples that illustrate the gains that can be obtained by employing optimization methods in the aforementioned field. Finally, several research opportunities are highlighted.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities (PID2019-111100RB-C21-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, RED2018-102642-T), the SEPIE Erasmus+Program (2019-I-ES01-KA103-062602), and the IoF2020-H2020 (731884) project.Do C. Martins, L.; Tordecilla, RD.; Castaneda, J.; Juan-Pérez, ÁA.; Faulin, J. (2021). Electric vehicle routing, arc routing, and team orienteering problems in sustainable transportation. Energies. 14(16):1-30. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14165131130141
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LDRD final report: Automated planning and programming of assembly of fully 3D mechanisms
This report describes the results of assembly planning research under the LDRD. The assembly planning problem is that of finding a sequence of assembly operations, starting from individual parts, that will result in complete assembly of a device specified as a CAD model. The automated assembly programming problem is that of automatically producing a robot program that will carry out a given assembly sequence. Given solutions to both of these problems, it is possible to automatically program a robot to assemble a mechanical device given as a CAD data file. This report describes the current state of our solutions to both of these problems, and a software system called Archimedes 2 we have constructed to automate these solutions. Because Archimedes 2 can input CAD data in several standard formats, we have been able to test it on a number of industrial assembly models more complex than any before attempted by automated assembly planning systems, some having over 100 parts. A complete path from a CAD model to an automatically generated robot program for assembling the device represented by the CAD model has also been demonstrated
Contextual Social Networking
The thesis centers around the multi-faceted research question of how contexts may
be detected and derived that can be used for new context aware Social Networking
services and for improving the usefulness of existing Social Networking services, giving
rise to the notion of Contextual Social Networking. In a first foundational part,
we characterize the closely related fields of Contextual-, Mobile-, and Decentralized
Social Networking using different methods and focusing on different detailed
aspects. A second part focuses on the question of how short-term and long-term
social contexts as especially interesting forms of context for Social Networking may
be derived. We focus on NLP based methods for the characterization of social relations
as a typical form of long-term social contexts and on Mobile Social Signal
Processing methods for deriving short-term social contexts on the basis of geometry
of interaction and audio. We furthermore investigate, how personal social agents
may combine such social context elements on various levels of abstraction. The third
part discusses new and improved context aware Social Networking service concepts.
We investigate special forms of awareness services, new forms of social information
retrieval, social recommender systems, context aware privacy concepts and services
and platforms supporting Open Innovation and creative processes.
This version of the thesis does not contain the included publications because of
copyrights of the journals etc. Contact in terms of the version with all included
publications: Georg Groh, [email protected] zentrale Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die vielschichtige Frage, wie Kontexte detektiert und abgeleitet werden können, die dazu dienen können, neuartige kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste zu schaffen und bestehende Dienste in ihrem Nutzwert zu verbessern. Die (noch nicht abgeschlossene) erfolgreiche Umsetzung dieses Programmes führt auf ein Konzept, das man als Contextual Social Networking bezeichnen kann. In einem grundlegenden ersten Teil werden die eng zusammenhängenden Gebiete Contextual Social Networking, Mobile Social Networking und Decentralized Social Networking mit verschiedenen Methoden und unter Fokussierung auf verschiedene Detail-Aspekte näher beleuchtet und in Zusammenhang gesetzt. Ein zweiter Teil behandelt die Frage, wie soziale Kurzzeit- und Langzeit-Kontexte als für das Social Networking besonders interessante Formen von Kontext gemessen und abgeleitet werden können. Ein Fokus liegt hierbei auf NLP Methoden zur Charakterisierung sozialer Beziehungen als einer typischen Form von sozialem Langzeit-Kontext. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf Methoden aus dem Mobile Social Signal Processing zur Ableitung sinnvoller sozialer Kurzzeit-Kontexte auf der Basis von Interaktionsgeometrien und Audio-Daten. Es wird ferner untersucht, wie persönliche soziale Agenten Kontext-Elemente verschiedener Abstraktionsgrade miteinander kombinieren können. Der dritte Teil behandelt neuartige und verbesserte Konzepte für kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste. Es werden spezielle Formen von Awareness Diensten, neue Formen von sozialem Information Retrieval, Konzepte für kontextbewusstes Privacy Management und Dienste und Plattformen zur Unterstützung von Open Innovation und Kreativität untersucht und vorgestellt. Diese Version der Habilitationsschrift enthält die inkludierten Publikationen zurVermeidung von Copyright-Verletzungen auf Seiten der Journals u.a. nicht. Kontakt in Bezug auf die Version mit allen inkludierten Publikationen: Georg Groh, [email protected]
Proceedings of The Rust-Edu Workshop
The 2022 Rust-Edu Workshop was an experiment. We wanted to gather together as many thought leaders we could attract in the area of Rust education, with an emphasis on academic-facing ideas. We hoped that productive discussions and future collaborations would result. Given the quick preparation and the difficulties of an international remote event, I am very happy to report a grand success. We had more than 27 participants from timezones around the globe. We had eight talks, four refereed papers and statements from 15 participants. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I can say that I learned a ton. These proceedings are loosely organized: they represent a mere compilation of the excellent submitted work. I hope you’ll find this material as pleasant and useful as I have. Bart Massey 30 August 202
Collaboration Methods for Social Service Agencies: a Case Study of Johnson County, Indiana
Enabled by a shared Information Technology platform, social service agencies can collaborate and share information to better serve clients holistically, improve the agency\u27s ability to raise funds, provide better statistics to stake holders, and predict social services needed in the future. Social service agencies have many barriers to overcome before successful collaboration such as security, client confidentiality, choosing a software stack, cost, and agreement among the agencies on what information they can share. This paper presents practical methodologies that can be used towards the development of an IT platform to support the collaboration of social service agencies in a local community such as Johnson County, Indiana
NewsView: A Recommender System for Usenet based on FAST Data Search
This thesis combines aspects from two approaches to information
access, information filtering and information retrieval, in an effort
to improve the signal to noise ratio in interfaces to conversational
data. These two ideas are blended into one system by augmenting a
search engine indexing Usenet messages with concepts and ideas from
recommender systems theory. My aim is to achieve a situation where
the overall result relevance is improved by exploiting the qualities
of both approaches. Important issues in this context are obtaining
ratings, evaluating relevance rankings and the application of useful
user profiles.
An architecture called NewsView has been designed as part of the work
on this thesis. NewsView describes a framework for interfaces to
Usenet with information retrieval and information filtering concepts
built into it, as well as extensive navigational possibilities within
the data. My aim with this framework is to provide a testbed for user
interface, information filtering and information retrieval issues,
and, most importantly, combinations of the three
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