The Challenge of Non-Technical Loss Detection using Artificial Intelligence: A Survey

Detection of non-technical losses (NTL) which include electricity theft, faulty meters or billing errors has attracted increasing attention from researchers in electrical engineering and computer science. NTLs cause significant harm to the economy, as in some countries they may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed. The predominant research direction is employing artificial intelligence to predict whether a customer causes NTL. This paper first provides an overview of how NTLs are defined and their impact on economies, which include loss of revenue and profit of electricity providers and decrease of the stability and reliability of electrical power grids. It then surveys the state-of-the-art research efforts in a up-to-date and comprehensive review of algorithms, features and data sets used. It finally identifies the key scientific and engineering challenges in NTL detection and suggests how they could be addressed in the future

Is Big Data Sufficient for a Reliable Detection of Non-Technical Losses?

Non-technical losses (NTL) occur during the distribution of electricity in power grids and include, but are not limited to, electricity theft and faulty meters. In emerging countries, they may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed. In order to detect NTLs, machine learning methods are used that learn irregular consumption patterns from customer data and inspection results. The Big Data paradigm followed in modern machine learning reflects the desire of deriving better conclusions from simply analyzing more data, without the necessity of looking at theory and models. However, the sample of inspected customers may be biased, i.e. it does not represent the population of all customers. As a consequence, machine learning models trained on these inspection results are biased as well and therefore lead to unreliable predictions of whether customers cause NTL or not. In machine learning, this issue is called covariate shift and has not been addressed in the literature on NTL detection yet. In this work, we present a novel framework for quantifying and visualizing covariate shift. We apply it to a commercial data set from Brazil that consists of 3.6M customers and 820K inspection results. We show that some features have a stronger covariate shift than others, making predictions less reliable. In particular, previous inspections were focused on certain neighborhoods or customer classes and that they were not sufficiently spread among the population of customers. This framework is about to be deployed in a commercial product for NTL detection.Comment: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Intelligent System Applications to Power Systems (ISAP 2017

Musicalidade em crianças com idade pré-escolar

Relatório Final de Prática de Ensino Supervisionada do Mestrado em Educação Pré-escolar apresentado na Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Viana do CasteloO presente estudo foi realizado no âmbito da Unidade Curricular de Prática de Ensino Supervisionada II integrada no Mestrado em Educação Pré-Escolar. Este projeto envolveu 25 crianças com idades entre os 4 e 6 anos de uma sala de um jardim-de-infância pertencente ao concelho de Viana do Castelo. Durante o projeto, foram estudados temas que mostraram ser fundamentais para a compreensão das bases teóricas para este estudo, tais como, a importância da Expressão Musical, a consciência musical nas crianças de idade pré-escolar, e das primeiras manifestações da música às metodologias de ensino musical nos dias de hoje. Suportando a escolha da temática a trabalhar neste projeto, estão as necessidades encontradas através das observações realizadas durante a PES I. Através da observação efetuada, foram identificados alguns aspetos que poderiam ser melhorados, entre os quais está a frequência que as crianças estavam em contacto com atividades do domínio da Expressão Musical. Este estudo está dividido em três partes diferentes, na qual a primeira parte apresenta o contexto educativo, tratando de todos os aspetos que devem ser tidos em conta para fazer uma devida contextualização acerca deste projeto e do local que teve incidência. Na segunda parte vão estar presentes os aspetos mais relacionados com o projeto, tais como, a perspetiva teórica de alguns autores acerca das temáticas estudadas, a metodologia adotada no trabalho de investigação, sendo ela o trabalho de projeto assente no paradigma qualitativo, a análise e interpretação de resultados e conclusões retiradas no trabalho desenvolvido. Este projeto dividiu-se em 7 atividades diferentes, que decorreram durante a PES II, e durante a planificação e implementação destas, foram tidas em conta as necessidades das crianças, assim como todos os objetivos traçados para a realização deste estudo. A terceira parte do relatório está contemplada uma reflexão global da PES, onde é feita uma análise de todo o percurso. Refletindo sobre todo o trabalho desenvolvido, verificou-se uma grande evolução das capacidades musicais que as crianças tinham, colocando em prática os conhecimentos retidos nas diferentes atividades, facilitando todo o decorrer do projeto e capacitando a recolha e análise de dados.The present study was performed under the subject Supervised Teaching Practice II (STP II), integrated in the Master of Preschool Education. In this project were involved 25 children, with ages between 4 and 6 years old which were part of a Kindergarten room, located in Viana do Castelo’s county. During the project, some themes were studied that revealed being crucial for understanding the theorical basis within this study, such as, the relevance of Musical Expression, the musical awareness of preschool children, and since the first manifestation of music to nowadays music teaching methodologies. Behind the selection of the theme to work in this project, are the needs found through the observations made during the STP I. During the observations were found some points that could and should be improved and the frequency that the Musical Expression was worked out was the one that pointed out. This study is divided in three different parts, in which the first part presents the educational context, treating all the aspects that should be taken in account to do a proper contextualization about this project and the place that it had incidence. The second part of the study will have the most revealing points that are related with the project, such as, the theorical perspective of some authors about the themes studied, the methodology adopted during the investigation work, that was a project work based on qualitative paradigm, the analysis and interpretation of the results and the conclusions of all the work developed. This project is divided into 7 different activities, which took place during the STP II, and during the planning and performing of them, were taken in account all the needs of the children, as well as all the goals planned to the accomplishment of this project. The third part contains a global reflection about the STP, where is done an analysis of all the course of the project. Prospecting all the work that has been done, we could see a great improvement of musical capacities of the children, applying all the concepts obtained on the different activities, facilitating all the course of the project and capacitating the data collection and analysis

Sistema inteligente de apoio à deteção e previsão de cyber ataques em sistemas computacionais

A segurança de informação tornou-se um aspeto muito importante de qualquer sistema de informação organizacional. As ameaças em sistemas computacionais têm-se revelado cada vez mais inteligentes permitindo contornar as soluções básicas de segurança como firewalls e antivírus. Lidar com vulnerabilidades de software em sistemas computacionais tornou-se um grande desafio para os administradores de sistemas. Com o crescente número de vulnerabilidades descobertas em cada ano, é impossível para os administradores manter os sistemas livres de ações maliciosas. Os Sistemas de Deteção de Intrusão (SDI) baseados em anomalias, permitem classificar o tráfego monitorizado de uma rede ou operações de um host em atividades normais ou atividades maliciosas. A eficiência da deteção de intrusões irá depender das técnicas utilizadas nestes sistemas. Este trabalho propõe a aplicação de técnicas machine learning num SDI a desenvolver no âmbito do projeto SASSI (ANI | P2020 17775). O objetivo principal do trabalho consiste na exploração e aplicação de metodologias para deteção e previsão de cyber ataques em sistemas computacionais, de modo a oferecer apoio na tomada de decisão a administradores de sistemas garantindo assim estabilidade e segurança nos sistemas de informação organizacionais.Information and data security has become a very important part of any organizational information system. Threats in these systems have become increasingly intelligent, so it can deceive the basic security soluions such as firewalls and antivirus. Dealing with software vulnerabilites in computer systems became a major challenge for system administrators. With the increasing number of vulnerabilites discovered each year, it is impossible for administrators to maitain software on their machines, free of malicious actions. Anomaly based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), allows monitorized traffic classification or computer systems classification in normal activity or malicious activity. The efficiency of intrusion detection depends on the techniques used in these systems. This work proposes the application of machine learning techniques in IDS to be developed in the scope of SASSI project (ANI | P2020 17775). The main goal of this work is to explore and apply different methodologies to detect and predict cyber attacks in computer systems so it can give support in decision-making to system administrators and guarantee stability and security in organizational information systems

Supporting argumentation dialogues in group decision support systems: an approach based on dynamic clustering

Group decision support systems (GDSSs) have been widely studied over the recent decades. The Web-based group decision support systems appeared to support the group decision-making process by creating the conditions for it to be effective, allowing the management and participation in the process to be carried out from any place and at any time. In GDSS, argumentation is ideal, since it makes it easier to use justifications and explanations in interactions between decision-makers so they can sustain their opinions. Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) intends to classify opinions at the aspect level and identify the elements of an opinion. Intelligent reports for GDSS provide decision makers with accurate information about each decision-making round. Applying ABSA techniques to group decision making context results in the automatic identification of alternatives and criteria, for instance. This automatic identification is essential to reduce the time decision makers take to step themselves up on group decision support systems and to offer them various insights and knowledge on the discussion they are participating in. In this work, we propose and implement a methodology that uses an unsupervised technique and clustering to group arguments on topics around a specific alternative, for example, or a discussion comparing two alternatives. We experimented with several combinations of word embedding, dimensionality reduction techniques, and different clustering algorithms to achieve the best approach. The best method consisted of applying the KMeans++ clustering technique, using SBERT as a word embedder with UMAP dimensionality reduction. These experiments achieved a silhouette score of 0.63 with eight clusters on the baseball dataset, which wielded good cluster results based on their manual review and word clouds. We obtained a silhouette score of 0.59 with 16 clusters on the car brand dataset, which we used as an approach validation dataset. With the results of this work, intelligent reports for GDSS become even more helpful, since they can dynamically organize the conversations taking place by grouping them on the arguments used.This research was funded by National Funds through the Portuguese FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia under the R&D Units Project Scope UIDB/00319/2020, UIDB/00760/2020, UIDP/00760/2020, and by the Luis Conceicao Ph.D. Grant with the reference SFRH/BD/137150/2018

Nature conservation, land use planning and exploitation of ornamental stones

ABSTRACT: Cabeça Veada is the name of a relatively small exploitation cluster for ornamental limestones occupying an area of 98 ha in the Portuguese Natural Park of Serra de Aire e Candeeiros, which is also a Natura 2000 Network protected area. Supported by comprehensive geological, mining and environmental studies, a specific methodology was developed in order to address the compatibility between the long term sustainability of this industry with the preservation of existing protected natural values. The obtained land use map should allow the Cabeça Veada mineral resources to be adequately included in the municipal land use planning process.N/

Design for sustainability in future scenarios in the self-service food packaging sector

The increase in the reciprocal demand of the packaging and food industries currently promotes a volume of waste that is disproportionate to an efficient management in terms of environmental, socio-ethical, economical and political sustainability. In this context, this research proposes the development of a methodology to define strategies that provide parameters for decisions guided by Design for Sustainability. It is anchored in the principle that the discontinuity of the current patterns of production and consumption is essential to achieve transformations with more promising results. This precept was related to Future Studies and in its premise to establish parameters that configure changes of perspective, as well as a deep awareness of the implications that involve the making of decisions. In this field of research, the recognition and adaptation of the Future Workshop method and the creation of Scenarios were highlighted. In this juncture, the scenarios obtained evidenced the aid they can provide for the elaboration of strategies that better lead to a preferable future. In order to seek a verification of this finding, an experiment was developed resulting in a system-packaging concept complementing the applicability of the proposed methodological structure.Keywords: design for sustainability, packaging, food, self-service, future studies, scenarios

Análise empírica da concordância nominal de número no português popular e culto de Vitória da Conquista – Ba (Empirical analysis of nominal number agreement in standard and substandard portuguese in Vitória da Conquista – Ba)

Neste trabalho, discutimos o fenômeno da variação na concordância nominal de número no português culto de Vitória da Conquista por meio de um registro sistematizado da fala dos informantes à luz da Teoria da Variação e Mudança. Apresentamos um estudo comparativo entre os dados por nós analisados e os dados analisados por Guimarães (2014), referentes ao português popular.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Concordância nominal de número. Estudo comparativo. Português popular. Português culto.  In this work, we discussthe phenomenon of the variation in the nominal number agreement in Standard and Substandard Portuguese in Vitória da Conquista – BA, Brazil, using the Theory of Variation and Change. We present a comparative study of the data we reviewed and analyzed by Guimarães (2014) for the Substandard Portuguese.KEYWORDS: Nominal number agreement. Comparative study. Popular Portuguese. Portuguese culture.Dans cet article, nous discutons du phénomène de variation de la concordance nominale du nombre dans le culte portugais Vitória da Conquista à travers un enregistrement systématique du discours des informateurs sur la théorie de la variation et du changement. Nous présentons une étude comparative des données que nous avons examinées et analysées par Guimarães (2014) pour le populaire portugais.MOTS-CLÉS: Accord de nombre nominal. Etude comparative. Portugais populaire. Culture portugaise.En este trabajo, se discute el fenómeno de la variación en el concordancia nominal de número en portugués Vitória da Conquista culto a través de un registro sistemático del discurso de los informantes a la Teoría de la variación y el cambio. Se presenta un estudio comparativo de los datos que revisar y analizar de Guimarães (2014) para el popular portuguesa.PALABRAS CLAVE: Concordancia nominal de número. Estudio comparativo. Portugués popular. Culto portugués