Browsing by Author "Malheiro, Benedita"
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- A 2020 perspective on “Online guest profiling and hotel recommendation”Publication . Veloso, Bruno M.; Leal, Fátima; Malheiro, Benedita; Burguillo, Juan CarlosTourism crowdsourcing platforms accumulate and use large volumes of feedback data on tourism-related services to provide personalized recommendations with high impact on future tourist behavior. Typically, these recommendation engines build individual tourist profiles and suggest hotels, restaurants, attractions or routes based on the shared ratings, reviews, photos, videos or likes. Due to the dynamic nature of this scenario, where the crowd produces a continuous stream of events, we have been exploring stream-based recommendation methods, using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), to incrementally update the prediction models and post-filters to reduce the search space and improve the recommendation accuracy. In this context, we offer an update and comment on our previous article (Veloso et al., 2019a) by providing a recent literature review and identifying the challenges laying ahead concerning the online recommendation of tourism resources supported by crowdsourced data.
- A 2020 perspective on “Scalable modelling and recommendation using wiki-based crowdsourced repositories:” Fairness, scalability, and real-time recommendationPublication . Leal, Fátima; Veloso, Bruno; Malheiro, Benedita; González-Vélez, Horacio; Carlos Burguillo, JuanWiki-based crowdsourced data sources generally lack reliability, as their provenance is not intrinsically marshalled. By using recommendation, one may arguably assess the reliability of wiki-based repositories in order to identify the most interesting articles for a given domain. In this commentary, we explore current trends in scalable modelling and recommendation methods based on side information such as the quality and popularity of wiki articles. The systematic parallelization of such profiling and recommendation algorithms allows the concurrent processing of distributed crowdsourced Wikidata repositories. These algorithms, which perform incremental updating, need further research to improve the performance and generate up-to-date high-quality recommendations. This article builds upon our previous work (Leal et al., 2019) by extending the literature review and identifying important trends and challenges pertaining to crowdsourcing platforms, particularly those of Wikidata provenance.
- Active Learning Strategies for Sustainable Engineering: The case of the European Project Semester at ISEPPublication . Duarte, Abel J.; Malheiro, Benedita; Silva, Manuel F.; Ferreira, Paulo; Guedes, PedroEngineering aims to improve the quality of daily life on a planet with limited resources. This chapter describes how the European Project Semester offered by the School of Engineering of the Porto Polytechnic contributes to make engineering undergraduates conscious of their environmental and societal impact. The program is a project-based active learning framework where problem-solving is supported by intercultural communication and creativity, ethical and sustainable reasoning, and global contextual analysis. This analysis shows that it fosters scientific, technical, and interpersonal competencies, emphasizing ethical and sustainable design as recommended by several reference institutions through the testimonials left on the project reports and the evolution perceived by the participants during the semester. These findings are supported by a sample of 45 projects conducted by 228 students from 23 countries and 65 degrees. All projects aimed to have a lasting impact on the future engineering practice of participants and, somehow, transform the world positively.
- Airfoil Selection and Wingsail Design for an Autonomous SailboatPublication . Silva, Manuel F.; Malheiro, Benedita; Guedes, Pedro; Ferreira, PauloOcean exploration and monitoring with autonomous platforms can provide researchers and decision makers with valuable data, trends and insights into the largest ecosystem on Earth. Regardless of the recognition of the importance of such platforms in this scenario, their design and development remains an open challenge. In particular, energy efficiency, control and robustness are major concerns with implications in terms of autonomy and sustainability. Wingsails allow autonomous boats to navigate with increased autonomy, due to lower power consumption, and greater robustness, due to simpler control. Within the scope of a project that addresses the design, development and deployment of a rigid wing autonomous sailboat to perform long term missions in the ocean, this paper summarises the general principles for airfoil selection and wingsail design in robotic sailing, and are given some insights on how these aspects influence the autonomous sailboat being developed by the authors.
- An Intelligent Distributed System for Environmental ManagementPublication . Malheiro, Benedita; Oliveira, EugénioEnvironmental management is a complex task. The amount and heterogeneity of the data needed for an environmental decision making tool is overwhelming without adequate database systems and innovative methodologies. As far as data management, data interaction and data processing is concerned we here propose the use of a Geographical Information System (GIS) whilst for the decision making we suggest a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture. With the adoption of a GIS we hope to provide a complementary coexistence between heterogeneous data sets, a correct data structure, a good storage capacity and a friendly user’s interface. By choosing a distributed architecture such as a Multi-Agent System, where each agent is a semi-autonomous Expert System with the necessary skills to cooperate with the others in order to solve a given task, we hope to ensure a dynamic problem decomposition and to achieve a better performance compared with standard monolithical architectures. Finally, and in view of the partial, imprecise, and ever changing character of information available for decision making, Belief Revision capabilities are added to the system. Our aim is to present and discuss an intelligent environmental management system capable of suggesting the more appropriate land-use actions based on the existing spatial and non-spatial constraints.
- An internet DGPS service for precise outdoor navigationPublication . Soares, Manuel Gonçalves; Malheiro, Benedita; Restivo, Francisco José de OliveiraThe goal of the work presented in this paper is to provide mobile platforms within our campus with a GPS based data service capable of supporting precise outdoor navigation. This can be achieved by providing campus-wide access to real time Differential GPS (DGPS) data. As a result, we designed and implemented a three-tier distributed system that provides Internet data links between remote DGPS sources and the campus and a campus-wide DGPS data dissemination service. The Internet data link service is a two-tier client/server where the server-side is connected to the DGPS station and the client-side is located at the campus. The campus-wide DGPS data provider disseminates the DGPS data received at the campus via the campus Intranet and via a wireless data link. The wireless broadcast is intended for portable receivers equipped with a DGPS wireless interface and the Intranet link is provided for receivers with a DGPS serial interface. The application is expected to provide adequate support for accurate outdoor campus navigation tasks.
- Analysis and prediction of hotel ratings from crowdsourced dataPublication . Leal, Fátima; Malheiro, Benedita; Burguillo, Juan CarlosCrowdsourcing has become an essential source of information for tourism stakeholders. Every day, tourists leave large volumes of feedback data in the form of posts, likes, textual reviews, and ratings in dedicated crowdsourcing platforms. This behavior makes the analysis of crowdsourced information strategic, allowing the discovery of important knowledge regarding tourists and tourism resources. This paper presents a survey on the analysis and prediction of hotel ratings from crowdsourced data, covering both off‐line (batch) and on‐line (stream‐based) processing. Specifically, it reports multiple rating‐based profiling, recommendation, and evaluation techniques. While most of the surveyed works adopt entity‐based multicriteria profiling, prerecommendation filtering, and off‐line processing, the latest hotel rating prediction trends include feature‐based, trust and reputation modeling, postrecommendation filtering, and on‐line processing. Additionally, since the volume of crowdsourced ratings tends to increase, the deployment of profiling and recommendation algorithms on high‐performance computing resources should be further explored.
- Analysis and Visualisation of Crowd-sourced Tourism DataPublication . Leal, Fátima; Dias, Joana Matos; Malheiro, Benedita; Burguillo, Juan CarlosThe tourist behaviour has changed significantly over the last decades due to technological advancement (e.g., ubiquitous access to the Web) and Web 2.0 approaches (e.g., Crowdsourcing). Tourism Crowdsourcing includes experience sharing in the form of ratings and reviews (evaluation-based), pages (wiki-based), likes, posts, images or videos (social-network-based). The main contribution of this paper is a tourist-centred off-line and on-line analysis, using hotel ratings and reviews, to discover and present relevant trends and patterns to tourists and businesses. On the one hand, online, we provide a list of the top ten hotels, according to the user query, ordered by the overall rating, price and the ratio between the positive and negative Word Clouds reviews. On the other hand, off-line, we apply Multiple Linear Regression to identify the most relevant ratings that influence the hotel overall rating, and generate hotel clusters based on these ratings.
- APASail—An Agent-Based Platform for Autonomous Sailing Research and CompetitionPublication . Alves, Bruno; Veloso, Bruno; Malheiro, BeneditaThis paper presents a platform for real and simulated autonomous sailing competitions, which can also be used as a research tool to test and assess navigation algorithms. The platform provides back-end services – competition server, boat modelling and data storage – and supports external browsers and software agents as front-end clients. The back-end adopts the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm for the internal modelling of sailing boats and offers a Web Service Application Programming Interface (API) for the external software agents and a Web application for Web browsers. As a whole, the platform offers tracking (real competitions) and simulation (simulated competitions) modes. The testing and assessment of navigation algorithms and boat models correspond to private simulated competitions. In simulation mode, the back-end internal boat agent implements a simplified physical model, including the weight, sail area, angle of the sail and rudder, velocity and direction of the wind and position and velocity of the hull, whereas the front-end external boat agent implements the navigation algorithm on the team side, ensuring the privacy of strategic knowledge. The Web application allows the configuration and launching of competitions, the registration of teams and researchers, the uploading of boat physical features for simulation as well as the live or playback viewing of real and simulated competitions. The simulation mode is illustrated with the help of a case study. The proposed platform, which is open, scalable, modular and distributed, was designed for the research community to prepare, run and gather data from real and simulated autonomous sailing competitions.
- Aquaponics System - An EPS@ISEP 2014 Spring ProjectPublication . Llauradó, Ana Mesas; Docherty, Arlene; Méry, Gwénaël; Sokolowska, Natalia; Keane, Sean; Duarte, Abel José; Malheiro, Benedita; Ribeiro, Maria Cristina; Ferreira, Fernando José; Silva, Manuel; Ferreira, Paulo; Guedes, PedroThe goal of this project, one of the proposals of the EPS@ISEP 2014 Spring, was to develop an Aquaponics System. Over recent years Aquaponics systems have received increased attention due to its possibilities in helping reduce strain on resources within 1st and 3rd world countries. Aquaponics is the combination of Hydroponics and Aquaculture and mimics a natural environment in order to successfully apply and enhance the understanding of natural cycles within an indoor process. By using this knowledge of natural cycles it was possible to create a system with the capabilities similar to that of a natural environment with the benefits of electronic adaptions to enhance the overall efficiency of the system. The multinational team involved in its development was composed of five students, from five countries and fields of study. This paper covers their solution, involving overall design, the technology involved and the benefits it could bring to the current market. The team was able to achieve the final rendered Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings, successfully performed all the electronic testing, and designed a solution under budget. Furthermore, the solution presented was deeply studied from the sustainability viewpoint and the team also developed a product specific marketing plan. Finally, the students involved in this project obtained new knowledge and skills.