Abstract
Climate change is causing the emergence of new pest species and diseases, threatening economies, public health, and food security. In Europe, olive groves are crucial for producing olive oil and table olives; however, the presence of the olive fruit fly (Bactrocera Oleae) poses a significant threat, causing crop losses and financial hardship. Early disease and pest detection methods are crucial for addressing this issue. This work presents a pioneering comparative performance study between two state-of-the-art object detection models, YOLOv5 and YOLOv8, for the detection of the olive fruit fly from trap images, marking the first-ever application of these models in this context. The dataset was obtained by merging two existing datasets: the DIRT dataset, collected in Greece, and the CIMO-IPB dataset, collected in Portugal. To increase its diversity and size, the dataset was augmented, and then both models were fine-tuned. A set of metrics were calculated, to assess both models performance. Early detection techniques like these can be incorporated in electronic traps, to effectively safeguard crops from the adverse impacts caused by climate change, ultimately ensuring food security and sustainable agriculture. © 2024 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Abstract
The impact of climate change on global temperature and precipitation patterns can lead to an increase in extreme environmental events. These events can create favourable conditions for the spread of plant pests and diseases, leading to significant production losses in agriculture. To mitigate these losses, early detection of pests is crucial in order to implement effective and safe control management strategies, to protect the crops, public health and the environment. Our work focuses on the development of a computer vision framework to detect and classify the olive fruit fly, also known as Bactrocera oleae, from images, which is a serious concern to the EU’s olive tree industry. The images of the olive fruit fly were obtained from traps placed throughout olive orchards located in Greece. The approach entails augmenting the dataset and fine-tuning the YOLOv7 model to improve the model performance, in identifying and classifying olive fruit flies. A Portuguese dataset was also used to further perform detection. To assess the model, a set of metrics were calculated, and the experimental results indicated that the model can precisely identify the positive class, which is the olive fruit fly.

Abstract
Several systems that employ machine learning models are subject to strict latency requirements. Fraud detection systems, transportation control systems, network traffic analysis and footwear manufacturing processes are a few examples. These requirements are imposed at inference time, when the model is queried. However, it is not trivial how to adjust model architecture and hyperparameters in order to obtain a good trade-off between predictive ability and inference time. This paper provides a contribution in this direction by presenting a study of how different architectural and hyperparameter choices affect the inference time of a Convolutional Neural Network for network traffic analysis. Our case study focus on a model for traffic correlation attacks to the Tor network, that requires the correlation of a large volume of network flows in a short amount of time. Our findings suggest that hyperparameters related to convolution operations-such as stride, and the number of filters-and the reduction of convolution and max-pooling layers can substantially reduce inference time, often with a relatively small cost in predictive performance.

Abstract
In an automatic music playlist generator, such as an automated online radio channel, how should the system react when a user hits the skip button? Can we use this type of negative feedback to improve the list of songs we will playback for the user next? We propose SkipAwareRec, a next-item recommendation system based on reinforcement learning. SkipAwareRec recommends the best next music categories, considering positive feedback consisting of normal listening behaviour, and negative feedback in the form of song skips. Since SkipAwareRec recommends broad categories, it needs to be coupled with a model able to choose the best individual items. To do this, we propose Hybrid SkipAwareRec. This hybrid model combines the SkipAwareRec with an incremental Matrix Factorisation (MF) algorithm that selects specific songs within the recommended categories. Our experiments with Spotify's Sequential Skip Prediction Challenge dataset show that Hybrid SkipAwareRec has the potential to improve recommendations by a considerable amount with respect to the skip-agnostic MF algorithm. This strongly suggests that reformulating the next recommendations based on skips improves the quality of automatic playlists. Although in this work we focus on sequential music recommendation, our proposal can be applied to other sequential content recommendation domains, such as health for user engagement.

Abstract
The complexity of the number of stakeholders, information systems used, and port operations evoke new challenges to port security when it comes to the total knowledge and control of the overall operations of transport and parking of containerized freight, namely hazmat ones. The rising interest and the port authorities' awareness of the relevance of security concerns involved in this complex ecosystem has led to the search for new technological solutions that allow, in an integrated manner, the smart and automatic control of operations of transport and hazardous freight parking in all the areas of its jurisdiction, without third-party dependencies. Despite its importance and criticality, port authorities tend to have limited real-time knowledge of the location of hazmat containers, whether moving within the port (entering and leaving), or in its parking, having a direct impact on the port security. This article presents a Digital Twin platform for 3D and real-time georeferenced visualization of container parks and the location of hazardous containerized freight. This tool combines different modules that further allow to visualize information associated to a container, its movement, as well as its surrounding area, including a realistic and dynamic 3D representation of what is the area encircling the port.