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Publications

Publications by Marta Campos Ferreira

2021

Considering the need for new aspects in route planners

Authors
Abrantes, D; Maria Campos Ferreira, M; Costa, P; Felicio, S; Hora, J; Dangelo, C; Silva, J; Teresa Galvão Dias, M; Coimbra, M;

Publication
Human Systems Engineering and Design (IHSED2021) Future Trends and Applications - AHFE International

Abstract
The rising number of people living in city centers is connected to an increase of private vehicles, traffic, and associated harmful effects. Efforts have been made to promote a modal shift to the use of more sustainable transportation means, such as walking and cycling, but several factors hinged to safety, comfort, and accessibility, still hinder this goal. Current route planners often focus on two particular dimensions, time and distance, which might not be enough to support other personal perceptions. We need to consider new aspects and different dimensions, such as air quality, noise levels, or people density, fueled by the recent advances in the area of sensorization and the Internet of Things. We tested the idea of an innovative route planner with surveys and focus groups and concluded that there is an interest for more power to customize personal routes, which could be a key element boosting soft mode mobility.

2022

A multi-head attention-based transformer model for traffic flow forecasting with a comparative analysis to recurrent neural networks

Authors
Reza, S; Ferreira, MC; Machado, JJM; Tavares, JMRS;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS

Abstract
Traffic flow forecasting is an essential component of an intelligent transportation system to mitigate congestion. Recurrent neural networks, particularly gated recurrent units and long short-term memory, have been the stateof-the-art traffic flow forecasting models for the last few years. However, a more sophisticated and resilient model is necessary to effectively acquire long-range correlations in the time-series data sequence under analysis. The dominant performance of transformers by overcoming the drawbacks of recurrent neural networks in natural language processing might tackle this need and lead to successful time-series forecasting. This article presents a multi-head attention based transformer model for traffic flow forecasting with a comparative analysis between a gated recurrent unit and a long-short term memory-based model on PeMS dataset in this context. The model uses 5 heads with 5 identical layers of encoder and decoder and relies on Square Subsequent Masking techniques. The results demonstrate the promising performance of the transform-based model in predicting long-term traffic flow patterns effectively after feeding it with substantial amount of data. It also demonstrates its worthiness by increasing the mean squared errors and mean absolute percentage errors by (1.25 - 47.8)% and (32.4 - 83.8)%, respectively, concerning the current baselines.

2022

Identifying the determinants and understanding their effect on the perception of safety, security, and comfort by pedestrians and cyclists: A systematic review

Authors
Ferreira, MC; Costa, PD; Abrantes, D; Hora, J; Felicio, S; Coimbra, M; Dias, TG;

Publication
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART F-TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR

Abstract
The continuous growth of the world population and its agglomeration in urban cities, demand an increasing need for mobility, which in turn contributes to the worsening of traffic congestion and pollution in cities. Therefore, it is necessary to promote active travel, such as walking and cycling. However, this is not an easy task, as pedestrians and cyclists are the most vulnerable link in the system, and low levels of safety, security and comfort can contribute to choosing private cars over active travel. Hence, it is essential to understand the determinants that affect the perceptions of pedestrians and cyclists, in order to support the definition of policies that promote the use of active modes of transport. Thus, this article fills an important gap in the literature by identifying and discussing the objective and subjective determinants that affect the perceptions of safety, security and comfort of pedestrians and cyclists, through a systematic review of the literature published in the last ten years. It followed the PRISMA statement guidelines and checklist, resulting in 68 relevant articles that were carefully analyzed. The results show that the perception of safety is negatively affected by fear of traffic-related injuries, fear of falling related to infra-structure and infrastructure maintenance, and negative behavior of drivers. Regarding security, crime was the major concern of pedestrians and cyclists, either with emphasis on the person or on personal property. With regard to comfort, high levels of air and noise pollution, lack of vege-tation, bad weather conditions, slopes and long commuting distances negatively affected the users' perception. The results also suggest that poor lighting affects all domains, providing a negative perception of safety, security and comfort. Similarly, the presence of people is seen as negatively influencing the perception of safety and comfort, while the absence of people nega-tively impacts the perception of security. Therefore, the findings achieved by this study are key to assist in the definition of transport policies and infrastructure creation in large smart cities. Additionally, new transport policies are proposed and discussed.

2022

A customized residual neural network and bi-directional gated recurrent unit-based automatic speech recognition model

Authors
Reza, S; Ferreira, MC; Machado, JJM; Tavares, JMRS;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS

Abstract
Speech recognition aims to convert human speech into text and has applications in security, healthcare, commerce, automobiles, and technology, just to name a few. Inserting residual neural networks before recurrent neural network cells improves accuracy and cuts training time by a good margin. Furthermore, layer normalization instead of batch normalization is more effective in model training and performance enhancement. Also, the size of the datasets presents tremendous influences in achieving the best performance. Leveraging these tricks, this article proposes an automatic speech recognition model with a stacked five layers of customized Residual Convolution Neural Network and seven layers of Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Units, including a logarithmic so f tmax for the model output. Each of them incorporates a learnable per-element affine parameter-based layer normalization technique. The training and testing of the new model were conducted on the LibriSpeech corpus and LJ Speech dataset. The experimental results demonstrate a character error rate (CER) of 4.7 and 3.61% on the two datasets, respectively, with only 33 million parameters without the requirement of any external language model.

2026

A Data-Driven Approach to Estimating Passenger Boarding in Bus Networks

Authors
Bongiovi, G; Dias, TG; Nauri Junior, J; Campos Ferreira, M;

Publication
Applied Sciences

Abstract
This study explores the application of multiple predictive algorithms under general versus route-specialized modeling strategies to estimate passenger boarding demand in public bus transportation systems. Accurate estimation of boarding patterns is essential for optimizing service planning, improving passenger comfort, and enhancing operational efficiency. This research evaluates a range of predictive models to identify the most effective techniques for forecasting demand across different routes and times. Two modeling strategies were implemented: a generalistic approach and a specialized one. The latter was designed to capture route-specific characteristics and variability. A real-world case study from a medium-sized metropolitan region in Brazil was used to assess model performance. Results indicate that ensemble-tree-based models, particularly XGBoost, achieved the highest accuracy and robustness in handling nonlinear relationships and complex interactions within the data. Compared to the generalistic approach, the specialized approach demonstrated superior adaptability and precision, making it especially suitable for long-term and strategic planning applications. It reduced the average RMSE by 19.46% (from 13.84 to 11.15) and the MAE by 17.36% (from 9.60 to 7.93), while increasing the average R² from 0.289 to 0.344. However, these gains came with higher computational demands and mean Forecast Bias (from 0.002 to 0.560), indicating a need for bias correction before operational deployment. The findings highlight the practical value of predictive modeling for transit authorities, enabling data-driven decision making in fleet allocation, route planning, and service frequency adjustment. Moreover, accurate demand forecasting contributes to cost reduction, improved passenger satisfaction, and environmental sustainability through optimized operations.

2026

Content validation and testing of a gamified web tool for nursing supervision

Authors
Silva, R; Camelo, R; Pinto, C; Campos, MJ; Ferreira, MC; Fernandes, CS;

Publication
Journal of Research in Nursing

Abstract
Background: This study aimed to validate the content of a game focused on clinical supervision in nursing, with the collaboration of experts, and to assess its usability alongside a group of nurses. The development of SUPERVISE ® was grounded in theories of Experiential Learning, Self-Determination, Constructivist, and Social Cognitive. Methods: A mixed study design was used. In the first phase, the content of the game was validated with the participation of experts using a modified e-Delphi method. In the second phase, the usability of SUPERVISE ® was tested with nurses. Results: In the first phase, the content of the game was validated by 36 experts, reaching a consensus = 95.4% on the 128 questions on which the game was based. In the second phase, the SUPERVISE ® game was tested and evaluated by 39 nurses. It showed good usability and with a System Usability Scale score = 79.4 (above the cut-off of 68) and was recognised as an effective teaching strategy. Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of combining rigorous content validation with practical evaluation to develop effective gamified educational tools for nursing practice.

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