Abstract
Underwater environments pose unique challenges to optical systems due to physical phenomena that induce severe data degradation. Current imaging sensors rarely address these effects comprehensively, resulting in the need to integrate complementary information sources. This article presents a multimodal data fusion approach to combine information from diverse sensing modalities into a single dense and accurate tridimensional representation. The proposed fusiNg tExture with apparent motion information for underwater Scene recOnstruction (NESO) encoder-decoder network leverages motion perception principles to extract relative depth cues, fusing them with textured information through an early fusion strategy. Evaluated on the FLSea-Stereo dataset, NESO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 58.7%. Dense depth maps are achieved using multi-stage skip connections with attention mechanisms that ensure propagation of key features across network levels. This representation is further enhanced by incorporating sparse but millimeter-precise depth measurements from active imaging techniques. A regression-based algorithm maps depth displacements between these heterogeneous point clouds, using the estimated curves to refine the dense NESO prediction. This approach achieves relative errors as low as 0.41% when reconstructing submerged anode structures, accounting for metric improvements of up to 0.1124 m relative to the initial measurements. Validation at the ATLANTIS Coastal Testbed demonstrates the effectiveness of this multimodal fusion approach in obtaining robust tri-dimensional representations in real underwater conditions.

Abstract
EMSO ERIC is a unique European distributed marine Research Infrastructure dedicated to the observation and study of the deep ocean in the long term in fixed regional areas. It provides different services of which access to its infrastructure by external users -engineers, scientists and researchers-, working both in the public and private sectors. The aim of this service, called physical access, is to facilitate access to instrumented platforms deployed at different sites across the European seas, from the seabed to the surface, in order to perform experiments in geosciences and engineering in real ocean conditions. Depending on the logistics and availability of each site, users may deploy their own platforms, instruments, systems or technologies to be tested by the existing equipment that, in this case, can provide reference measurements. Users may also deploy their own systems on the existing EMSO platforms, either in standalone mode or connected to them, receiving power and, in some cases, being able to transmit data by satellite or by cable, depending on the site. Projects requiring the use of several EMSO sites are also accepted. The host EMSO Regional Facility provides logistics and technical support in order to deploy and recover the systems, access the data and it may also offer training and co-development. EMSO ERIC launches the physical access call on a yearly basis and evaluates the received project proposals every two months. Access is free of charge and funding is available for travel, consumables, shipping, operations and hardware adaptations needed to run the project. Since 2022, when the first call was launched, ten projects with varied topics have been funded and are in different phases of execution.

Abstract
The deep ocean is vast and challenging to observe; however, it is key to knowledge of the sea and its impact on global climate. Fixed sea observing points (such as the EMSO observing nodes) provide a limited view and are complemented by expensive oceanographic campaigns with systems demanding high logistical requirements such as deep-sea ROVs.  These costs not only limit our capability for key ocean data collection in the deep but also introduce their own environmental costs.Emerging challenges in knowledge and pressure on the exploration of the deep ocean demand new technological solutions for monitoring and safeguarding the marine ecosystem.Innovative robotic technologies such as the TURTLE robotic deep-sea landers can combine long-term permanence at the seabed with mobility and dynamic reconfigurability in spatial and temporal deep-sea observation.Robotic systems of a heterogeneous nature (from conventional gliders, AUVs, or robotic landers) can be combined with standard and new sensing systems, such as bottom-deployed sensor nodes, moored systems, and cabled points when feasible.These systems can provide underwater localization services for the different assets, energy supply and high bandwidth data transfer with robotic docking stations for other mobile elements. An example of the synergy obtained with these new systems is the possibility of using robotic landers as carriers of EGIM (EMSO Generic Instrument Module) sensor payloads, providing power and data storage and flexibility in the deployment and recovery process.This approach, partly taken in the EU-funded Trident project to develop technical solutions for cost-effective and efficient observation of environmental impacts on deep seabed environments, allows for a substantial reduction in the operational and logistic requirements for deep-sea observation, greatly reducing the need for costly oceanographic campaigns or the use of expensive (economic and logistical) deep sea ROV systems.In this work, we present some of the new developments and discuss the transition from existing technological solutions to new ones integrating these recent developments.

Abstract
This paper presents the development and implementation of learning-based detection and tracking methods using multibeam data to detect marine litter in the water column. The presented work encompasses (i) the creation of acoustic videos and the application of multiple post-processing techniques; (ii) the training of multiple You Only Look Once (YOLO) detection models, specifically YOLOv8, across different variants, acoustic frequencies, and input types (both raw and post-processed); (iii) and the development of a marine litter tracking system based on DeepSORT. The results include a multibeam multi-frequency data study demonstrating the potential of acoustic image sensing for detecting and tracking marine litter materials in the water column. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Abstract
Crowdsourced data streams are popular and extremely valuable in several domains, namely in tourism. Tourism crowdsourcing platforms rely on past tourist and business inputs to provide tailored recommendations to current users in real time. The continuous, open, dynamic and non-curated nature of the crowd-originated data demands specific stream mining techniques to support online profiling, recommendation, change detection and adaptation, explanation and evaluation. The sought techniques must, not only, continuously improve and adapt profiles and models; but must also be transparent, overcome biases, prioritize preferences, master huge data volumes and all in real time. This article surveys the state-of-art of adaptive and explainable stream recommendation, extends the taxonomy of explainable recommendations from the offline to the stream-based scenario, and identifies future research opportunities.

Abstract
The challenge of engineering education is to transform engineering students into agents of innovation and well-being. In addition to solid scientific and technical knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving and interpersonal competencies, it implies the ability to design and implement solutions supported by ethical and sustainability principles. With this goal in mind, the European Project Semester (EPS) provides a student-centred project-based learning framework. It is offered by a group of European higher education institutions, including the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), the engineering school of the Polytechnic of Porto. Students work in teams of four to six, from different fields of study and nationalities, to design solutions to problems that affect individuals, society or the planet, taking into account the state of the art, the market and the ethical and sustainability implications of their decisions. These solutions are then implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype. Most of the projects address problems in education, the environment, food production and smart cities and have a strong educational, ethical and sustainability drive, encouraging students to develop sustainability competencies. This work analyses team papers of illustrative EPS@ISEP projects searching for evidences of the development of sustainability competencies. The proposed method maps keywords related to the sixteen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to the contents of team papers by applying natural language processing and reusing the list of SDG keywords proposed by Auckland University. The results confirm EPS@ISEP fosters sustainability competencies in engineering undergraduates. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.