Abstract

Abstract
In recent years, several regulatory initiatives have been carried out at the European Commission level to ensure the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence, including the General Data Protection Regulation, Data Governance Act, or the Artificial Intelligence Act. However, there is also a need for technological solutions that effectively enable the implementation of this regulation in a realistic and efficient way. The main goal of this work is to propose and implement such a technological solution, relying on the notion of observability. The hypothesis is that a set of ethics metrics can be implemented along a domain-agnostic Data Science/Artificial Intelligence pipeline. These metrics, when observed in real time, will allow not only to assess the level of compliance of the pipeline with ethics standards at different levels, but also allow for a timely reaction by the organization when the data, the model or any other artifact in the pipeline exhibits undesired behavior. In this way, some of the most important ethical principles of AI are guaranteed: responsibility and prevention of harm. This work aims to identify a large group of ethics metrics, implement them, map them onto the different stages of a typical Data Science / AI process, and determine whether the presence of these metrics ensures or contributes to the development of AI solutions that can be considered ethical according to the latest European regulation.

Abstract
Nowadays the concept of digitalization and Industry 4.0 is more and more important, and organizations must improve and adapt their processes and systems in order to keep up to date with the latest paradigm. In this context, there are multiple developed Maturity Models (MMs) to help companies on the processes of evaluating their digital maturity and defining a roadmap to achieve their full potential. However, this is a subject in constant evolution and most of the available MMs don't fill all the needs that a company might have in its transformation process. Thus, European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) arose to support companies on the process of responding to digital challenges and becoming more competitive. Supported by the European Commission and the Digital Transformation Accelerator, they use tools to measure the digital maturity progress of their customers. This paper analyzes several MMs publicly available and compares them to the guidelines provided to the EDIH.

Abstract
We live in an era in which the preservation of the environment is being widely discussed, driven by growing concerns over climate issues. One major factor contributing to this situation is the lack of attention societies give to maintaining high sustainability levels. Data plays a crucial role in understanding and assessing sustainability impacts in both urban and rural areas. However, obtaining comprehensive data on a country's sustainability is challenging due to the lack of simple and accessible sources. Existing solutions for sustainability analysis are limited by high costs and implementation difficulties, which restrict their spatial coverage. In this paper, we propose a solution using low-cost hardware and open-source technologies to collect data about the movement of people and vehicles. This solution involves low-cost video-based meters that can be flexibly deployed to various locations. Specifically, we developed a prototype using Raspberry Pi and YOLO which is able to correctly classify 91% of the vehicles by type, and 100% of the events (entering of leaving). The results indicate that this system can effectively and affordably identify and count people and vehicles, allowing for its implementations namely in remote sensitive areas such as natural parks, in which the access of people and vehicles must be controlled and monitored. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press.

Abstract
Quality inspection is crucial in the textile industry as it ensures that the final products meet the required standards. It helps detect and address defects, such as fabric flaws and stitching irregularities, enhancing customer satisfaction, and optimizing production efficiency by identifying areas of improvement, reducing waste, and minimizing rework. In the competitive textile market, it is vital for maintaining customer loyalty, brand reputation, and sustained success. Nonetheless, and despite the importance of quality inspection, it is becoming increasingly harder to hire and train people for such tedious and repetitive tasks. In this context, there is an increased interest in automated quality control techniques that can be used in the industrial domain. In this paper we describe a computer vision model for localizing and classifying different types of defects in textiles. The model developed achieved an mAP@0.5 of 0.96 on the validation dataset. While this model was trained with a publicly available dataset, we will soon use the same architecture with images collected from Jacquard looms in the context of a funded research project. This paper thus represents an initial validation of the model for the purposes of fabric defect detection.

Abstract
The high rates of mortality provoked by cardiovascular disorders (CVDs) have been rated by the OMS in the top among non-communicable diseases, killing about 18 million people annually. It is crucial to detect arrhythmias or cardiovascular events in an early way. For that purpose, novel portable acquisition devices have allowed long-term electrocardiographic (ECG) recording, being the most common way to discover arrhythmias of a random nature such as atrial fibrillation (AF). Nonetheless, the acquisition environment can distort or even destroy the ECG recordings, hindering the proper diagnosis of CVDs. Thus, it is necessary to assess the ECG signal quality in an automatic way. The proposed approach exploits the feature and meta-feature extraction of 5-s ECG segments with the ability of machine learning classifiers to discern between high- and low-quality ECG segments. Three different approaches were tested, reaching values of accuracy close to 83% using the original feature set and improving up to 90% when all the available meta-features were utilized. Moreover, within the high-quality group, the segments belonging to the AF class outperformed around 7% until a rate over 85% when the meta-features set was used. The extraction of meta-features improves the accuracy even when a subset of meta-features is selected from the whole set.