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Roads and roadsides provide dispersal channels for non-native invasive alien plants (IAP), many of which hold devastating impacts in the economy, human health, biodiversity and ecosystem functionality. Remote sensing is an essential tool for efficiently assessing and monitoring the dynamics of IAP along roads. In this study, we explore the potentialities of object based image analysis (OBIA) approach to map several invasive plant species along roads using very high spatial resolution imagery. We compared the performance of OBIA approaches implemented in one open source software (OTB/Monteverdi) against those available in two proprietary pro-grams (eCognition and ArcGIS). We analysed the images by two sequential processes. First, we obtained a land-cover map for 15 study sites by segmenting the images with the algorithms Mean Shift Segmentation (MSS) and Multiresolution Segmentation (MRS), and by classifying the segmented images with the algorithms Support Vector Machine (SVM), Nearest Neighbour Classifier (NNC) and Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC). We created a mask using the polygons classified as non-vegetation to crop the images of the 15 study sites. Second, we repeated the previous segmentation and classification steps over the 15 masked images of vegetated areas using the same algorithms. OTB/Monteverdi, with MSS and SVM algorithms, showed to be a good software for land-cover mapping (OA = 87.0%), as well as ArcGIS, with MSS and MLC algorithms (OA = 84.3%). However, these two programs, using the same segmentation algorithms, did not achieve good accuracy results when mapping IAP species (OA(OTB/Monteverdi) = 63.3%; OAA(cos = 45.7%). eCognition, with MRS and NNC algorithms, reached better classification results in both land-cover and IAP maps (OA(Land-cover )= 95.7%; OA(Invasive-plant )= 92.8%). 'Bare soil' and 'Road', and 'A. donax' were the classes with best and worst overall accuracy, respectively, when mapping land-cover classes in the three programs. 'Other trees' was the class with the most accurate and significant differences in the three programs when mapping IAP species. The separation of each invasive species should be improved with a phenology-based design of field surveys. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of sequential segmentation and classification of RS data for mapping and monitoring plant invasions along linear infrastructures, which allows to reduce the time, cost and hazard of extensive field campaigns along roadsides.

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Criminal investigations collect and analyze the facts related to a crime, from which the investigators can deduce evidence to be used in court. It is a multidisciplinary and applied science, which includes interviews, interrogations, evidence collection, preservation of the chain of custody, and other methods and techniques of investigation. These techniques produce both digital and paper documents that have to be carefully analyzed to identify correlations and interactions among suspects, places, license plates, and other entities that are mentioned in the investigation. The computerized processing of these documents is a helping hand to the criminal investigation, as it allows the automatic identification of entities and their relations, being some of which difficult to identify manually. There exists a wide set of dedicated tools, but they have a major limitation: they are unable to process criminal reports in the Portuguese language, as an annotated corpus for that purpose does not exist. This paper presents an annotated corpus, composed of a collection of anonymized crime-related documents, which were extracted from official and open sources. The dataset was produced as the result of an exploratory initiative to collect crime-related data from websites and conditioned-access police reports. The dataset was evaluated and a mean precision of 0.808, recall of 0.722, and F1-score of 0.733 were obtained with the classification of the annotated named-entities present in the crime-related documents. This corpus can be employed to benchmark Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and tools to detect and correlate entities in the documents. Some examples are sentence detection, named-entity recognition, and identification of terms related to the criminal domain.

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Introduction:The lack of engagement and the shortage of motivation and drive, also referred to as apathy, negatively impacts the effectiveness and adherence to treatment and the general well-being of people with neurocognitive disorders (NCDs), such as dementia. Methodology:The hypothesis raised states that the engagement of people with dementia during their non-invasive treatments for NCDs is affected by the noisy source levels and negative auditory stimuli present within environmental treatment settings. An online survey was conducted with the study objectives to assess 1) the engagement levels of dementia patients while interacting with others at home versus in therapy facilities, 2) the emotions perceived when interacting with people at home compared to therapy sessions, 3) the perceived loudness of the environment at home versus in therapy facilities, and 4) which source sounds negatively impact the patients at home and during therapy sessions. A purposive sampling (n=62) targeting relatives, friends, and caregivers of dementia patients was conducted via online community forums in the DACH region. Moreover, a recording session was conducted in a psychotherapist’s office to verify the answer tothe questionnaire on the noise sources perceived in therapy facilities. Results and Discussion:The raised hypothesis that disruptive auditory stimuli and noise levels influence the engagement levels of demented individuals during treatment is confirmed as the engagement is affected by the perceived noise disruptions when comparing perceived noise levels and engagement at home to those in treatment facilities.Significant statistical results were found between the lower engagement of demented individuals when interacting with people during therapy sessions compared to higher engagement in-home interactions. Furthermore, negatively perceived sound sources can be found in both therapy facilities and home settings. The noise sound sources identified, such as human voices, household appliances and household noises, while recording inthe psychotherapist’s office align with the questionnaire responses received on this topic. The findings indicate that the perceived heightened noise levels in therapy facilities stand in correlation with the lowered engagement rate perceived during the therapy session compared to the lower noise level and higher engagement encountered when demented individuals interact at home. Conclusion:If the identified noise elements are masked or replaced by other auditory stimuli that promote a soothing soundscape, the original disturbances encountered during therapy and the lack of engagement can possibly be minimized. Further studies need to be conducted in the prototyping of a noise intervention tool to analyze the impact on lack of engagement through noise disturbances.Keywords. Noise, Engagement, Dementia, Therapy, Apathy.INTRODUCTIONNeurocognitive disorders (NCDs) are a steadily rising global public health concern. In 2020, around 50 million people worldwide lived with major NCDs, specifically dementia, with nearly 10 million new cases per year1NCDs can be found in many diseases, including Alzheimer, Parkinson, Huntington, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (Reith, 2018). The causes of NCDs are typically associated with advanced age. Still, it can occur from incidents such as traumatic brain injuries, infections, thyroid problems, damage to the blood vessels, and other causes (Kane et al., 2017), increasingly affecting a wide range of people and age groups. Successful treatment methods are limited and can be split into two main categories, invasive and non-invasive methods.Invasive treatment methods are surgical procedures, such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), a neurosurgical procedure in which a neurotransmitter is placed in the brain to send electrical 1World Health Organization, Dementia [website] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia(accessed 12 April 2021)