Abstract
Pedestrian safety is a pressing subject in urban areas. The disorderly sharing of streets and roads between pedestrians and vehicles leads to potentially serious accidents for pedestrians. This student project aims to tackle the issue by placing an interactive gaming device at traffic lights. SMASHY by Stempe Safety offers pedestrians an amusing and active way to discourage jaywalking. The multipurpose solution features a smashing game with buttons on one side and a screen displaying useful information on the other side. While the traffic light remains red for pedestrians, the module buttons light up and the players can start smashing the buttons as fast as possible, until the light turns green and consequently, the game ends. Ultimately, the modules are connected to an app where, if desired by the player, scores can be tracked and difficulty can vary based on user performance. Multiple modules can be placed around the city and the app will track player scores by location. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

Abstract
CoffeeMush is an innovative and sustainable project developed as part of the European Project Semester (EPS) at ISEP in 2024. This student project aims to tackle waste management environmental problems by turning coffee waste into mushrooms, a valuable food source. CoffeeMush consists of a smart device providing optimal conditions for mushroom cultivation, complemented by a user-friendly Android application for remote monitoring and control. The design was guided by ethical, sustainability, market and technical considerations. The paper describes the theoretical background of the project, the technical design, and the prototype development and testing. The results show the feasibility of CoffeeMush as a practical and environmentally friendly solution for urban mushroom cultivation, and its impact on sustainable food production and waste reduction. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

Abstract
In healthcare, diagnoses usually rely on physician expertise. However, complex cases may benefit from consulting similar past clinical reports cases. In this paper, we present MedLink (http://medlink.inesctec.pt), a tool that given a free-text medical report, retrieves and ranks relevant clinical case reports published in health conferences and journals, aiming to support clinical decision-making, particularly in challenging or complex diagnoses. To this regard, we trained two BERT models on the sentence similarity task: a bi-encoder for retrieval and a cross-encoder for reranking. To evaluate our approach, we used 10 medical reports and asked a physician to rank the top 10 most relevant published case reports for each one. Our results show that MedLink’s ranking model achieved NDCG@10 of 0.747. Our demo also includes the visualization of clinical entities (using a NER model) and the production of a textual explanation (using a LLM) to ease comparison and contrasting between reports. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
In the spring of 2023, a team of European Project Semester (EPS) students enrolled at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) chose to foster socialisation in urban spaces. Public spaces are ideal sites to promote social interaction and community involvement. The aim of this project is then to use such places to divert attention from smartphones by promoting physical social interaction. In recent years, the combination of interactive games and technology has emerged as a potential strategy to increase the use and allure of public areas. The proposed solution, named Shift it, is a puzzle game that combines technology with old school gaming, providing a fun and unique socialising experience. The game, to be installed in public areas, has as key features inclusiveness (invites all people to play), fun (creates a healthy competitive setup) and empathy (creates puzzles by taking and scrambling user pictures). This paper presents the proposed design, which was based on state-of-the-art, ethics, market and sustainability analyses, followed by the development and testing of a proof-of-concept prototype. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

Abstract
Social media platforms, increasingly used as news sources for varied data analytics, have transformed how information is generated and disseminated. However, the unverified nature of this content raises concerns about trustworthiness and accuracy, potentially negatively impacting readers' critical judgment due to disinformation. This work aims to contribute to the automatic data quality validation field, addressing the rapid growth of online content on wiki pages. Our scalable solution includes stream-based data processing with feature engineering, feature analysis and selection, stream-based classification, and real-time explanation of prediction outcomes. The explainability dashboard is designed for the general public, who may need more specialized knowledge to interpret the model's prediction. Experimental results on two datasets attain approximately 90% values across all evaluation metrics, demonstrating robust and competitive performance compared to works in the literature. In summary, the system assists editors by reducing their effort and time in detecting disinformation.

Abstract
Motivation The validity of epidemiologic findings can be increased using triangulation, i.e. comparison of findings across contexts, and by having sufficiently large amounts of relevant data to analyse. However, access to data is often constrained by practical considerations and by ethico-legal and data governance restrictions. Gaining access to such data can be time-consuming due to the governance requirements associated with data access requests to institutions in different jurisdictions.Results DataSHIELD is a software solution that enables remote analysis without the need for data transfer (federated analysis). DataSHIELD is a scientifically mature, open-source data access and analysis platform aligned with the 'Five Safes' framework, the international framework governing safe research access to data. It allows real-time analysis while mitigating disclosure risk through an active multi-layer system of disclosure-preventing mechanisms. This combination of real-time remote statistical analysis, disclosure prevention mechanisms, and federation capabilities makes DataSHIELD a solution for addressing many of the technical and regulatory challenges in performing the large-scale statistical analysis of health and biomedical data. This paper describes the key components that comprise the disclosure protection system of DataSHIELD. These broadly fall into three classes: (i) system protection elements, (ii) analysis protection elements, and (iii) governance protection elements.Availability and implementation Information about the DataSHIELD software is available in https://datashield.org/ and https://github.com/datashield.