Abstract
The number of applications in which industrial robots share their working environment with people is increasing. Robots appropriate for such applications are equipped with safety systems according to ISO/TS 15066:2016 and are often referred to as collaborative robots (cobots). Due to the nature of human-robot collaboration, the working environment of cobots is subjected to unforeseeable modifications caused by people. Vision systems are often used to increase the adaptability of cobots, but they usually require knowledge of the objects to be manipulated. The application of machine learning techniques can increase the flexibility by enabling the control system of a cobot to continuously learn and adapt to unexpected changes in the working environment. In this paper we address this issue by investigating the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to control a cobot to perform pick-and-place tasks. We present the implementation of a control system that can adapt to changes in position and enables a cobot to grasp objects which were not part of the training. Our proposed system uses deep Q-learning to process color and depth images and generates an ?-greedy policy to define robot actions. The Q-values are estimated using Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) based on pre-trained models for feature extraction. To reduce training time, we implement a simulation environment to first train the RL agent, then we apply the resulting system on a real cobot. System performance is compared when using the pre-trained CNN models ResNext, DenseNet, MobileNet, and MNASNet. Simulation and experimental results validate the proposed approach and show that our system reaches a grasping success rate of 89.9% when manipulating a never-seen object operating with the pre-trained CNN model MobileNet.

Abstract
BackgroundTraumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is one of the leading causes of injury related mortality in the world, with severe cases reaching mortality rates of 30-40%. It is highly heterogeneous both in causes and consequences, complicating medical interpretation and prognosis. Gathering clinical, demographic, and laboratory data to perform a prognosis requires time and skill in several clinical specialties. Machine learning (ML) methods can take advantage of the data and guide physicians toward a better prognosis and, consequently, better healthcare. The objective of this study was to develop and test a wide range of machine learning models and evaluate their capability of predicting mortality of TBI, at hospital discharge, while assessing the similarity between the predictive value of the data and clinical significance. MethodsThe used dataset is the Hackathon Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury (HPTBI) dataset, composed of electronic health records containing clinical annotations and demographic data of 300 patients. Four different classification models were tested, either with or without feature selection. For each combination of the classification model and feature selection method, the area under the receiver operator curve (ROC-AUC), balanced accuracy, precision, and recall were calculated. ResultsMethods based on decision trees perform better when using all features (Random Forest, AUC = 0.86 and XGBoost, AUC = 0.91) but other models require prior feature selection to obtain the best results (k-Nearest Neighbors, AUC = 0.90 and Artificial Neural Networks, AUC = 0.84). Additionally, Random Forest and XGBoost allow assessing the feature's importance, which could give insights for future strategies on the clinical routine. ConclusionPredictive capability depends greatly on the combination of model and feature selection methods used but, overall, ML models showed a very good performance in mortality prediction for TBI. The feature importance results indicate that predictive value is not directly related to clinical significance.

Abstract

Abstract
The indicators of student success at higher education institutions are continuously analysed to increase the students' enrolment in multiple scientific areas. Every semester, the students respond to a pedagogical survey that aims to collect the student opinion of curricular units in terms of content and teaching methodologies. Using this information, we intend to anticipate the success in higher-level courses and prevent dropouts. Specifically, this paper contributes with an interpretable student classification method. The proposed solution relies on (i) a pedagogical survey to collect student's opinions; (ii) a statistical data analysis to validate the reliability of the survey; and (iii) machine learning algorithms to classify the success of a student. In addition, the proposed method includes an explainable mechanism to interpret the classifications and their main factors. This transparent pipeline was designed to have implications in both digital and sustainable education, impacting the three pillars of sustainability, i.e.,economic, social, and environmental, where transparency is a cornerstone. The work was assessed with a dataset from a Portuguese higher-level institution, contemplating multiple courses from different departments. The most promising results were achieved with Random Forest presenting 98% in accuracy and F-measure.

Abstract
Accurate predictions of time series are increasingly required to support judgments in a variety of decisions. Several predictive models are available to support these predictions, depending on how each field offers a data variety with varied behavior. The use of artificial neural networks (ANN) at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was significant since the tool may offer forecasting data for various conditions and hence assist in governing critical choices. In this context, this paper describes a system for predicting the daily number of cases, fatalities, and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients for the next 28 days in five European countries: Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. The database selection is based on comparable mitigation processes to analyze the impact of safety procedure flexibilization with the most recent numbers of COVID-19. Additionally, it is intended to check the algorithm's adaptability to different variants throughout time. The network's input data has been normalized to account for the size of the countries in the study and smoothed by seven days. The mean absolute error (MAE) was employed as a comparing criterion of two datasets, one with data from the beginning of the pandemic and another with data from the last year, since all variables (cases, deaths, and ICU patients) may be tendentious in percentage analysis. The best architecture produced a general MAE prediction for the 28 days ahead of 256,53 daily cases, 0,59 daily deaths, and 1,63 ICU patients, all numbers normalized by million people. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Narratives are used to convey information and are an important way of understanding the world through information sharing. With the increasing development in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, it becomes relevant to explore new techniques to extract, process, and visualize narratives. Narrative visualization tools enable a news story reader to have a different perspective from the traditional format, allowing it to be presented in a schematic way, using representative symbols to summarize it. We propose a new narrative visualization approach using icons to represent important narrative elements. The proposed visualization is integrated in Brat2Viz, a narrative annotation visualization tool that implements a pipeline that transforms text annotations into formal representations leading to narrative visualizations. To build the icon visualization, we present a narrative element extraction process that uses automatic sentence extraction, automatic translation methods, and an algorithm that determines the actors' most adequate descriptions. Then, we introduce a method to create an icon dictionary, with the ability to automatically search for icons. Furthermore, we present a critical analysis and user-based evaluation of the results resorting to the responses collected in two separate surveys.