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Facts & Numbers
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Presentation

Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support

At LIAAD, we work on the very strategic area of Data Science, which has an increasing interest worldwide and is critical to all areas of human activity. The huge amounts of collected data (Big Data) and the ubiquity of devices with sensors and/or processing power offer opportunities and challenges to scientists and engineers. Moreover, the demand for complex models for objective decision support is spreading in business, health, science, e-government and e-learning, which encourages us to invest in different approaches to modelling.

Our overall strategy is to take advantage of the data flood and diversification, and to invest in research lines that will help reduce the gap between collected and useful data, while offering diverse modelling solutions.

At LIAAD, our fundamental scientific principals are machine learning, statistics, optimisation and mathematics.

Latest News
Artificial Intelligence

INESC TEC helps identify and quantify reactions to climate change on social media

How do we react to social media posts about climate change? This was the starting point of an international study featuring INESC TEC collaboration, analysing nearly two million posts on the social network X (formerly Twitter) published over 12 years in the Iberian Peninsula.

28th July 2025

Artificial Intelligence

Researchers demonstrate that tobacco mimics and accelerates ageing in human tissues

A team of researchers from INESC TEC, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre analysed 46 types of tissues from over 700 individuals. The team concluded that smoking impacts tissue architecture and can cause molecular changes not only in organs directly associated with smoke inhalation, e.g., lungs, but also in tissues from other organs, including the pancreas, thyroid, oesophagus, and specific regions of the brain. In many cases, the effects of smoking significantly overlap with those of ageing.

24th July 2025

Artificial Intelligence

INESC TEC won Arquivo.pt award with platform that gathers 50 years of local election data

Imagine being able to access Portuguese local election data in a structured and intuitive way, from 1976 to the present. This was the idea behind the platform A Minha Região - O teu portal autárquico, developed by INESC TEC researchers Rúben Almeida, Sérgio Nunes and Ricardo Campos, which won first place in the 2025 Arquivo.pt awards.

14th July 2025

Artificial Intelligence

Preventing environmental crimes in waste transportation: INESC TEC has the solution

The EnSafe project (Enhancing Environmental Protection: Anomaly Detection in Waste Transportation using Network Science) is developing AI-based solutions to tackle environmental crimes, focusing on waste transportation chains. EnSafe benefits from the active involvement of INESC TEC, which is developing technologies to detect irregular and suspicious behaviours in a sector that is vulnerable to fraud and environmental corruption.

26th May 2025

Computer Science and Engineering

Consulting Clinical Reports to Support Medical Decisions Made Easier with Award-Winning INESC TEC Tool

Supporting physicians in making complex and rare clinical decisions is the goal of MedLink, a tool developed by researchers at INESC TEC, which won the Best Demo Paper award at the European Conference on Information Retrieval—one of the most prestigious conferences in Europe in the field of information retrieval.

08th May 2025

006

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Team
Publications

LIAAD Publications

View all Publications

2025

Online boxplot derived outlier detection

Authors
Mazarei, A; Sousa, R; Mendes Moreira, J; Molchanov, S; Ferreira, HM;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DATA SCIENCE AND ANALYTICS

Abstract
Outlier detection is a widely used technique for identifying anomalous or exceptional events across various contexts. It has proven to be valuable in applications like fault detection, fraud detection, and real-time monitoring systems. Detecting outliers in real time is crucial in several industries, such as financial fraud detection and quality control in manufacturing processes. In the context of big data, the amount of data generated is enormous, and traditional batch mode methods are not practical since the entire dataset is not available. The limited computational resources further compound this issue. Boxplot is a widely used batch mode algorithm for outlier detection that involves several derivations. However, the lack of an incremental closed form for statistical calculations during boxplot construction poses considerable challenges for its application within the realm of big data. We propose an incremental/online version of the boxplot algorithm to address these challenges. Our proposed algorithm is based on an approximation approach that involves numerical integration of the histogram and calculation of the cumulative distribution function. This approach is independent of the dataset's distribution, making it effective for all types of distributions, whether skewed or not. To assess the efficacy of the proposed algorithm, we conducted tests using simulated datasets featuring varying degrees of skewness. Additionally, we applied the algorithm to a real-world dataset concerning software fault detection, which posed a considerable challenge. The experimental results underscored the robust performance of our proposed algorithm, highlighting its efficacy comparable to batch mode methods that access the entire dataset. Our online boxplot method, leveraging dataset distribution to define whiskers, consistently achieved exceptional outlier detection results. Notably, our algorithm demonstrated computational efficiency, maintaining constant memory usage with minimal hyperparameter tuning.

2025

KDBI special issue: Time-series pattern verification in CNC turning-A comparative study of one-class and binary classification

Authors
da Silva, JP; Nogueira, AR; Pinto, J; Curral, M; Alves, AC; Sousa, R;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS

Abstract
Integrating Industry 4.0 and Quality 4.0 optimises manufacturing through IoT and ML, improving processes and product quality. The primary challenge involves identifying patterns in computer numerical control (CNC) machining time-series data to boost manufacturing quality control. The proposed solution involves an experimental study comparing one-class and binary classification algorithms. This study aims to classify time-series data from CNC turning machines, offering insight into monitoring and adjusting tool wear to maintain product quality. The methodology entails extracting spectral features from time-series data to train both one-class and binary classification algorithms, assessing their effectiveness and computational efficiency. Although certain models consistently outperform others, determining the best performing is not possible, as a trade-off between classification and computational performance is observed, with gradient boosting standing out for effectively balancing both aspects. Thus, the choice between one-class and binary classification ultimately relies on dataset's features and task objectives.

2025

MedLink: Retrieval and Ranking of Case Reports to Assist Clinical Decision Making

Authors
Cunha, LF; Guimarães, N; Mendes, A; Campos, R; Jorge, A;

Publication
Advances in Information Retrieval - 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2025, Lucca, Italy, April 6-10, 2025, Proceedings, Part V

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.

2025

Preface

Authors
Campos, R; Jorge, M; Jatowt, A; Bhatia, S; Litvak, M;

Publication
CEUR Workshop Proceedings

Abstract
[No abstract available]

2025

The 8th International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts: Text2Story 2025

Authors
Campos, R; Jorge, A; Jatowt, A; Bhatia, S; Litvak, M;

Publication
Advances in Information Retrieval - 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2025, Lucca, Italy, April 6-10, 2025, Proceedings, Part V

Abstract
For seven years, the Text2Story Workshop series has fostered a vibrant community dedicated to understanding narrative structure in text, resulting in significant contributions to the field and developing a shared understanding of the challenges in this domain. While traditional methods have yielded valuable insights, the advent of Transformers and LLMs have ignited a new wave of interest in narrative understanding. The previous iteration of the workshop also witnessed a surge in LLM-based approaches, demonstrating the community’s growing recognition of their potential. In this eighth edition we propose to go deeper into the role of LLMs in narrative understanding. While LLMs have revolutionized the field of NLP and are the go-to tools for any NLP task, the ability to capture, represent and analyze contextual nuances in longer texts is still an elusive goal, let alone the understanding of consistent fine-grained narrative structures in text. Consequently, this iteration of the workshop will explore the issues involved in using LLMs to unravel narrative structures, while also examining the characteristics of narratives generated by LLMs. By fostering dialogue on these emerging areas, we aim to continue the workshop's tradition of driving innovation in narrative understanding research. Text2Story encompasses sessions covering full research papers, work-in-progress, demos, resources, position and dissemination papers, along with one keynote talk. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Facts & Figures

72Researchers

2016

23Academic Staff

2020

3Book Chapters

2020