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Publications

Publications by HumanISE

2023

From 10 Blue Links Pages to Feature-Full Search Engine Results Pages - Analysis of the Temporal Evolution of SERP Features

Authors
Oliveira, B; Lopes, CT;

Publication
CHIIR

Abstract
Web Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are one of the most well-known and used web pages. These pages have started as simple "10 blue links"pages, but the information in SERP currently goes way beyond these links. Several features have been included in these pages to complement organic and sponsored results and attempt to provide answers to the query instead of just pointing to websites that might deliver that information. In this work, we analyze the appearance and evolution of SERP features in the two leading web search engines, Google Search and Microsoft Bing. Using a sample of SERP from the Internet Archive, we analyzed the appearance and evolution of these features. We found that SERP are becoming more diverse in terms of elements, aggregating content from different verticals and including more features that provide direct answers.

2023

Chatbots Scenarios for Education

Authors
Virkus, S; Mamede, HS; Ramos Rocio, VJ; Dickel, J; Zubikova, O; Butkiene, R; Vaiciukynas, E; Ceponiene, L; Gudoniene, D;

Publication
ICIST

Abstract
Educational chatbots are digital tools designed to assist learners in various educational settings. These chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to simulate human conversation and respond to user queries in a way that facilitates learning. They can be integrated into various educational platforms such as learning management systems, educational apps, and websites to provide learners with a personalized and interactive learning experience. Our paper discusses different scenarios for educational purposes and suggests in total four scenarios for educational needs.

2023

on the summary measures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (Jul, 10.1007/s10479-023-05470-8, 2023)

Authors
Van Eynde, R; Vanhoucke, M; Coelho, J;

Publication
ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract

2023

Automated design of priority rules for resource-constrained project scheduling problem using surrogate-assisted genetic programming

Authors
Luo, JY; Vanhoucke, M; Coelho, J;

Publication
SWARM AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION

Abstract
In the past few years, the genetic programming approach (GP) has been successfully used by researchers to design priority rules for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) thanks to its high generalization ability and superior performance. However, one of the main drawbacks of the GP is that the fitness evaluation in the training process often requires a very high computational effort. In order to reduce the runtime of the training process, this research proposed four different surrogate models for the RCPSP. The experiment results have verified the effectiveness and the performance of the proposed surrogate models. It is shown that they achieve similar performance as the original model with the same number of evaluations and better performance with the same runtime. We have also tested the performance of one of our surrogate models with seven different population sizes to show that the selected surrogate model achieves similar performance for each population size as the original model, even when the searching space is sufficiently explored. Furthermore, we have investigated the accuracy of our proposed surrogate models and the size of the rules they designed. The result reveals that all the proposed surrogate models have high accuracy, and sometimes the rules found by them have a smaller size compared with the original model.

2023

A prediction model for ranking branch-and-bound procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Authors
Guo, WK; Vanhoucke, M; Coelho, J;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
The branch-and-bound (B&B) procedure is one of the most widely used techniques to get optimal so-lutions for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). Recently, various components from the literature have been assembled by Coelho and Vanhoucke (2018) into a unified search algo-rithm using the best performing lower bounds, branching schemes, search strategies, and dominance rules. However, due to the high computational time, this procedure is only suitable to solve small to medium-sized problems. Moreover, despite its relatively good performance, not much is known about which components perform best, and how these components should be combined into a procedure to maximize chances to solve the problem. This paper introduces a structured prediction approach to rank various combinations of components (configurations) of the integrated B&B procedure. More specifically, two regression methods are used to map project indicators to a full ranking of configurations. The objec-tive is to provide preference information about the quality of different configurations to obtain the best possible solution. Using such models, the ranking of all configurations can be predicted, and these predic-tions are then used to get the best possible solution for a new project with known network and resource values. A computational experiment is conducted to verify the performance of this novel approach. Fur-thermore, the models are tested for 48 different configurations, and their robustness is investigated on datasets with different numbers of activities. The results show that the two models are very competitive, and both can generate significantly better results than any single-best configuration.

2023

New resource-constrained project scheduling instances for testing (meta-)heuristic scheduling algorithms

Authors
Coelho, J; Vanhoucke, M;

Publication
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract
The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is a well-known scheduling problem that has attracted attention since several decades. Despite the rapid progress of exact and (meta-)heuristic procedures, the problem can still not be solved to optimality for many problem instances of relatively small size. Due to the known complexity, many researchers have proposed fast and efficient meta-heuristic solution procedures that can solve the problem to near optimality. Despite the excellent results obtained in the last decades, little is known why some heuristics perform better than others. However, if researchers better understood why some meta-heuristic procedures generate good solutions for some project instances while still falling short for others, this could lead to insights to improve these meta-heuristics, ultimately leading to stronger algorithms and better overall solution quality. In this study, a new hardness indicator is proposed to measure the difficulty of providing near-optimal solutions for meta-heuristic procedures. The new indicator is based on a new concept that uses the o-distance metric to describe the solution space of the problem instance, and relies on current knowledge for lower and upper bound calculations for problem instances from five known datasets in the literature. This new indicator, which will be called the o -D indicator, will be used not only to measure the hardness of existing project datasets, but also to generate a new benchmark dataset that can be used for future research purposes. The new dataset contains project instances with different values for the o -D indicator, and it will be shown that the value of the o-distance metric actually describes the difficulty of the project instances through two fast and efficient meta-heuristic procedures from the literature.

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