2026
Authors
Laroca, H; Rocio, V; Cunha, A;
Publication
SYSTEMS RESEARCH AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE
Abstract
Disinformation is an ancient social phenomenon that has found a favourable environment for dissemination in internet-based social networks. While the scientific community seeks to address the problem by creating specific tools to detect and classify the various types of false information, we argue that systems thinking is necessary to understand and holistically address this major threat. The works that directly cite Disinformation Systems treat this term as a grouping of concepts, mechanisms, objectives and institutions in a large multidisciplinary repository that finds a self-explanation in the term systems. Through a qualitative and theoretical basis, this research proposes that the generation of disinformation can be defined as a system model, theorizing that the entire process of creating, producing and disseminating disinformation can be defined systematically. Thus, we define an initial descriptive model and affirm that the generation of disinformation can be characterized in terms of a sociotechnical work system. We tested the model in historical disinformation scenarios showing that it fits the components and flows of the system. Although initial, this work has the potential to enable the development of new systemic insights and research in the area of disinformation.
2026
Authors
Laroca, H; Rocio, V; Cunha, A;
Publication
Journal of Data and Information Quality
Abstract
Disinformation, although an ancient phenomenon, has gained unprecedented reach and speed with the rise of the internet and social media platforms. While traditional fact-checking approaches focus on the semantic content of information, this article proposes a quantitative analysis based on metadata and formal textual features to investigate disinformation from a quality dimension perspective, assuming that false or misleading information often fails to meet informational quality criteria. Using an experimental approach, we analyzed two datasets of news from reliable and unreliable sources and applied statistical methods, including the Mann–Whitney U test, Cliff’s Delta, and Rosenthal’s r, to measure differences and effect size in the quality dimensions of accuracy, currency, readability, consistency, and reliability. The results show that lexical cohesion and lexical diversity are the strongest discriminators of source reliability, followed by structural error rates, while currency and readability display only weak discriminative power. The proposed News Reliability Index (NRI) emerges as a moderate but complementary indicator. Overall, reliable sources consistently demonstrate higher information quality, but structural differences alone are insufficient to detect disinformation, especially considering the capacity of generative AI to produce syntactically coherent texts. We conclude that semantic content analysis remains essential for identifying disinformation, with structural features best applied as supporting signals in detection models. Finally, we highlight future challenges, such as the growing use of artificial intelligence in generating high-quality disinformation, which may reduce the effectiveness of structural metrics and complicate automation in verification processes. © 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
2026
Authors
Bernardes, G; Moura, N; Pinto, AS;
Publication
CoRR
Abstract
2026
Authors
Videira M.; Ferreira M.; Braz G.; Correia N.; Cunha A.;
Publication
Procedia Computer Science
Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a vision-threatening complication of diabetes and one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide. It is characterized by the appearance of lesions on the retina, such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, and soft exudates, which are crucial for staging the disease. Diagnosis is typically performed through analysis of fundus images, a manual process that is time-consuming and prone to subjectivity. To address this, this study explores the automatic segmentation of DRrelated lesions using deep learning techniques. Four convolutional neural network architectures were evaluated: U-Net, FPN, DeepLabV3+, and Attention U-Net. The IDRiD dataset was used for training and validation The DeepLabV3+ model with ResNet50 achieved the highest overall performance, while FPN was the only model capable of detecting microaneurysms in the multiclass task. These findings underscore the importance of architecture selection, loss function design, and preprocessing choices. Future work may explore new datasets, enhanced data augmentation, and the impact of optic disc removal on segmentation accuracy.
2026
Authors
Fernandes, T; da Silva, JAC; Pinto, B; Silva, T; Pendao, C; Filipe, V;
Publication
DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SPECIAL SESSIONS II, 22ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Abstract
Motorcycle safety is significantly compromised by blind spot collisions, necessitating Advanced Rider Assistance Systems. This paper proposes a blind spot warning system designed for edge devices, leveraging computer vision techniques for real-time object detection and tracking. The system aims to enhance rider awareness by detecting vehicles in blind spots and providing timely warnings through visual LED alerts. Preliminary results from training the RF-DETRBase model, the lightest version of the RF-DETR architecture, on the challenging BDD100K dataset, which features diverse driving scenarios and numerous small objects, demonstrate the system's potential. The dataset's inherent complexities were highlighted by poor small object detection (mAP 0.128) and declining performance at higher IoU thresholds. Despite these challenges, the model achieved a promising Average Precision of 0.700 at an Intersection over Union of 0.50, indicating effective vehicle detection.
2026
Authors
Dintén, R; Zorrilla, M; Veloso, B; Gama, J;
Publication
INFORMATION FUSION
Abstract
One of the key aspects of Industry 4.0 is using intelligent systems to optimize manufacturing processes by improving productivity and reducing costs. These systems have greatly impacted in different areas, such as demand prediction and quality assessment. However, the prognostics and health management of industrial equipment is one of the areas with greater potential. This paper presents a comparative analysis of deep learning architectures applied to the prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) on public real industrial datasets. The analysis includes some of the most commonly employed recurrent neural network variations and a novel approach based on a hybrid architecture using transformers. Moreover, we apply explainability techniques to provide comprehensive insights into the model's decision-making process. The contributions of the work are: (1) a novel transformer-based architecture for RUL prediction that outperforms traditional recurrent neural networks; (2) a detailed description of the design strategies used to construct the models on two under-explored datasets; (3) the use of explainability techniques to understand the feature importance and to explain the model's prediction and (4) making models built for reproducibility available to other researchers.
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