Abstract
As the demand for electric charging accelerates, so does the stress on the relatively insufficient public charging infrastructure. To appropriately manage and scale charging infrastructure, there is a need for support tools capable of predicting the utilization and sales of charging stations, as well as the traffic flow of users from their original location to the charging stations. Therefore, this article proposes a generic methodology for infrastructure placement, namely forecasting demand and predicting its flow to the supply points. The methodology is applied in a case study to the electric charging grid of Portugal with real data, in the context of the needs of a particular charging point operator (CPO). Demand is first forecasted at a high-granularity level with a demand disaggregation model, followed by its capture by the grid of chargers using a parameterized gravity model. Validation is performed by comparing actual with predicted sales per charging station. Adequate visualizations to support decision-making are presented.

Abstract
With the ever-growing complexity of deep learning models for face recognition, it becomes hard to deploy these systems in real life. Researchers have two options: 1) use smaller models; 2) compress their current models. Since the usage of smaller models might lead to concerning biases, compression gains relevance. However, compressing might be also responsible for an increase in the bias of the final model. We investigate the overall performance, the performance on each ethnicity subgroup and the racial bias of a State-of-the-Art quantization approach when used with synthetic and real data. This analysis provides a few more details on potential benefits of performing quantization with synthetic data, for instance, the reduction of biases on the majority of test scenarios. We tested five distinct architectures and three different training datasets. The models were evaluated on a fourth dataset which was collected to infer and compare the performance of face recognition models on different ethnicity.

Abstract
Event extraction is an Information Retrieval task that commonly consists of identifying the central word for the event (trigger) and the event's arguments. This task has been extensively studied for English but lags behind for Portuguese, partly due to the lack of task-specific annotated corpora. This paper proposes a framework in which two separated BERT-based models were fine-tuned to identify and classify events in Portuguese documents. We decompose this task into two sub-tasks. Firstly, we use a token classification model to detect event triggers. To extract event arguments, we train a Question Answering model that queries the triggers about their corresponding event argument roles. Given the lack of event annotated corpora in Portuguese, we translated the original version of the ACE-2005 dataset (a reference in the field) into Portuguese, producing a new corpus for Portuguese event extraction. To accomplish this, we developed an automatic translation pipeline. Our framework obtains F1 marks of 64.4 for trigger classification and 46.7 for argument classification setting, thus a new state of the art reference for these tasks in Portuguese.

Abstract
This scientific paper delves into the effects of water stress on grapevines, specifically focusing on gene expression and polyphenol production. We conducted a controlled greenhouse experiment with three hydric conditions and analyzed the expression of genes related to polyphenol biosynthesis. Our results revealed significant differences in the expression of ABCC1, a gene linked to anthocyanin metabolism, under different irrigation treatments. These findings highlight the importance of anthocyanins in grapevine responses to abiotic stresses. By integrating genomics, metabolomics, and systems biology, this study contributes to our understanding of grapevine physiology under water stress conditions and offers insights into developing sensor technologies for real-world applications in viticulture. © 2023 by the authors.

Abstract
An autonomous vehicle relying on LiDAR data should be able to assess its limitations in real time without depending on external information or additional sensors. The point cloud generated by the sensor is subjected to significant degradation under adverse weather conditions (rain, fog, and snow), which limits the vehicle's visibility and performance. With this in mind, we show that point cloud data contains sufficient information to estimate the weather accurately and present MobileWeatherNet, a LiDAR-only convolutional neural network that uses the bird's-eye view 2D projection to extract point clouds' weather condition and improves state-of-the-art performance by 15% in terms of the balanced accuracy while reducing inference time by 63%. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that among common architectures, the use of the bird's eye view significantly enhances their performance without an increase in complexity. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first approach that uses deep learning for weather estimation using point cloud data in the form of a bird's-eye-view projection.

Abstract
Transactions have been a key issue in database management for a long time and there are a plethora of architectures and algorithms to support and implement them. The current state-of-the-art is focused on storage management and is tightly coupled with its design, leading, for instance, to the need for completely new engines to support new features such as Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP). We address this challenge with a proposal to implement transactional logic in a query language such as SQL. This means that our approach can be layered on existing analytical systems but that the retrieval of a transactional snapshot and the validation of update transactions runs in the server and can take advantage of advanced query execution capabilities of an optimizing query engine. We demonstrate our proposal, TiQuE, on MonetDB and obtain an average 500x improvement in transactional throughput while retaining good performance on analytical queries, making it competitive with the state-of-the-art HTAP systems.