Abstract

Abstract
Water scarcity is becoming an issue of more significant concern with a major impact on global sustainability. For it, new measures and approaches are urgently needed. Digital technologies and tools can play an essential role in improving the effectiveness and efficiency of current water management approaches. Therefore, a solution is proposed and validated, given the limited presence of models or technological architectures in the literature to support intelligent water management systems for domestic use. It is based on a layered architecture, fully designed to meet the needs of households and to do so through the adoption of technologies such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing. By developing a prototype and using it as a use case for testing purposes, we have concluded the positive impact of using such a solution. Considering this is a first contribution to overcome the problem, some issues will be addressed in a future work, namely, data and device security and energy and traffic optimisation issues, among several others.

Abstract

Abstract
DeskVR allows users to experience Virtual Reality (VR) while sitting at a desk without requiring extensive movements. This makes it better suited for professional work environments where productivity over extended periods is essential. However, tasks that typically resort to mid-air gestures might not be suitable for DeskVR. In this paper, we focus on the fundamental task of object selection. We present TouchRay, an object selection technique conceived specifically for DeskVR that enables users to select objects at any distance while resting their hands on the desk. It also allows selecting objects' sub-components by traversing their corresponding hierarchical trees. We conducted a user evaluation comparing TouchRay against state-of-the-art techniques targeted at traditional VR. Results revealed that participants could successfully select objects in different settings, with consistent times and on par with the baseline techniques in complex tasks, without requiring mid-air gestures.

Abstract
Topics discussed on social media platforms contain a disparate amount of information written in colloquial language, making it difficult to understand the narrative of the topic. In this paper, we take a step forward, towards the resolution of this problem by proposing a framework that performs the automatic extraction of narratives from a document, such as tweet posts. To this regard, we propose a methodology that extracts information from the texts through a pipeline of tasks, such as co-reference resolution and the extraction of entity relations. The result of this process is embedded into an annotation file to be used by subsequent operations, such as visualization schemas. We named this framework Tweet2Story and measured its effectiveness under an evaluation schema that involved three different aspects: (i) as an Open Information extraction (OpenIE) task, (ii) by comparing the narratives of manually annotated news articles linked to tweets about the same topic and (iii) by comparing their knowledge graphs, produced by the narratives, in a qualitative way. The results obtained show a high precision and a moderate recall, on par with other OpenIE state-of-the-art frameworks and confirm that the narratives can be extracted from small texts. Furthermore, we show that the narrative can be visualized in an easily understandable way.

Abstract
We propose a method for computing the similarity of symbolically-encoded Portuguese folk melodies. The main novelty of our method is the use of a preprocessing melodic reduction at multiple hierarchies to filter the surface of folk melodies according to 1) pitch stability, 2) interval salience, 3) beat strength, 4) durational accents, and 5) the linear combination of all former criteria. Based on the salience of each note event per criteria, we create three melodic reductions with three different levels of note retention. We assess the degree to which six folk music similarity measures at multiple reduction hierarchies comply with collected ground truth from experts in Portuguese folk music. The results show that SIAM combined with 75th quantile reduction using the combined or durational accents best models the similarity for a corpus of Portuguese folk melodies by capturing approximately 84-90% of the variance observed in ground truth annotations.