2025
Authors
Nogueira, AFR; Oliveira, HP; Teixeira, LF;
Publication
IMAGE AND VISION COMPUTING
Abstract
3D human pose estimation aims to reconstruct the human skeleton of all the individuals in a scene by detecting several body joints. The creation of accurate and efficient methods is required for several real-world applications including animation, human-robot interaction, surveillance systems or sports, among many others. However, several obstacles such as occlusions, random camera perspectives, or the scarcity of 3D labelled data, have been hampering the models' performance and limiting their deployment in real-world scenarios. The higher availability of cameras has led researchers to explore multi-view solutions due to the advantage of being able to exploit different perspectives to reconstruct the pose. Most existing reviews focus mainly on monocular 3D human pose estimation and a comprehensive survey only on multi-view approaches to determine the 3D pose has been missing since 2012. Thus, the goal of this survey is to fill that gap and present an overview of the methodologies related to 3D pose estimation in multi-view settings, understand what were the strategies found to address the various challenges and also, identify their limitations. According to the reviewed articles, it was possible to find that most methods are fully-supervised approaches based on geometric constraints. Nonetheless, most of the methods suffer from 2D pose mismatches, to which the incorporation of temporal consistency and depth information have been suggested to reduce the impact of this limitation, besides working directly with 3D features can completely surpass this problem but at the expense of higher computational complexity. Models with lower supervision levels were identified to overcome some of the issues related to 3D pose, particularly the scarcity of labelled datasets. Therefore, no method is yet capable of solving all the challenges associated with the reconstruction of the 3D pose. Due to the existing trade-off between complexity and performance, the best method depends on the application scenario. Therefore, further research is still required to develop an approach capable of quickly inferring a highly accurate 3D pose with bearable computation cost. To this goal, techniques such as active learning, methods that learn with a low level of supervision, the incorporation of temporal consistency, view selection, estimation of depth information and multi-modal approaches might be interesting strategies to keep in mind when developing a new methodology to solve this task.
2025
Authors
Rincon, AM; Vincenzi, AMR; Faria, JP;
Publication
2025 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE TESTING, VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION WORKSHOPS, ICSTW
Abstract
This study explores prompt engineering for automated white-box integration testing of RESTful APIs using Large Language Models (LLMs). Four versions of prompts were designed and tested across three OpenAI models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o) to assess their impact on code coverage, token consumption, execution time, and financial cost. The results indicate that different prompt versions, especially with more advanced models, achieved up to 90% coverage, although at higher costs. Additionally, combining test sets from different models increased coverage, reaching 96% in some cases. We also compared the results with EvoMaster, a specialized tool for generating tests for REST APIs, where LLM-generated tests achieved comparable or higher coverage in the benchmark projects. Despite higher execution costs, LLMs demonstrated superior adaptability and flexibility in test generation.
2025
Authors
Cardoso, P; Carvalhais, M;
Publication
Springer Series in Design and Innovation
Abstract
Games are commonly designed to assist players in their progression, maintaining their attention and motivation until they achieve closure while presenting challenges that need to be overcome to progress. But not all games are designed with this in mind, and players do not always play to progress. When that happens, we call it stalling. In computer games, stalling is when players or the game system try to maintain a particular state, impeding player progression and the game from developing. This chapter explores stalling as an act of players and, alternatively, as an act of the game itself that can be designed or result from emergent behaviours. It presents a model composed of two axes—Player/Game and Transitory/Permanent—that generate four types of stalling: Squandering, Casting-off, Lingering, and Taunting. This model leads to the conclusion that stalling is a legitimate playing tactic and versatile strategy for the design of games. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.
2025
Authors
Mussi, M; Metelli, AM; Restelli, M; Losapio, G; Bessa, RJ; Boos, D; Borst, C; Leto, G; Castagna, A; Chavarriaga, R; Dias, D; Egli, A; Eisenegger, A; El Manyari, Y; Fuxjäger, A; Geraldes, J; Hamouche, S; Hassouna, M; Lemetayer, B; Leyli-Abadi, M; Liessner, R; Lundberg, J; Marot, A; Meddeb, M; Schiaffonati, V; Schneider, M; Stadelmann, T; Usher, J; Van Hoof, H; Viebahn, J; Waefler, T; Zanotti, G;
Publication
iScience
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every aspect of modern society. It demonstrates a high potential to contribute to more flexible operations of safety-critical network infrastructures under deep transformation to tackle global challenges, such as climate change, energy transition, efficiency, and digital transformation, including increasing infrastructure resilience to natural and human-made hazards. The widespread adoption of AI creates the conditions for a new and inevitable interaction between humans and AI-based decision systems. In such a scenario, creating an ecosystem in which humans and AI interact healthily, where the roles and positions of both actors are well-defined, is a critical challenge for research and industry in the coming years. This perspective article outlines the challenges and requirements for effective human-AI interaction by taking an interdisciplinary point of view that merges computer science, decision-making sciences, psychological constructs, and industrial practices. The work focuses on three emblematic safety-critical scenarios from two different domains: energy (power grids) and mobility (railway networks and air traffic management). © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
2025
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
Authors
Barisic, A; Cunha, J; Ruchkin, I; Moreira, A; Araújo, J; Challenger, M; Savic, D; Amaral, V;
Publication
SUSTAINABLE COMPUTING-INFORMATICS & SYSTEMS
Abstract
Supporting sustainability through modelling and analysis has become an active area of research in Software Engineering. Therefore, it is important and timely to survey the current state of the art in sustainability in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), one of the most rapidly evolving classes of complex software systems. This work presents the findings of a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) that aims to identify key primary studies reporting on CPS modelling approaches that address sustainability over the last 10 years. Our literature search retrieved 2209 papers, of which 104 primary studies were deemed relevant fora detailed characterisation. These studies were analysed based on nine research questions designed to extract information on sustainability attributes, methods, models/meta-models, metrics, processes, and tools used to improve the sustainability of CPS. These questions also aimed to gather data on domain-specific modelling approaches and relevant application domains. The final results report findings for each of our questions, highlight interesting correlations among them, and identify literature gaps worth investigating in the near future.
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