Abstract

Abstract
In recent years, several regulatory initiatives have been carried out at the European Commission level to ensure the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence, including the General Data Protection Regulation, Data Governance Act, or the Artificial Intelligence Act. However, there is also a need for technological solutions that effectively enable the implementation of this regulation in a realistic and efficient way. The main goal of this work is to propose and implement such a technological solution, relying on the notion of observability. The hypothesis is that a set of ethics metrics can be implemented along a domain-agnostic Data Science/Artificial Intelligence pipeline. These metrics, when observed in real time, will allow not only to assess the level of compliance of the pipeline with ethics standards at different levels, but also allow for a timely reaction by the organization when the data, the model or any other artifact in the pipeline exhibits undesired behavior. In this way, some of the most important ethical principles of AI are guaranteed: responsibility and prevention of harm. This work aims to identify a large group of ethics metrics, implement them, map them onto the different stages of a typical Data Science / AI process, and determine whether the presence of these metrics ensures or contributes to the development of AI solutions that can be considered ethical according to the latest European regulation.

Abstract
We live in an era in which the preservation of the environment is being widely discussed, driven by growing concerns over climate issues. One major factor contributing to this situation is the lack of attention societies give to maintaining high sustainability levels. Data plays a crucial role in understanding and assessing sustainability impacts in both urban and rural areas. However, obtaining comprehensive data on a country's sustainability is challenging due to the lack of simple and accessible sources. Existing solutions for sustainability analysis are limited by high costs and implementation difficulties, which restrict their spatial coverage. In this paper, we propose a solution using low-cost hardware and open-source technologies to collect data about the movement of people and vehicles. This solution involves low-cost video-based meters that can be flexibly deployed to various locations. Specifically, we developed a prototype using Raspberry Pi and YOLO which is able to correctly classify 91% of the vehicles by type, and 100% of the events (entering of leaving). The results indicate that this system can effectively and affordably identify and count people and vehicles, allowing for its implementations namely in remote sensitive areas such as natural parks, in which the access of people and vehicles must be controlled and monitored. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press.

Abstract
Given the new requirements of Machine Learning problems in the last years, especially in what concerns the volume, diversity and speed of data, new approaches are needed to deal with the associated challenges. In this paper we describe CEDEs - a distributed learning system that runs on top of an Hadoop cluster and takes advantage of blocks, replication and balancing. CEDEs trains models in a distributed manner following the principle of data locality, and is able to change parts of the model through an optimization module, thus allowing a model to evolve over time as the data changes. This paper describes its generic architecture, details the implementation of the first modules, and provides a first validation.

Abstract
As the field of Machine Learning evolves, the number of available learning algorithms and their parameters continues to grow. On the one hand, this is positive as it allows for the finding of potentially more accurate models. On the other hand, however, it also makes the process of finding the right model more complex, given the number of possible configurations. Traditionally, data scientists rely on trial-and-error or brute force procedures, which are costly, or on their own intuition or expertise, which is hard to acquire. In this paper we propose an approach for algorithm recommendation based on meta-learning. The approach can be used in real-time to predict the best n algorithms (based on a selected performance metric) and their configuration, for a given ML problem. We evaluate it through cross-validation, and by comparing it against an Auto ML approach, in terms of accuracy and time. Results show that the proposed approach recommends algorithms that are similar to those of traditional approaches, in terms of performance, in just a fraction of the time.

Abstract
In the last years, the number of machine learning algorithms and their parameters has increased significantly. On the one hand, this increases the chances of finding better models. On the other hand, it increases the complexity of the task of training a model, as the search space expands significantly. As the size of datasets also grows, traditional approaches based on extensive search start to become prohibitively expensive in terms of computational resources and time, especially in data streaming scenarios. This paper describes an approach based on meta-learning that tackles two main challenges. The first is to predict key performance indicators of machine learning models. The second is to recommend the best algorithm/configuration for training a model for a given machine learning problem. When compared to a state-of-the-art method (AutoML), the proposed approach is up to 130x faster and only 4% worse in terms of average model quality. Hence, it is especially suited for scenarios in which models need to be updated regularly, such as in streaming scenarios with big data, in which some accuracy can be traded for a much shorter model training time.