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Publicações

2023

Indoor environmental quality in offices and risk of health and productivity complaints at work: A literature review

Autores
Felgueiras, F; Mourao, Z; Moreira, A; Gabriel, MF;

Publicação
JOURNAL OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS ADVANCES

Abstract
Many service jobs are carried out in modern offices, with individual offices being increasingly replaced by open-plan settings. The high number of adult people working in office buildings, in most situations sharing the work-place with many others during a considerable part of their daily time, highlights the importance of providing adequate guidance to ensure the quality of office environments. This paper aims to summarize existing data on modern offices' indoor environmental quality (IEQ) conditions in terms of air pollution (volatile organic compounds (VOC), particulate matter and inorganic pollutants), thermal comfort, lighting and acoustics and the respective associations with health and productivity-related outcomes in workers. Evidence shows that al-though many offices present acceptable IEQ, some office settings can have levels of air pollutants, hygrothermal conditions/thermal comfort and illuminance that do not comply with the existing international standards and recommendations. In addition, findings suggest the existence of significant associations between the assessed IEQ indicators and the risk of detrimental effects on health and productivity of office workers. In particular, airborne particles, CO2, O 3 and thermal comfort were linked with the prevalence of sick building syndrome symptoms. Poor lighting and acoustical quality have also been associated with malaise and physiological stress among office workers. Similarly, better productivity levels have been registered for good indoor air quality conditions, in terms of VOC, airborne particles and CO2. Overall, the evidence revised in this work suggests that for promoting health and productivity recommendations for office building managers include actions to ensure that: i) all relevant IEQ indicators are periodically controlled to ensure that levels comply with recommended limit values; ii) declared in-door pollution sources are avoided; iii) adequate ventilation and acclimatization strategies are implemented; and iv) there is the possibility of conduct personalized adjustments to environmental conditions (following workers' preferences).

2023

CIDER: Collaborative Interior Design in Extended Reality

Autores
Pintani, D; Caputo, A; Mendes, D; Giachetti, A;

Publicação
CHItaly

Abstract
Despite significant efforts dedicated to exploring the potential applications of collaborative mixed reality, the focus of the existing works is mostly related to the creation of shared virtual/mixed environments resolving concurrent manipulation issues rather than supporting an effective collaboration strategy for the design procedure. For this reason, we present CIDER, a system for the collaborative editing of 3D augmented scenes allowing two or more users to manipulate the virtual scene elements independently and without unexpected changes. CIDER is based on the use of "layers"encapsulating the state of the environment with private layers that can be edited independently and a global one collaboratively updated with "commit"operations. Using this system, implemented for the HoloLens 2 headsets and supporting multiple users, we performed a user test on a realistic interior design task, evaluating the general usability and comparing two different approaches for the management of the atomic commit: forced (single-phase) and voting (requiring consensus), analyzing the effects of this choice on the collaborative behavior.

2023

TSO-DSO Coordinated Operational Planning in the Presence of Shared Resources

Autores
Simoes, M; Madureira, AG; Soares, F; Lopes, JP;

Publicação
2023 IEEE BELGRADE POWERTECH

Abstract
Electric power systems are currently experiencing a profound change, as increasing amounts of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) displace conventional forms of generation. This development has gone hand-in-hand with an increasing share of distributed power generation being connected directly to the Distribution Network (DN), and the widespread of other types of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), such as Energy Storage Sytems (ESSs), Electric Vehicles (EVs), and active (flexible) consumers. As these trends are expected to continue, this will require a profound revision of the way Transmission System Operators (TSOs) and Distribution System Operators (DSOs) interact with each other to fully benefit from the growing flexibility that is available at the DN level. In this work we propose a new tool for the coordinated operational planning of transmission and distribution systems, considering the existence of shared resources that can be simultaneously used by TSO and DSOs for the optimal operation of their networks. The tool uses advanced distributed optimization techniques, namely the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) in order to maintain data privacy of the several agents involved in the optimization problem, and keep the tractability of the problem. The proposed tool is applied to modified IEEE test systems, and the results obtained highlight the benefits of the proposed coordination mechanism to solve problems occurring simultaneously at the transmission and DN-levels.

2023

Automatic Classification of Bird Sounds: Using MFCC and Mel Spectrogram Features with Deep Learning

Autores
Carvalho, S; Gomes, EF;

Publicação
VIETNAM JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Abstract
Bird species identification is a relevant and time-consuming task for ornithologists and ecologists. With growing amounts of audio-annotated data, automatic bird classification using machine learning techniques is an important trend in the scientific community. Analyzing bird behavior and population trends helps detect other organisms in the environment and is an important problem in ecology. Bird populations react quickly to environmental changes, which make their real-time counting and tracking challenging and very useful. A reliable methodology that automatically identifies bird species from audio would therefore be a valuable tool for the experts in different scientific and applicational domains. The goal of this work is to propose a methodology to identify bird sounds. In this paper, we explore deep learning techniques that are being used in this domain, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to classify the data. In deep learning, audio problems are commonly approached by converting them into images using audio feature extraction techniques such as Mel Spectrograms and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). We propose and test multiple deep learning and feature extraction combinations in order to find the most suitable approach to this problem.

2023

Investigating the Accuracy of Autoregressive Recurrent Networks Using Hierarchical Aggregation Structure-Based Data Partitioning

Autores
Oliveira, JM; Ramos, P;

Publicação
BIG DATA AND COGNITIVE COMPUTING

Abstract
Global models have been developed to tackle the challenge of forecasting sets of series that are related or share similarities, but they have not been developed for heterogeneous datasets. Various methods of partitioning by relatedness have been introduced to enhance the similarities of sets, resulting in improved forecasting accuracy but often at the cost of a reduced sample size, which could be harmful. To shed light on how the relatedness between series impacts the effectiveness of global models in real-world demand-forecasting problems, we perform an extensive empirical study using the M5 competition dataset. We examine cross-learning scenarios driven by the product hierarchy commonly employed in retail planning to allow global models to capture interdependencies across products and regions more effectively. Our findings show that global models outperform state-of-the-art local benchmarks by a considerable margin, indicating that they are not inherently more limited than local models and can handle unrelated time-series data effectively. The accuracy of data-partitioning approaches increases as the sizes of the data pools and the models' complexity decrease. However, there is a trade-off between data availability and data relatedness. Smaller data pools lead to increased similarity among time series, making it easier to capture cross-product and cross-region dependencies, but this comes at the cost of a reduced sample, which may not be beneficial. Finally, it is worth noting that the successful implementation of global models for heterogeneous datasets can significantly impact forecasting practice.

2023

Phenobot - Intelligent photonics for molecular phenotyping in Precision Viticulture

Autores
Martins, RC; Cunha, M; Santos, F; Tosin, R; Barroso, TG; Silva, F; Queirós, C; Pereira, MR; Moura, P; Pinho, T; Boaventura, J; Magalhães, S; Aguiar, AS; Silvestre, J; Damásio, M; Amador, R; Barbosa, C; Martins, C; Araújo, J; Vidal, JP; Rodrigues, F; Maia, M; Rodrigues, V; Garcia, A; Raimundo, D; Trindade, M; Pestana, C; Maia, P;

Publicação
BIO Web of Conferences

Abstract
The Phenobot platform is comprised by an autonomous robot, instrumentation, artificial intelligence, and digital twin diagnosis at the molecular level, marking the transition from pure data-driven to knowledge-driven agriculture 4.0, towards a physiology-based approach to precision viticulture. Such is achieved by measuring the plant metabolome 'in vivo' and 'in situ', using spectroscopy and artificial intelligence for quantifying metabolites, e.g.: i. grapes: chlorophylls a and b, pheophytins a and b, anthocyanins, carotenoids, malic and tartaric acids, glucose and fructose; ii. foliage: chlorophylls a and b, pheophytins a and b, anthocyanins, carotenoids, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, sugars, and leaf water potential; and iii. soil nutrients (NPK). The geo-referenced metabolic information of each plant (organs and tissues) is the basis of multi-scaled analysis: i. geo-referenced metabolic maps of vineyards at the macroscopic field level, and ii. genome-scale 'in-silico' digital twin model for inferential physiology (phenotype state) and omics diagnosis at the molecular and cellular levels (transcription, enzyme efficiency, and metabolic fluxes). Genome-scale 'in-silico' Vitis vinifera numerical network relationships and fluxes comprise the scientific knowledge about the plant's physiological response to external stimuli, being the comparable mechanisms between laboratory and field experimentation - providing a causal and interpretable relationship to a complex system subjected to external spurious interactions (e.g., soil, climate, and ecosystem) scrambling pure data-driven approaches. This new approach identifies the molecular and cellular targets for managing plant physiology under different stress conditions, enabling new sustainable agricultural practices and bridging agriculture with plant biotechnology, towards faster innovations (e.g. biostimulants, anti-microbial compounds/mechanisms, nutrition, and water management). Phenobot is a project under the Portuguese emblematic initiative in Agriculture 4.0, part of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (Ref. PRR: 190 Ref. 09/C05-i03/2021 - PRR-C05-i03-I-000134). © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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