Elsa Ferreira Gomes

Abstract

Abstract
The Informatics Engineering degree at ISEP, aligned with international standards, was the first undergraduate degree in Portugal to be certified with EUR-ACE®. The programme emphasizes project-based learning, in which students, working in teams, develop interdisciplinary projects applying knowledge from all courses in each semester. A specific laboratory-project course coordinates an integrative project that aims to address complex problems. In the 2nd semester, two computer engineering courses (object-oriented programming and software engineering), and two mathematics courses (discrete mathematics and statistics) are involved, besides the laboratory/project course. This paper focuses on the integration of mathematics with informatics courses in this project, addressing real-world-like problems, bridging software engineering with mathematical topics. To assess the adopted PBL, enquiries were carried out among students. This approach fosters active learning and reinforces the relevance of mathematics within engineering, preparing students for job market demands. © 2026, IGI Global Scientific Publishing. All rights reserved.

Abstract
Sound-based uroflowmetry (SU) is a non-invasive technique emerging as an alternative to traditional uroflowmetry (UF) to calculate the voiding flow rate based on the sound generated by the urine impacting the water in a toilet, enabling remote monitoring and reducing the patient burden and clinical costs. This study trains four different machine learning (ML) models (random forest, gradient boosting, support vector machine and convolutional neural network) using both regression and classification approaches to predict and categorize the voiding flow rate from sound events. The models were trained with a dataset that contains sounds from synthetic void events generated with a high precision peristaltic pump and a traditional toilet. Sound was simultaneously recorded with three devices: Ultramic384k, Mi A1 smartphone and Oppo Smartwatch. To extract the audio features, our analysis showed that segmenting the audio signals into 1000 ms segments with frequencies up to 16 kHz provided the best results. Results show that random forest achieved the best performance in both regression and classification tasks, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.9, 0.7 and 0.9 ml/s and quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) of 0.99, 1.0 and 1.0 for the three devices. To evaluate the models in a real environment and assess the effectiveness of training with synthetic data, the best-performing models were retrained and validated using a real voiding sounds dataset. The results reported an MAE below 2.5 ml/s and a QWK above 0.86 for regression and classification tasks, respectively.

Abstract

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.