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Publicações

2025

Interventions based on biofeedback systems to improve workers’ psychological well-being, mental health and safety: a systematic literature review (Preprint)

Autores
Ferreira, S; Rodrigues, MA; Mateus, C; Rodrigues, PP; Rocha, NB;

Publicação

Abstract
BACKGROUND

In modern, high-speed work settings, the significance of mental health disorders is increasingly acknowledged as a pressing health issue, with potential adverse consequences for organizations, including reduced productivity and increased absenteeism. Over the past few years, various mental health management solutions, such as biofeedback applications, have surfaced as promising avenues to improve employees' mental well-being.

OBJECTIVE

To gain deeper insights into the suitability and effectiveness of employing biofeedback-based mental health interventions in real-world workplace settings, given that most research has predominantly been conducted within controlled laboratory conditions.

METHODS

A systematic review was conducted to identify studies that used biofeedback interventions in workplace settings. The review focused on traditional biofeedback, mindfulness, app-directed interventions, immersive scenarios, and in-depth physiological data presentation.

RESULTS

The review identified nine studies employing biofeedback interventions in the workplace. Breathing techniques showed great promise in decreasing stress and physiological parameters, especially when coupled with visual and/or auditory cues.

CONCLUSIONS

Future research should focus on developing and implementing interventions to improve well-being and mental health in the workplace, with the goal of creating safer and healthier work environments and contributing to the sustainability of organizations.

2025

Rating and perceived helpfulness in a bipartite network of online product reviews

Autores
Campos, P; Pinto, E; Torres, A;

Publicação
ELECTRONIC COMMERCE RESEARCH

Abstract
In many e-commerce platforms user communities share product information in the form of reviews and ratings to help other consumers to make their choices. This study develops a new theoretical framework generating a bipartite network of products sold by Amazon.com in the category musical instruments, by linking products through the reviews. We analyze product rating and perceived helpfulness of online customer reviews and the relationship between the centrality of reviews, product rating and the helpfulness of reviews using Clustering, regression trees, and random forests algorithms to, respectively, classify and find patterns in 2214 reviews. Results demonstrate: (1) that a high number of reviews do not imply a high product rating; (2) when reviews are helpful for consumer decision-making we observe an increase on the number of reviews; (3) a clear positive relationship between product rating and helpfulness of the reviews; and (4) a weak relationship between the centrality measures (betweenness and eigenvector) giving the importance of the product in the network, and the quality measures (product rating and helpfulness of reviews) regarding musical instruments. These results suggest that products may be central to the network, although with low ratings and with reviews providing little helpfulness to consumers. The findings in this study provide several important contributions for e-commerce businesses' improvement of the review service management to support customers' experiences and online customers' decision-making.

2025

On the impact of input resolution on CNN-based gastrointestinal endoscopic image classification

Autores
Lopes I.; Almeida E.; Libanio D.; Dinis-Ribeiro M.; Coimbra M.; Renna F.;

Publicação
Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Annual International Conference

Abstract
Gastric cancer (GC) remains a significant global health issue, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown their high potential for detecting precancerous gastrointestinal (GI) conditions on endoscopic images [1] [2]. Despite the need for high resolution to capture the complexity of GI tissue patterns, the impact of endoscopic image resolution on the performance of these models remains underexplored. This study investigates how different image resolutions affect CNNs classification of intestinal metaplasia (IM) using two datasets with different resolutions and imaging modalities. Our results reveal that the often adopted input resolution of 224×224 pixels does not provide optimal performance for detecting IM, even when using transfer learning from networks pre-trained on images with this resolution. Higher resolutions, such as 512×512, consistently outperform 224 × 224, with notable improvements in F1-scores (e.g., InceptionV3: 94.46% at 512 × 512 vs. 91.49% at 224 × 224). Additionally, our findings indicate that model performance is constrained by the original image quality, underscoring the critical importance of maintaining the higher original image resolutions and quality provided by endoscopes during clinical exams, for the purposes of training and testing CNNs for gastric cancer management.Clinical Relevance- This research highlights the importance of image quality, particularly when endoscopes capture lower-resolution images. Understanding how image resolution impacts diagnostic accuracy can guide clinicians in improving imaging techniques and employing Artificial Intelligence-driven tools effectively for more accurate GC detection and better patient outcomes.

2025

A sleek lock-free hash map in an ERA of safe memory reclamation methods

Autores
Moreno, P; Areias, M; Rocha, R;

Publicação
PARALLEL COMPUTING

Abstract
Lock-free data structures have become increasingly significant due to their algorithmic advantages in multi-core cache-based architectures. Safe Memory Reclamation (SMR) is a technique used in concurrent programming to ensure that memory can be safely reclaimed without causing data corruption, dangling pointers, or access to freed memory. The ERA theorem states that any SMR method for concurrent data structures can only provide at most two of the three main desirable properties: Ease of use, Robustness, and Applicability. This fundamental trade-off influences the design of efficient lock-free data structures at an early stage. This work redesigns a previous lock-free hash map to fully exploit the properties of the ERA theorem and to leverage the characteristics of multi-core cache-based architectures by minimizing the number of cache misses, which are a significant bottleneck in multi-core environments. Experimental results show that our design outperforms the previous design, which was already quite competitive when compared against the Concurrent Hash Map design of the Intel's TBB library.

2025

LLM Prompt Engineering for Automated White-Box Integration Test Generation in REST APIs

Autores
Rincon, AM; Vincenzi, AMR; Faria, JP;

Publicação
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

Next Higher Point: Two Novel Approaches for Computing Natural Visibility Graphs

Autores
Daniel, P; Silva, VF; Ribeiro, P;

Publicação
COMPLEX NETWORKS & THEIR APPLICATIONS XIII, COMPLEX NETWORKS 2024, VOL 1

Abstract
With the huge amount of data that has been collected over time, many methods are being developed to allow better understanding and forecasting in several domains. Time series analysis is a powerful tool to achieve this goal. Despite being a well-established area, there are some gaps, and new methods are emerging to overcome these limitations, such as visibility graphs. Visibility graphs allow the analyses of times series as complex networks and make possible the use of more advanced techniques from another well-established area, network science. In this paper, we present two new efficient approaches for computing natural visibility graphs from times series, one for online scenarios in.O(n log n) and the other for offline scenarios in.O(nm), the latter taking advantage of the number of different values in the time series (m).

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