Abstract
Today, the growth of population, the cities expansion, and the continuous quest for economic growth worldwide have brought a set of new problems associated with the increasing use and depletion of resources. Society faces fundamental challenges reaching a sustainable energy supply, which should ensure a clean and affordable energy provision. Therefore, the consumers' behavior and their willingness to actively participate in the energy market will have a fundamental role in attaining a sustainable future. Solutions to mitigate global climate change should be grounded in a rigorous understanding of energy demand, particularly the factors that drive energy demand. This research is aimed to evaluate consumers' willingness to participate in demand-side management (DSM). For this purpose, agent-based modeling (ABM) was used. Data on DSM acceptance and consumers' flexibility was available based on a survey conducted in Portugal including the socio-economic characterization of the respondents and the assessment of their willingness to participate in DSM programs. According to this methodology, the consumer is defined as an agent. For consumer agents, effective factors were defined and assessed. In this paper, simulation was run with NetLogo software, and the result showed the importance of the agents' social network on their willingness to participate.

Abstract

Abstract
Although phoneme selection is a well-studied subject in contact linguistics, phoneme integration is mostly unexplored. This study aims at assessing phoneme integration by measuring consonant frequency in Sri Lanka Portuguese and Portuguese. For that, we select two large lexical corpora and, take several preparation steps to make the data uniform, consistent and reusable. In terms of integration, we find that the more unconstrained a consonant is concerning its phonotactic patterns, the more frequent it is. We also find that being coronal has a positive impact on integration, whereas being palatal has a negative impact. Moreover, we find that in spite of the apparently random changes in the consonant frequency, consonant classes are robustly transmitted from the lexifier to this creole. Copyright © 2022 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract
Three-dimensional scanning is a task of great importance for our modern society and has brought significant advances in the precision of material inventory. These sensors map the material surface continuously, allowing real-time inventory monitoring. Most technologies are expensive because this process is complex, and even inexpensive ones are considerate smart investments for the average user. Therefore, this work presents the simulation of a low-cost time-of-flight based 3D scanning system that performs the volume estimation of an object-filled indoor space after a voxelization process. The system consists of a 2D LIDAR scanner that performs an azimuthal scan of 180. through its rotating platform and a motor that rotates the platform in angle inclination.

Abstract
In recent years, with the rise of a growing economic and technological interest in lithium mineral resources, there has been a parallel concern, on the part of some local populations and even national environmental groups, for a hypothetical contamination problem that this type of exploitations may cause on the quality of groundwater. Thus, the present study was based on an evaluation of an open-pit quarry, in the so-called Alijó quarry, located in the North of Portugal, in the parish of Canedo, Ribeira de Pena municipality and Vila Real district. This exploitation, under concession by the company José Aldeia Lagoa & Filhos, SA, has been going on for at least 11 years and mainly supplies the ceramic and glass industry. It is in this context that this work is carried out. The general objectives are to assess signs of impacts that extractive activities, carried out in the open-pit exploitation area of Alijó, may have caused on the surrounding subsoil. In this sense, it was necessary to consider the aforementioned hypothesis of the existence of possible sources of water drainage with ionic anomalies for the surrounding environment. If this hypothesis were confirmed, then the level of underground conductivity would have to be proportionally high and obtainable through equivalent low values of electrical resistivity (high electrical conductivity). The current study was limited to geophysical tools along with a few chemical analysis of water samples collected in the open-pit exploration for control purposes. The signs we sought for could possibly be manifested in the form of anomalous concentrations of some of the elements of the mineralization of this lithiniferous pegmatite and whose effects could, hypothetically, be measured in the form of anomalous low values of underground electrical resistivity, as well as anomalous pH valuespresent in the drainage water. To this end, a study mainly supported by the electrical resistivity method was carried out. This method is based on the measurement of electrical resistivity variations of different subsoil geological materials, since rocks and soils, depending on their mineralogical composition, texture, porosity, fracturing and the content/chemical composition of the water contained in them, could exhibit anomalous, low electrical resistivity. The results revealed that no low resistivity values were found, typical of areas that normally exhibit natural or anthropogenic geochemical anomalies, or even, in more extreme cases, contaminations with acid drainages whose acidity and resistivity would be even lower and more anomalous.

Abstract
Currently, radiologists face an excessive workload, which leads to high levels of fatigue, and consequently, to undesired diagnosis mistakes. Decision support systems can be used to prioritize and help radiologists making quicker decisions. In this sense, medical content-based image retrieval systems can be of extreme utility by providing well-curated similar examples. Nonetheless, most medical content-based image retrieval systems work by finding the most similar image, which is not equivalent to finding the most similar image in terms of disease and its severity. Here, we propose an interpretability-driven and an attention-driven medical image retrieval system. We conducted experiments in a large and publicly available dataset of chest radiographs with structured labels derived from free-text radiology reports (MIMIC-CXR-JPG). We evaluated the methods on two common conditions: pleural effusion and (potential) pneumonia. As ground-truth to perform the evaluation, query/test and catalogue images were classified and ordered by an experienced board-certified radiologist. For a profound and complete evaluation, additional radiologists also provided their rankings, which allowed us to infer inter-rater variability, and yield qualitative performance levels. Based on our ground-truth ranking, we also quantitatively evaluated the proposed approaches by computing the normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG). We found that the Interpretability-guided approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches and shows the best agreement with the most experienced radiologist. Furthermore, its performance lies within the observed inter-rater variability.