não financiado

PIDI/CISeD/2022/008 • R-FOREST _ Restauro de solos de zonas florestais pósfogo – análise, avaliação e modelação digital do comportamento do solo

Leave a Comment / concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Elisabete Silva
Duration: 2023 – 2025

Cised team members
Isabel Brás
Filipe Caldeira
João Menoita Henriques
Ana Matos

The protection and conservation of burned forest areas requires specific actions that must be developed with a strong awareness of the local reality regarding climate, hydrogeology, social expectations and economy. Recent studies show that the ecological effects of post-fire rehabilitation treatments need to be determined and taken into account when defining forest management models, since some options may increase the level of soil degradation. Consequently, it is urgent to assess the effects of the options taken and ensure that they are included in the decision-making process. The main objective of R-FOREST project is to work on recent forest areas burned to be more resistant to fires and erosion, and thereby increase the resilience of forest ecosystems. The specific objectives intended to be achieved are: 1- Assess the effect of fire on the physical and chemical dynamics of the burned soil; 2 – Assess the soil restoration using mulching with different organic additives and its effect on ecosystem recovery, and use satellite images to improve the characterization and prediction of its constituents; 3- Modell and validate of the observed effects to predict the evolution of soil properties; and 4 - Envelop all stakeholders, including landowners and authorities, on the importance of soil protection in order to have a resilient ecosystem.
First, the characterization of the burned area will be made, evaluating the effects of fire on the physical and chemical properties of the soil. Then, 2 areas with about 0,5 hectare each (0,5 ha burned and 0,5 ha unburned) will be used to develop different soil recovery options through mulching, using urban waste composts and agro-forestry waste. The criteria for choosing the best additives will be based on soil recovery capacity, measuring environmental indicators. Sampling campaigns will be carried out to evaluate the soil physical and chemical properties, soil quality indices through the content of humic substances and bioindicators. Using univariate and multivariate statistical techniques, comparations will be made between the studied areas to highlight the effects of the intervention. Predictive models and their validation will allow describing structural patterns and comparing the effect of climate and soil restoration techniques on their quality. The success of the selected measures implementation will depend mainly on the involvement of landowners who should be aware for the crucial idiosyncrasies of sustainable forest management in the region, combined with voluntary conservation efforts, to maintain biodiversity, increasing the intrinsic value of the forest. All purposes will be integrated the involvement of researchers, landowners, companies and local associations in a participatory community panel.

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PIDI/CISeD/2023/013 • Práticas de Mobilidade Sustentável

concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Eduardo Miguel Teixeira Mendonça Gouveia
Duration: 2023 – 2025

Cised team members
Filipe Manuel Simões Caldeira
Vasco Eduardo Graça Santos
Maria Elisabete Ferreira Silva
José Luis Mendes Loureiro Abrantes
Paulo Joaquim Antunes Vaz

The dynamics imposed on the electric mobility market and environmental and technological issues lead to a paradigm involving various energy chain agents, from producers, consumers, traders, and network operators.
From the outset, private users and entities are faced with various mobility solutions, including vehicles with a thermal engine, hybrid, or purely electric. In the case of EV (Electric Vehicles), decision-making includes choices that are covered with different levels of sophistication, from charging an electric vehicle from a simple single-phase 16 A socket to more complex solutions that fit the assembly of Wallbox.
Other variables, such as the type of charging (fast/slow) and battery life, are also important. The most appropriate tariff option for each case and the maintenance inherent to each type of mobility solution make the decision denser.
Concerning energy production (self-consumption) and considering the user profile, it will be essential to reflect on mobility solutions that think of renewable energy production (solar photovoltaic, other) in which the EV can be a storage point for that energy with the consequent assessment of the potential economic benefit and the resultant minimization of the ecological footprint, highlighting the carbon footprint.
On the other hand, all these dynamics of sustainable mobility will impact the electrical grids. The network operator will now have to deal with these “new” realities, minimizing the impact on the network, namely in terms of power flow and in terms of the quality of the voltage wave. Also, at the end customer level, there are reports of situations in which inverters “withdraw” photovoltaic production from the grid in the face of disturbances in the quality of the voltage wave. These situations must be assessed at the level of the network operator when they have external causes at their origin or at the level of the consumer when the source of the disturbance is internal.
The present project proposal intends to contribute at several levels in several agents: users, energy producers (self-consumption), network operators, general public due to possible ascertainable environmental benefits.
The intended results include the guidance of dissertations, digital platforms, and publication in scientific journals and communications. Protocols for the study of sustainable mobility solutions within the scope of local agents may also be framed. In terms of results, it will also be essential to organize dissemination activities to disseminate the results obtained within the community and improve the visibility of research and development work in the mobility and transport sector.

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PIDI/CISeD/2023/012 • Computer vision in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for industrial applications

Leave a Comment / [DAI] Digital Automotive Industry, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
José Luís Henriques da Silva
Duration: 2023 – 2025

Cised team members
Serafim Oliveira
Rui Pedro Duarte
José Luís Abrantes
Paulo Vaz
João Menoita

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be used to monitor activities and offer technological solutions in various industrial sectors.
Applying machine vision algorithms to UAVs allows vehicles to understand and interact with the surrounding environment more intelligently. They can identify and avoid obstacles, make navigation decisions based on the collected visual information, and even perform complex tasks such as following predetermined routes or recognizing specific objects.
However, artificial vision has challenges such as the need to deal with changing lighting conditions, changing weather conditions and the presence of complex and moving objects. Machine vision algorithms need to be robust enough to handle these situations and provide accurate and reliable results.
Furthermore, it is important to perform rigorous validation and testing of machine vision algorithms under different scenarios and conditions to ensure that they are robust enough before being deployed in practical applications.
This project intends to implement this technology in industrial environments, namely in precision positioning (Vision Positioning System – VPS) and automated inspection.
The use of UAVs equipped with VPS and automated inspection systems allows real-time monitoring of various industrial activities, such as detecting chemical leaks, identifying risk areas, monitoring production flow, visual quality control, among others.
Data collected by UAVs or sensors can be processed in real time and provide valuable information for decision making and ensuring safety and compliance in industrial environments.

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PIDI/CISeD/2023/010 • SafeSec-M-Audit – Estrutura de Monitorização e Auditoria de Segurança e Saúde no Trabalho

concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Filipe Manuel Simões Caldeira
Duration: 2023 – 2025

Cised team members
João Pedro Menoita Henriques

The Civil Construction industry is characterized by involving projects of high complexity, dimension and budgets with the use of numerous human resources.
However, its construction sites are environments conducive to the occurrence of accidents, some of them fatal or with serious injuries, as a result of the number of workers, goods and equipment that circulate and operate in them. Falls are one of the most recurrent causes associated with accidents. Other consequences of accidents stem from the costs resulting from compensation and new hires, legal liabilities and delays in work, in addition to the impact on the reputation of organizations.
Although there is a national legal framework for managing health and safety at work, with its concepts and standards, the mandatory use of PPE (personal protective equipment), it appears that there is a strong rejection on the part of workers regarding its use. Some of the problems are mitigated by safety management professionals, through the identification of occupational risks on the site, training in the use and handling of PPE, as well as raising awareness of safe behaviour. However, these are disconnected from the reality of operations at the construction site.
To overcome this reality, this project proposes a structure (framework) for auditing safety and health at work in order to reduce the number of accidents at work. This project also intends to define a model that aims to identify the best distribution of sensors across the work sites, avoiding accidents and minimizing their response time. Given the large volume and speed of data to be collected for real-time monitoring processes, an aggregator hub of messages will be proposed that allows efficient exchange between the various stakeholders. Efforts will be delivered to enhance its scalability and reliability by defining a set of performance indicators (KPIs) to guarantee the quality of the services provided by the framework in an uninterrupted manner and with fast response times when faced with large loads.

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PIDI/CISeD/2022/009 • Autonomous Food Plan Adaption

[CDS] Connected Digital Society, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Carlos Augusto da Silva Cunha
Duration: 2022 – 2024

Cised team members
Rui Pedro Amaro Duarte

The alignment of nutrition requirements with food plan creation, follow-up, and adjustment, demands the regular gathering of biometrics, food intake habits, physical activity, and energy consumption data. Analyzing these data in the context of individual objective accomplishment provides the feedback for dynamic adjustment of food plans required to build a nutrition control system. The introduction of sensors for data-gathering activities coupled with artificial intelligence algorithms for creating personalized models has transformed nutrition into an autonomous process that can be realized without or with the minimum intervention of the nutritionist. This process is based on a person’s data with a broader spectrum than those proportioned by the follow-up of traditional nutrition. For that reason, it is potentially also more effective. Also, data availability enables food plan adjustment in shorter cycles, helping reduce the time required to meet individual objectives. This project aims to develop a nutrition control system based on data gathered by sensors (e.g., smartwatches and smart scales) for dynamic food plan adjustment, using machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

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PIDI/CISeD/2022/004 • Hight-Tech Defense Industries: Development of Autonomous Smart Systems

[DDSS] Digital Decision Support Systems, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
João Reis
Nuno Melão
Duration: 2022 – 2023

Cised team members
Nuno Melão

Technological innovations such as robotics and artificial intelligence have enabled the development of intelligent autonomous systems in the defence sector. However, it is common for decision‐makers to have doubts about what kind of decisions should be transferred to these systems. On the other hand, international law stipulates that the responsibility for the use of weapons systems rests with humans and cannot be transferred to machines. Thus, another important challenge is to determine the degree of human‐machine interaction in intelligent autonomous systems. To help address these issues, this project aims to identify the attributes and degree of automation/humanization of intelligent autonomous systems developed by the military industry in Portugal. This project will contribute to the production of knowledge about autonomous military systems, as well as to ensure that lethal decision‐making processes are not transferred to machines, thus meeting legal and ethical concerns.

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PIDI/CISeD/2022/007 • Modelos de Machine Learning para Deteção de Padrões e Preferências Alimentares

[DDSS] Digital Decision Support Systems, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher: Rui Pedro Duarte
Duration: 2022 – 2024

Cised team members
Carlos Augusto da Silva Cunha
Ricardo Luís da Costa Gama

Food assumes an increasingly important role in people's lives, and adequate nutrition associated with a healthy lifestyle increases the average life expectancy. To this end, there has been an increase in the number of people whom nutritionists are following to have a food plan suited to their needs, which vary according to each person's goals: from the purely aesthetic component, through the improvement of the quality of life, for professional reasons (such as sportsmen or high competition athletes), even people with special needs, in which a correct diet impacts on the aggravation of previously diagnosed diseases. There are, however, some associated problems that can impact noncompliance with a previously defined meal plan. One of them is defining a food plan made up of foods people don't like. The other relates to real-time notification of the nutritionist of the correct fulfilment of the plan in terms of the proper intake of recommended macronutrients in each meal of the food plan.

Regarding the first, the combination of foods is a factor mainly linked to people's preferences, far beyond the rules of food combinations recommended by nutritionists. Thus, patterns for each individual may vary over time and as a function of other conditions (e.g., temperature, season). People's sensitivity to these combinations is one of the factors responsible for abandoning eating plans and not matching their food tastes. With this work, we intend to develop an Artificial Intelligence model to detect food patterns to adapt a food plan defined by a nutritionist in an evolutionary way and in real-time to allow the correct management of the plan. Thus, it becomes possible to provide a better quality of life to people who need to define food plans in various types of contexts.

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PIDI/CISeD/2022/006 • STORYTur – O uso do storytelling em vídeos promocionais turísticos

[CDS] Connected Digital Society, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Sara Santos
Duration: 2022 – 2024

Cised team members
Luísa Augusto

Currently, more and more cities and regions differentiate themselves through the creation of a positive identity and image, developing territorial branding. The use of storytelling can also be an asset when used to promote tourist destinations. It is essential that the entities that manage the tourist image of Portuguese regions rethink their dissemination strategies and give priority to “storytelling”, emotions, and involvement with the public in building the image of the territories. Territorial marketing, and in particular the focus on tourism promotion videos, allows to demonstrate the unique characteristics of the territory and its differentiation from the others. Through the story told about the region, the audience identifies with the characters and is “transported” by the narrative.

In Portugal, the Centro region has stood out for the promotional films (with storytelling techniques) that it uses to promote the Center of Portugal. In recent years, “Turismo do Centro” has won dozens of international awards related to tourism promotion. For its part, the “Aldeias Históricas de Portugal” also won the world award for best tourism film in the world, in 2021.

Considering this worldwide recognition, this project will have the partnership of “Turismo do Centro” and “Aldeias Históricas de Portugal”, as examples of good practices in tourism promotion of regions through storytelling in promotional videos.

STORYtur's main objective is to understand the strategies for promoting tourism in Portuguese regions, especially in the Center region.

The project comprises the development of studies through interviews (to the representatives of “Turismo do Centro” and “Aldeias Históricas de Portugal”) and the application of questionnaires to the public.

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PIDI/CISeD/2023/011 • Modelos de Inteligência Artificial para Deteção de Stress Crónico e Padrões de Movimento em Ambientes de Atividades da Vida Diária

Leave a Comment / [CDS] Connected Digital Society, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Rui Pedro Duarte
Duration: 2022 – 2024

Cised team members
Carlos Augusto da Silva Cunha

For a long time, stress has been considered an important health factor that affects the quality of life. Several studies indicate that excessive and continuous stress can trigger or worsen several diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular. Stress is a response to a stressor, an external stimulus or condition that causes an emotional, physical, or psychological change in the individual. However, even though momentary stress can be easily identified, it is hard for people to recognize that they are living a stressful life. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease that affects individuals. It has symptoms on diverse levels, such as vision, fatigue, numbness and tingling, muscle spasms, stiffness and weakness, mobility problems, problems with thinking, learning, planning, and even depression and anxiety. With this, a few critical questions need to be raised: Is there any relation between stress and MS exacerbations? What are the relevant biomarkers to identify continuous stress? Are they reliable? Are their measurements little intrusive?
Thus, it is vital to measure stress and identify its types, in order to monitor and help people to deal with the manifestations of stress. It becomes crucial to identify continuous stress, as there are studies that indicate that it has a negative impact, while a systemic stress situation may even be rewarded. The monitoring process of this continuous stress needs to be controlled and with low intrusion in the user, so that it does not have negative effects on their lifestyle. For that, there are several biomarkers to identify stress in people, but not all are recommended. The most indicated biomarkers are heart rate (HR) and electrical conductivity, which can be monitored by devices such as smart watches. With this, it is possible to train artificial intelligence models to create a solution to detect long-term stress, which does not harm people's quality of life.

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PIDI/CISeD/2021/002 • Combinações de relações bancárias e detentores do seu capital, custos de financiamento, performance e estrutura de capital das empresas

[DDSS] Digital Decision Support Systems, concluído, interno, nacional, não competitivo, não financiado, viseu /

Principal Researcher:
Pedro Manuel Nogueira Reis
António Pedro Soares Pinto

Duration: 2021 – 2023

A revisão da literatura identifica o efeito do poder de mercado do sistema bancário nos custos de financiamento da empresa (Wang et al., 2020; Abubakr & Esposito, 2012; Han et al., 2015), na estrutura de capital das pequenas empresas (Degryse et al., 2012), da inclusão financeira – acesso adequado, atempado e a custos reduzidos a um conjunto de produtos e serviços financeiros regulados, aumentando o bem-estar financeiro (Banco de Portugal, 2017) – e no desempenho da empresa (Chauvet & Jacolin, 2017). Contudo, pelo que seja do nosso conhecimento, ainda não foi realizado qualquer estudo que avalie o impacto das possíveis combinações das relações com as diversas instituições bancárias, bem como com as características dos seus detentores de capital, com as quais as empresas estabelecem relações, na sua atividade. O estudo incide sobre Pequenas e Médias Empresas (PME´s), que representam cerca de 99,9% do tecido empresarial português em 2019 (PORDATA, 2021) e 99,9% do tecido empresarial espanhol em janeiro de 2020 (MINISTERIO DE INDUSTRIA, COMERCIO Y TURISMO, 2021), constituindo este o grande impulso e motivação para a realização desta investigação. Para além, das características da carteira de credores de financiamento remunerado, o estudo contempla diferentes variáveis de controlo, tais como, a idade das empresas, o número de empregados, total de ativos, localização da empresa, quantidade de bancos de relação da empresa, entre outras características que se tornem relevantes para a análise.

OBJETIVOS
Este estudo procura avaliar de que forma as características das principais instituições bancárias que concedem crédito à empresa e, as relações de combinação entre elas, condicionam a estrutura de capital, os custos de financiamento e o desempenho das empresas, nomeadamente, nas de menor dimensão. Para além deste objetivo, também as características dos detentores de capital que controlam as instituições financeiras com as quais as empresas estabelecem relação será propósito de análise, no que respeita à sua influência na atividade financeira e operacional da empresa.
O universo da amostra em análise, será constituído por PME’s ibéricas, recolhido na base de dados SABI – Bureau Van Dijk, com recurso à análise de dados seccionados. Pretende-se também, aferir a prevalência, ou não, de diferenças significativas no comportamento das empresas portuguesas e espanholas.
Os dados serão analisados recorrendo a técnicas de inferência estatística como testes de hipóteses paramétricos e não paramétricos, regressão multivariada com recurso a equações simultâneas, modelando pelo estimador de 2 ou 3 estágios dos mínimos quadrados, procurando dar resposta às questões em investigação.

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