Abstract
The integration of renewable energy into sustainability metrics is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in regions aiming to balance energy efficiency, waste management, and urban development. This study explores the application of multicriteria decision-making and statistical techniques to evaluate municipal sustainability, with a focus on renewable energy, using the Alto Minho region of Portugal as a case study. The analysis incorporates 12 SDG indicators across ten municipalities, addressing energy consumption, urban renewal, and waste management. Cluster analysis revealed distinct groups of municipalities, highlighting disparities in sustainability performance. Municipalities such as Melgaço and Monção excelled in energy-related metrics, while others showed strengths in waste management and urban renewal. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) emphasized the importance of renewable energy indicators, revealing notable changes in rankings when energy-related criteria were prioritized. Ponte de Lima and Melgaço ranked highest under energy-focused weighting schemes, showcasing their leadership in energy efficiency and renewable adoption. The findings underscore the need for targeted policies to enhance sustainability across municipalities, particularly in regions lagging in energy performance.

Abstract
This paper solves the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) with a satisfiability problem (SAT) solver. This paper builds further on various existing SAT models for this well-known project scheduling problem and extends them with two methods to satisfy the resource constraints. Specifically, we use the well-known minimal forbidden sets and compare them with the so-called covers that are traditionally used in SAT implementations. Moreover, we also implement an existing binary decision trees approach under various settings and extend the model with networks with adders, so far never used for solving the RCPSP, to guarantee that resource constraints are satisfied. The algorithms are tested under different settings on a set of 13,413 project instances with diverse network and resource structures, and the experiments demonstrate that a combination of these approaches help in finding better solutions within a reasonable time. Moreover, 393 new lower bounds, 62 new upper bounds, and 290 optimally solved instances (including 18 from the PSPLIB) have been discovered, which, to the best of our knowledge, had not been found before. The strong performance of the new algorithm motivated additional experiments, and the preliminary results suggest several promising directions for future research.

Abstract
Deep-learning beat-tracking algorithms have achieved remarkable accuracy in recent years. However, despite these advancements, challenges persist with musical examples featuring complex rhythmic structures, especially given their under-representation in training corpora. Expanding on our prior work, this paper demonstrates how our user-centred beat-tracking methodology effectively handles increasingly demanding musical scenarios. We evaluate its adaptability and robustness through musical pieces that exhibit rhythmic dissonance, while maintaining ease of integration with leading methods through minimal user annotations. The selected musical works—Uruguayan Candombe, Colombian Bambuco, and Steve Reich’s Piano Phase—present escalating levels of rhythmic complexity through their respective polyrhythm, polymetre, and polytempo characteristics. These examples not only validate our method’s effectiveness but also demonstrate its capability across increasingly challenging scenarios, culminating in the novel application of beat tracking to polytempo contexts. The results show notable improvements in terms of the F-measure, ranging from 2 to 5 times the state-of-the-art performance. The beat annotations used in fine-tuning reduce the correction edit operations from 1.4 to 2.8 times, while reducing the global annotation effort to between 16% and 37% of the baseline approach. Our experiments demonstrate the broad applicability of our human-in-the-loop strategy in the domain of Computational Ethnomusicology, confronting the prevalent Music Information Retrieval (MIR) constraints found in non-Western musical scenarios. Beyond beat tracking and computational rhythm analysis, this user-driven adaptation framework suggests wider implications for various MIR technologies, particularly in scenarios where musical signal ambiguity and human subjectivity challenge conventional algorithms. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Abstract
Wikipedia is the largest and most globally well-known online encyclopedia, but its collaborative nature leads to a significant disparity in article quality. In this work, we explore real-time and automatic quality assessment within Wikipedia through machine-learning. We first constructed a dataset of 36,000 English articles and 145 features, then compared the performance of multiple classification and regression algorithms and studied how the number of classes and features affects the model’s performance. The six-class experiments achieved a classifier accuracy of 64% and a mean absolute error of 0.09 in regression methods, which matches or beats most state-of-the-art approaches. Our model produces similar results on some non-English Wikipedias, but the error is slightly higher on other versions. We have also determined that the features measuring the article’s content and revision history bring the largest performance boost. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Abstract

Abstract
This project was developed to improve the cost estimation process of new products within the Product Development Department of a furniture manufacturer. This work involved developing a methodology using Machine Learning (ML) models trained on products’ existing data to predict the cost of new innovative ones based on similarities and given data. The ML models used were Linear Regression (LR), Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LGBM), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The proposed methodology considers the estimation of the total cost of producing a product, which encompasses both material and operational costs. Throughout this project, several analyses were developed to identify and evaluate different independent variables that could explain the behaviour of these two cost components. The suitability of the different variables was studied by applying several ML models, and a set of functions that return an estimate of the cost as a function of these predictor variables was obtained. The proposed approach, which incorporates ML models into more complex variables to predict, resulted in a 19.29% reduction in estimation error. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.