Abstract
The academic performance of a higher education student can be affected by several factors and in most cases Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have programs to intervene, prevent failure or students dropping out. These include student tutoring, mentoring, recovery classes, summer school, etc. Being able to identify the borderline cases is extremely important for planning and intervening in time. This position paper reports on an ongoing project, being developed at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD), which uses the students’ data and artificial intelligence algorithms to create models and predict the performance of students and classes. The main objective of the IA.EDU project is to research the usage of data, artificial intelligence and data science to create artificial intelligence solutions, including models and applications, to provide predictive information that can contribute to the increase in students’ academic success and a reduction in the dropout rate, by making it possible to act proactively with the students at risk, course directors and course designers. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
The use of Educational Software (ES) in education has become essential for teachers and students. On the one hand, the effectiveness of its use may facilitate the acquisition of learning and on the other hand, it may enable a better transmission of the contents. In this sense, it is necessary to provide teachers with tools that allow them to develop successful pedagogical actions with appealing and innovative resources, capable of stimulating creativity and motivating students for learning. The aim of this study is to ascertain the knowledge and the use by teachers of ES Kahoot, GeoGebra and Texas Ti-Nspire, in what type of content, activities and what is the impact of their use in the teaching of Geometry and Measurement (GM), whether in teaching practice of teachers, or in the learning of students. The adopted method has a qualitative nature, with characteristics of a case study. Fourteen teachers who teach Mathematics at various schools in Portugal participated. Two questionnaires and a challenge that consisted of the elaboration of tasks were used as instruments. Data analysis was performed using Excel (Office 2016) and content analysis of the answers given, and the tasks developed. The results suggest that of the three ES, Kahoot was the most unknown and was the most chosen by teachers to develop different GM content. The reasons are also described as to why these ES may cause an improvement in the teaching practices of teachers, as well as motivation and student learning. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper presents the construction of an autonomous robot to participating in the autonomous driving competition of the National Festival of Robotics in Portugal, which relies on an open platform requiring basic knowledge of robotics, like mechanics, control, computer vision and energy management. The projet is an excellent way for teaching robotics concepts to engineering students, once the platform endows students with an intuitive learning for current technologies, development and testing of new algorithms in the area of mobile robotics and also in generating good team-building.

Abstract
The capability of drones to perform autonomous missions has led retail companies to use them for deliveries, saving time and human resources. In these services, the delivery depends on the Global Positioning System (GPS) to define an approximate landing point. However, the landscape can interfere with the satellite signal (e.g., tall buildings), reducing the accuracy of this approach. Changes in the environment can also invalidate the security of a previously defined landing site (e.g., irregular terrain, swimming pool). Therefore, the main goal of this work is to improve the process of goods delivery using drones, focusing on the detection of the potential receiver. We developed a solution that has been improved along its iterative assessment composed of five test scenarios. The built prototype complements the GPS through Computer Vision (CV) algorithms, based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), running in a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Pi NoIR Camera (i.e., No InfraRed-without infrared filter). The experiments were performed with the models Single Shot Detector (SSD) MobileNet-V2, and SSDLite-MobileNet-V2. The best results were obtained in the afternoon, with the SSDLite architecture, for distances and heights between 2.5-10 m, with recalls from 59%-76%. The results confirm that a low computing power and cost-effective system can perform aerial human detection, estimating the landing position without an additional visual marker.

Abstract
Research and development in mobile robotics are continuously growing. The ability of a human-made machine to navigate safely in a given environment is a challenging task. In agricultural environments, robot navigation can achieve high levels of complexity due to the harsh conditions that they present. Thus, the presence of a reliable map where the robot can localize itself is crucial, and feature extraction becomes a vital step of the navigation process. In this work, the feature extraction issue in the vineyard context is solved using Deep Learning to detect high-level features - the vine trunks. An experimental performance benchmark between two devices is performed: NVIDIA's Jetson Nano and Google's USB Accelerator. Several models were retrained and deployed on both devices, using a Transfer Learning approach. Specifically, MobileNets, Inception, and lite version of You Only Look Once are used to detect vine trunks in real-time. The models were retrained in a built in-house dataset, that is publicly available. The training dataset contains approximately 1600 annotated vine trunks in 336 different images. Results show that NVIDIA's Jetson Nano provides compatibility with a wider variety of Deep Learning architectures, while Google's USB Accelerator is limited to a unique family of architectures to perform object detection. On the other hand, the Google device showed an overall Average precision higher than Jetson Nano, with a better runtime performance. The best result obtained in this work was an average precision of 52.98% with a runtime performance of 23.14 ms per image, for MobileNet-V2. Recent experiments showed that the detectors are suitable for the use in the Localization and Mapping context.