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Publications

Publications by HumanISE

2024

Does Fake News have Feelings?

Authors
Laroca, H; Rocio, V; Cunha, A;

Publication
Procedia Computer Science

Abstract
Fake news spreads rapidly, creating issues and making detection harder. The purpose of this study is to determine if fake news contains sentiment polarity (positive or negative), identify the polarity of sentiment present in their textual content and determine whether sentiment polarity is a reliable indication of fake news. For this, we use a deep learning model called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), trained on a sentiment polarity dataset to classify the polarity of sentiments from a dataset of true and fake news. The findings show that sentiment polarity is not a reliable single feature for recognizing false news correctly and must be combined with other parameters to improve classification accuracy. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

2024

Problems and prospects of hybrid learning in higher education

Authors
Bidarra, J; Rocio, V; Sousa, N; Coutinho Rodrigues, J;

Publication
OPEN LEARNING

Abstract
This study was initiated at a time of unprecedented uncertainty, as lecturers and educational institutions across the world tried to manage the move to online education as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It started with lecturers' perspectives of their performance during that time to identify innovative teaching strategies beyond the priority of emergency teaching. The main goal was to identify the occurrence of more permanent changes in Higher Education after the pandemic. The research was based on a qualitative approach where faculty members were interviewed about their activities before, during and after lockdown periods. Data collected was analysed with the help of an algorithm based on Artificial Intelligence. Ultimately, it was possible to gather and evaluate practical solutions related to hybrid learning in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, leading to recommendations for stakeholders in Higher Education.

2024

Reducing the feasible solution space of resource-constrained project instances

Authors
Vanhoucke, M; Coelho, J;

Publication
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract
This paper present an instance transformation procedure to modify known instances of the resource -constrained project scheduling problem to make them easier to solve by heuristic and/or exact solution algorithms. The procedure makes use of a set of transformation rules that aim at reducing the feasible search space without excluding at least one possible optimal solution. The procedure will be applied to a set of 11,183 instances and it will be shown by a set of experiments that these transformations lead to 110 improved lower bounds, 16 new and better schedules (found by three meta -heuristic procedures and a set of branch -and -bound procedures) and even 64 new optimal solutions which were never not found before.

2024

A genetic algorithm for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Alternative Subgraphs using a boolean satisfiability solver

Authors
Servranckx, T; Coelho, J; Vanhoucke, M;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
This study evaluates a new solution approach for the Resource -Constrained Project Scheduling with Alternative Subgraphs (RCPSP-AS) in case that complex relations (i.e. nested and linked alternatives) are considered. In the RCPSP-AS, the project activity structure is extended with alternative activity sequences. This implies that only a subset of all activities should be scheduled, which corresponds with a set of activities in the project network that model an alternative execution mode for a work package. Since only the selected activities should be scheduled, the RCPSP-AS comes down to a traditional RCPSP problem when the selection subproblem is solved. It is known that the RCPSP and, hence, its extension to the RCPSP-AS is NP -hard. Since similar scheduling and selection subproblems have already been successfully solved by satisfiability (SAT) solvers in the existing literature, we aim to test the performance of a GA -SAT approach that is derived from the literature and adjusted to be able to deal with the problem -specific constraints of the RCPSP-AS. Computational results on smalland large-scale instances (both artificial and empirical) show that the algorithm can compete with existing metaheuristic algorithms from the literature. Also, the performance is compared with an exact mathematical solver and learning behaviour is observed and analysed. This research again validates the broad applicability of SAT solvers as well as the need to search for better and more suited algorithms for the RCPSP-AS and its extensions.

2024

A matheuristic for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Authors
Vanhoucke, M; Coelho, J;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
This paper presents a matheuristic solution algorithm to solve the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). The problem makes use of a restricted neighbourhood method using an activity selection and a search space restriction module and implements them as two alternative search algorithms. The first algorithm makes use of the best-performing components of the branch-and-bound procedures from the literature, and embeds them into a greedy neighbourhood search. The second matheuristic implements the exact branch-and-bound procedures into a known and well-performing meta-heuristic search algorithm. Computational experiments have been carried out on seven different datasets consisting of 10,000+ project instances. Experiments reveal that the choice of exact algorithm is key in finding high-quality solutions, and illustrate that the trade-off between selecting an activity set size and search space restriction depends on the specific implementation. The computational tests demonstrate that the matheuristic discovered 24 new best known solutions that could not be found by either a meta-heuristic or an exact method individually. Moreover, a new benchmark dataset has been proposed that can be used to develop new matheuristic search procedures to solve the problem consisting of 461 instances from the literature.

2024

Project management and scheduling 2022

Authors
Servranckx, T; Coelho, J; Vanhoucke, M;

Publication
ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract
This article summarises the research studies published in the special issue on Project Management and Scheduling devoted to the 18th International Conference on Project Management and Scheduling (PMS). The special issue contains state-of-the art research in the field of (non-)robust project and machine scheduling and the contribution of each individual study to the academic literature are discussed. We notice that there is a growing interest in the research community to investigate robust scheduling approaches and optimisation problems observed in real-life business settings. This allows us to derive some interesting future research directions for the project and machine scheduling community.

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