Abstract
Fires in large buildings can have tragic consequences, including the loss of human lives. Despite the advancements in building construction and fire safety technologies, the unpredictable nature of fires, particularly in large buildings, remains an enormous challenge. Acknowledging the paramount importance of prioritising human safety, the academic community has been focusing consistently on enhancing the efficiency of building evacuation. While previous studies have integrated evacuation simulation models, aiding in aspects such as the design of evacuation routes and emergency signalling, modelling human behaviour during a fire emergency remains challenging due to cognitive complexities. Moreover, behavioural differences from country to country add another layer of complexity, hindering the creation of a universal behaviour model. Instead of centring on modelling the occupant behaviour, this paper proposes an innovative approach aimed at enhancing the occupants' behaviour predictability by providing real-time information to the occupants regarding the most suitable evacuation routes. The proposed models use a building's environmental conditions to generate contextual information, aiding in developing solutions to make the occupants' behaviour more predictable by providing them with real-time information on the most appropriate and efficient evacuation routes at each moment, guiding the occupants to safety during a fire emergency. The models were incorporated into a context-aware recommender system for testing purposes. The simulation results indicate that such a system, coupled with hazard and congestion models, positively influences the occupants' behaviour, fostering faster adaptation to the environmental conditions and ultimately enhancing the efficiency of building evacuations.

Abstract
News articles typically include reporting events to inform on what happened. These reporting events are not part of the story being told but are nonetheless a relevant part of the news and can pose a challenge to the computational processing of news narratives. They compose a reporting narrative, which is the present study's focus. This paper aims to demonstrate through selected use cases how a comprehensive annotation scheme with suitable tags and links can properly represent the reporting events and the way they relate to the events that make the story. In addition, we put forward a proposal for their visual representation that enables a systematic and detailed analysis of the importance of reporting events in the news structure. Finally, we describe some lexico-grammatical features of reporting events, which can contribute to their automatic detection. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract
Visual representations have the potential to improve information understanding. We explore this idea in the development of NewsLine, an open-source web-based prototype that focuses on narrative visualizations of news content. Having structured data as input, the prototype produces a storyline which showcases the narrative's events and participants, allowing the user to interact with the visualization in a number of ways. We built an information hub around the storyline to allow for multiple levels of exploration, specifically the main visualization, the event information module, and the sidebar. The visualization depicts the sequence of events that make up a news story, as well as the interactions between the involved parties in each event. The event information module presents additional information on a particular event. The sidebar is the “control center” of the visualization, unlocking a number of interactions and configurations. The prototype was evaluated with a user study with journalists and also with an online survey which gathered feedback from 178 potential end users. From these, 106 participants (60.6%) provided a rating of four or above (one to five scale) when asked to quantify their interest in using the application. Moreover, participants were asked to rank the importance of the visualization elements used. The results highlight that two elements stand out as the most important, the events and the entities. Overall, the participants generally found the application to be useful, but in need of some work in order for it to be made available to a broader public. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract
Narratives are present in many forms of human expression and can be understood as a fundamental way of communication between people. Computational understanding of the underlying story of a narrative, however, may be a rather complex task for both linguists and computational linguistics. Such task can be approached using natural language processing techniques to automatically extract narratives from texts. In this paper, we present an in depth survey of narrative extraction from text, providing a establishing a basis/framework for the study roadmap to the study of this area as a whole as a means to consolidate a view on this line of research. We aim to fulfill the current gap by identifying important research efforts at the crossroad between linguists and computer scientists. In particular, we highlight the importance and complexity of the annotation process, as a crucial step for the training stage. Next, we detail methods and approaches regarding the identification and extraction of narrative components, their linkage and understanding of likely inherent relationships, before detailing formal narrative representation structures as an intermediate step for visualization and data exploration purposes. We then move into the narrative evaluation task aspects, and conclude this survey by highlighting important open issues under the domain of narratives extraction from texts that are yet to be explored.

Abstract
Plants gather and process information about their surroundings to make decisions that prioritize their well-being while considering the environment. These decisions are conveyed through electrical signals within and between cells, mainly in the form of action and variation potentials, in response to stimuli, including mechanical vibrations, changes in temperature, light intensity, and humidity. Although the ability of some plants, such as the Mimosa pudica, to react to sudden environmental stimuli (e.g., touch) is well known, their long-term electrical response under slow environmental changes remains not fully understood. Here, a multi-source monitoring system has been developed to collect and store electrical signals from the plant Mimosa pudica, and surrounding environmental temperature and humidity, over a period of approximately 5 days. A realtime dashboard shows the environmental temperature and variation potential (VP) from Mimosa pudica. The VP mimics the environmental temperature changes, with an associated delay. Our long-term physiological observations suggest that environmental temperature sensing in the plant Mimosa pudica can be monitored and is likely driven by bioelectricity.

Abstract
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has been a popular research field due to the widespread of devices with sensors and computational power (e.g., smartphones and smartwatches). Applications for HAR systems have been extensively researched in recent literature, mainly due to the benefits of improving quality of life in areas like health and fitness monitoring. However, since persons have different motion patterns when performing physical activities, a HAR system would need to adapt to the characteristics of the user in order to maintain or improve accuracy. Mobile devices, such as smartphones, used to implement HAR systems, have limited resources (e.g., battery life). They also have difficulty adapting to the device's constraints to work efficiently for long periods. In this work, we present a kNN-based HAR system and an extensive study of the influence of hyperparameters (window size, overlap, distance function, and the value of k) and parameters (sampling frequency) on the system accuracy, energy consumption, and response time. We also study how hyperparameter configurations affect the model's performance for the users and the activities. Experimental results show that adapting the hyperparameters makes it possible to adjust the system's behavior to the user, the device, and the target service. These results motivate the development of a HAR system capable of automatically adapting the hyperparameters for the user, the device, and the service.