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Publications

Publications by LIAAD

2022

The Importance of Digital Transformation in International Business

Authors
Pereira, CS; Durao, N; Moreira, F; Veloso, B;

Publication
SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract
This study was developed under the scope of a Portuguese project focused on the entrepreneur's perspective and perception on the internationalization process of his company: more specifically, about the factors that enhanced the company entry into foreign markets as well as the constraints found in this process. This work focuses on the importance of using digital transformation to integrate technological tools in international business practice and strategy and the obstacles encountered with introducing these new technologies. This study aims to determine the relationships between technology categories and obstacles. The final goal is to assess the impact of these characteristics of the companies by the sector of economic activity, size, and percentage of profits resulting from international expansion. A questionnaire was designed and sent by email to 8183 companies from the AICEP database, distributed by three main activity sectors. A total of 310 valid answers were gathered from the Portuguese internationalized companies. The research limitations are related to the reduced number of interviews. These interviews showed that managers were not aware of the concept of digital transformation and misunderstood the use of digital technologies in the internationalization process of the business. This limitation can add some bias to the qualitative results. In addition to these limitations, the number of responses per sector was also not homogeneous. The practical implications of this study are that managers and top-level executives can use that to better understand how companies could use digital tools and what obstacles they should avoid when they want to internationalize their business. This paper is one of the first research contributions to analyze the impact of digital transformation in the internalization of Portuguese companies.

2022

ZeroBERTo: Leveraging Zero-Shot Text Classification by Topic Modeling

Authors
Alcoforado, A; Ferraz, TP; Gerber, R; Bustos, E; Oliveira, AS; Veloso, BM; Siqueira, FL; Costa, AHR;

Publication
COMPUTATIONAL PROCESSING OF THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE, PROPOR 2022

Abstract
Traditional text classification approaches often require a good amount of labeled data, which is difficult to obtain, especially in restricted domains or less widespread languages. This lack of labeled data has led to the rise of low-resource methods, that assume low data availability in natural language processing. Among them, zero-shot learning stands out, which consists of learning a classifier without any previously labeled data. The best results reported with this approach use language models such as Transformers, but fall into two problems: high execution time and inability to handle long texts as input. This paper proposes a new model, ZeroBERTo, which leverages an unsupervised clustering step to obtain a compressed data representation before the classification task. We show that ZeroBERTo has better performance for long inputs and shorter execution time, outperforming XLM-R by about 12% in the F1 score in the FolhaUOL dataset.

2022

Personalised Combination of Multi-Source Data for User Profiling

Authors
Veloso, B; Leal, F; Malheiro, B;

Publication
Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems

Abstract
Human interaction with intelligent systems, services, and devices generates large volumes of user-related data. This multi-source information can be used to build richer user profiles and improve personalization. Our goal is to combine multi-source data to create user profiles by assigning dynamic individual weights. This paper describes a multi-source user profiling methodology and illustrates its application with a film recommendation system. The contemplated data sources include (i) personal history, (ii) explicit preferences (ratings), and (iii) social activities (likes, comments, or shares). The MovieLens dataset was selected and adapted to assess our approach by comparing the standard and the proposed methodologies. In the standard approach, we calculate the best global weights to apply to the different profile sources and generate all user profiles accordingly. In the proposed approach, we determine, for each user, individual weights for the different profile sources. The approach proved to be an efficient solution to a complex problem by continuously updating the individual data source weights and improving the accuracy of the generated personalised multimedia recommendations. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

2022

Simulation, modelling and classification of wiki contributors: Spotting the good, the bad, and the ugly

Authors
Garcia-Mendez, S; Leal, F; Malheiro, B; Burguillo-Rial, JC; Veloso, B; Chis, AE; Gonzalez-Velez, H;

Publication
SIMULATION MODELLING PRACTICE AND THEORY

Abstract
Data crowdsourcing is a data acquisition process where groups of voluntary contributors feed platforms with highly relevant data ranging from news, comments, and media to knowledge and classifications. It typically processes user-generated data streams to provide and refine popular services such as wikis, collaborative maps, e-commerce sites, and social networks. Nevertheless, this modus operandi raises severe concerns regarding ill-intentioned data manipulation in adver-sarial environments. This paper presents a simulation, modelling, and classification approach to automatically identify human and non-human (bots) as well as benign and malign contributors by using data fabrication to balance classes within experimental data sets, data stream modelling to build and update contributor profiles and, finally, autonomic data stream classification. By employing WikiVoyage - a free worldwide wiki travel guide open to contribution from the general public - as a testbed, our approach proves to significantly boost the confidence and quality of the classifier by using a class-balanced data stream, comprising both real and synthetic data. Our empirical results show that the proposed method distinguishes between benign and malign bots as well as human contributors with a classification accuracy of up to 92%.

2022

Smart Contracts for the CloudAnchor Platform

Authors
Vasco, E; Veloso, B; Malheiro, B;

Publication
Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection - 20th International Conference, PAAMS 2022, L'Aquila, Italy, July 13-15, 2022, Proceedings

Abstract
CloudAnchor is a multi-agent brokerage platform for the negotiation of Infrastructure as a Service cloud resources between Small and Medium Sized Enterprises, acting either as providers or consumers. This project entails the research, design, and implementation of a smart contract solution to permanently record and manage contractual and behavioural stakeholder data on a blockchain network. Smart contracts enable safe contract code execution, increasing trust between parties and ensuring the integrity and traceability of the chained contents. The defined smart contracts represent the inter-business trustworthiness and Service Level Agreements established within the platform. CloudAnchor interacts with the blockchain network through a dedicated Application Programming Interface, which coordinates and optimises the submission of transactions. The performed tests indicate the success of this integration: (i) the number and value of negotiated resources remain identical; and (ii) the run-time increases due to the inherent latency of the blockchain operation. Nonetheless, the introduced latency does not affect the brokerage performance, proving to be an appropriate solution for reliable partner selection and contractual enforcement between untrusted parties. This novel approach stores all brokerage strategic knowledge in a distributed, decentralised, and immutable database. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2022

Interpretable Success Prediction in Higher Education Institutions Using Pedagogical Surveys

Authors
Leal, F; Veloso, B; Pereira, CS; Moreira, F; Durao, N; Silva, NJ;

Publication
SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract
The indicators of student success at higher education institutions are continuously analysed to increase the students' enrolment in multiple scientific areas. Every semester, the students respond to a pedagogical survey that aims to collect the student opinion of curricular units in terms of content and teaching methodologies. Using this information, we intend to anticipate the success in higher-level courses and prevent dropouts. Specifically, this paper contributes with an interpretable student classification method. The proposed solution relies on (i) a pedagogical survey to collect student's opinions; (ii) a statistical data analysis to validate the reliability of the survey; and (iii) machine learning algorithms to classify the success of a student. In addition, the proposed method includes an explainable mechanism to interpret the classifications and their main factors. This transparent pipeline was designed to have implications in both digital and sustainable education, impacting the three pillars of sustainability, i.e.,economic, social, and environmental, where transparency is a cornerstone. The work was assessed with a dataset from a Portuguese higher-level institution, contemplating multiple courses from different departments. The most promising results were achieved with Random Forest presenting 98% in accuracy and F-measure.

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