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Publications

2026

Competitive and Cooperative Player-Oriented GWAPs for Enhancing Crowdsourcing Campaigns - An Evidence-Based Synthesis

Authors
Guimaraes, D; Correia, A; Paulino, D; Paredes, H;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

Abstract
The use of gamified crowdsourcing mechanisms through serious games and games with a purpose (GWAPs) has emerged as an effective motivational strategy for enhancing performance in human intelligence tasks (HITs). In this systematic literature review, we examine the underlying characteristics of competitive and cooperative player-oriented GWAPs and how they can be leveraged to optimize crowdsourcing performance in completing batches of HITs. By exploring gamified crowdsourcing elements in GWAPs, we can evaluate the impact of these two types of player behaviors (i.e., competition and cooperation) on motivation and performance. We reviewed 27 publications and grouped them into five categories: player orientation, game elements and motivation, crowd work optimization, gamified knowledge collection, and comparative studies and best practices. Our research pinpoints the significance of intuitive task instructions, alignment of game elements with player motivations, and the role of competitive and cooperative dynamics in enhancing engagement and performance.

2026

A Systematic Literature Review on the Benefits of Robotics and Active Learning Methodologies for Promoting STEAM Education among Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Authors
Conde, MA; Rodríguez-Sedano, FJ; García-Peñalvo, FJ; Suganuma, L; Gonçalves, J; Jormanainen, I; Yigzaw, S;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Abstract
The integration of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities into STEAM education presents ongoing challenges, particularly in engineering disciplines where both technical and social competencies are essential. Robotics and active learning methodologies have emerged as promising solutions to address these challenges by offering adaptive, interactive, and student-centered learning environments. This study conducts a systematic literature review to examine how these technologies and methodologies are applied to support students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. A total of 34 high-quality studies published over the past ten years were selected through a rigorous process of database searching, inclusion/exclusion filtering, and quality assessment. The analysis reveals that robotics is particularly effective in fostering academic development, cognitive skills, social-behavioral interaction, and emotional regulation, while active learning promotes social responding, role understanding, and collaborative skills. Together, these approaches not only enhance individual learning outcomes but also facilitate the broader inclusion of students with disabilities within engineering education.

2026

A Parametric Information-gain to Improve Online Tree-based Machine Learning Models

Authors
Costa, VV; Costa, D; Veloso, B; Rocha, EM;

Publication

Abstract
Decision trees are a cornerstone of interpretable machine learning and are widely used for their simplicity and effectiveness in classification tasks. To address the growing need for models that can operate on continuous, unbounded data, decision trees have been reinvented for the data stream setting, where they must learn incrementally under constraints such as limited memory, evolving distributions, and delayed supervision. A critical component of these tree-based models, particularly those based on the Hoeffding Trees, is the split criterion, which determines how the input space is partitioned. This study introduces a new split criterion for stream-based Hoeffding trees, based on a unified five-parameter entropic formulation that generalizes several well-known measures, including Shannon, Gini, Tsallis, and Rényi entropies. While such formulations have been explored in batch learning, their application to streaming scenarios has not been made. By incorporating this criterion into a variety of established streaming classifiers and evaluating performance on standard benchmark datasets, we demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over existing methods, including those implemented in the River library. Notably, we report gains of up to 40% in immediate evaluation metrics, along with consistent wins and some draws on the prequential Macro-F1, with no observed losses against baseline criteria. The generality of the approach introduces additional computational overhead and also enables greater expressiveness and adaptability in handling uncertainty and nonstationary data. This work advances the integration of information-theoretic principles into online learning and highlights the importance of efficient hyperparameter tuning and adaptive entropy selection in streaming environments.

2026

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Research Track and Applied Data Science Track - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2025, Porto, Portugal, September 15-19, 2025, Proceedings, Part VIII

Authors
Pfahringer, B; Japkowicz, N; Larrañaga, P; Ribeiro, RP; Dutra, I; Pechenizkiy, M; Cortez, P; Pashami, S; Jorge, AM; Soares, C; Abreu, PH; Gama, J;

Publication
ECML/PKDD (8)

Abstract

2026

Price optimization for round trip car sharing

Authors
Currie, CSM; M'Hallah, R; Oliveira, BB;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
Car sharing, car clubs and short-term rentals could support the transition toward net zero but their success depends on them being financially sustainable for service providers and attractive to end users. Dynamic pricing could support this by incentivizing users while balancing supply and demand. We describe the usage of a round trip car sharing fleet by a continuous time Markov chain model, which reduces to a multi-server queuing model where hire duration is assumed independent of the hourly rental price. We present analytical and simulation optimization models that allow the development of dynamic pricing strategies for round trip car sharing systems; in particular identifying the optimal hourly rental price. The analytical tractability of the queuing model enables fast optimization to maximize expected hourly revenue for either a single fare system or a system where the fare depends on the number of cars on hire, while accounting for stochasticity in customer arrival times and durations of hire. Simulation optimization is used to optimize prices where the fare depends on the time of day or hire duration depends on price. We present optimal prices for a given customer population and show how the expected revenue and car availability depend on the customer arrival rate, willingness-to-pay distribution, dependence of the hire duration on price, and size of the customer population. The results provide optimal strategies for pricing of car sharing and inform strategic managerial decisions such as whether to use time-or state-dependent pricing and optimizing the fleet size.

2026

Synchronization of Multimodal Physiological Data Streams: State-of-the-Art, Trends, and Future Challenges

Authors
Francisco Manuel Pinto Vieira; João Paulo Silva Cunha;

Publication
IEEE Access

Abstract

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