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Publications

2026

Degradation-Aware Planning of Shared Battery Energy Storage Systems for Coordinated Transmission and Distribution System Operation

Authors
Simões, M; Peças Lopes, J; Soares, FJ;

Publication

Abstract
Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) are an important source of flexibility in power systems with high penetration of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs). When installed at transmission-distribution interface nodes, shared ESSs can support both Transmission System Operators (TSOs) and Distribution System Operators (DSOs), but their long-term planning remains challenging because investment decisions depend on coordinated operation under uncertainty and battery degradation over time. This paper proposes a degradation-aware planning framework for shared battery ESSs in coordinated TSO-DSO operation. The problem is formulated as a bi-level stochastic optimization model in which the upper level determines siting, sizing, and staged investment decisions under investment-cost uncertainty, while the lower level evaluates these decisions through coordinated system operation. To preserve tractability, the framework combines Benders' decomposition for long-term planning with an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM)-based decentralized coordination mechanism for short-term operation. The framework is evaluated on integrated IEEE transmission-distribution test systems over a 15-year planning horizon. Relative to uncoordinated operation, coordinated operation with shared ESSs reduces operating costs by up to 18.25% and RES curtailment by up to 92.16% in the later years of the planning horizon, while eliminating voltage violations. The results also show that degradation materially affects ESS valuation and that temporal discretization can influence siting and sizing decisions.

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

Unsupervised Concept Drift Detector for Data Streams With Varying Feature Spaces

Authors
Zhao, RR; Sun, JB; Jiang, J; Gama, J;

Publication
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING

Abstract
Data streams with varying feature spaces have received extensive attention recently, while the common concept drift in them remains underexplored. Unsupervised concept drift detectors can report potential drifts without class labels, making them suitable for practical scenarios where labeling is usually costly and difficult. However, existing unsupervised detectors usually operate under fixed feature spaces. To address this limitation, a Matching Degree Histogram-based unsupervised detector for data streams with Varying Feature Spaces (MDH-VFS) is proposed. Changes in input features are refined into four scenarios, specifying the sources of concept drifts in such data streams. Based on this, MDH-VFS monitors the distribution of each feature independently using the fix-slide windows model. A matching degree-based histogram (MD-Histogram) supporting online updating is proposed to model data distribution. MD-Histogram requires no prior distributions and captures data change more sensitively than traditional histograms. The dissimilarity between two MD-Histograms is measured by the Hellinger distance, and drift is detected using an adaptive thresholding strategy. Both the drift positions and drift features can be reported. Experimental results show that MDH-VFS can not only effectively detect drifts in data streams with varying feature spaces (achieving average F1-score/MCC above 77% and outperforming nine existing detectors with improvements of at least 43%), but also improve the classification performance of downstream learning algorithms (reaching a maximum average accuracy of 88% and yielding up to 7.23% improvement).

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

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