Abstract
Software performance concerns have been attracting research interest at an increasing rate, especially regarding energy performance in non-wired computing devices. In the context of mobile devices, several research works have been devoted to assessing the performance of software and its underlying code. One important contribution of such research efforts is sets of programming guidelines aiming at identifying efficient and inefficient programming practices, and consequently to steer software developers to write performance-friendly code.Despite recent efforts in this direction, it is still almost unfeasible to obtain universal and up-to-date knowledge regarding software and respective source code performance. Namely regarding energy performance, where there has been growing interest in optimizing software energy consumption due to the power restrictions of such devices. There are still many difficulties reported by the community in measuring performance, namely in large-scale validation and replication. The Android ecosystem is a particular example, where the great fragmentation of the platform, the constant evolution of the hardware, the software platform, the development libraries themselves, and the fact that most of the platform tools are integrated into the IDE's GUI, makes it extremely difficult to perform performance studies based on large sets of data/applications. In this paper, we analyze the execution of a diversified corpus of applications of significant magnitude. We analyze the source-code performance of 1322 versions of 215 different Android applications, dynamically executed with over than 27900 tested scenarios, using state-of-the-art black-box testing frameworks with different combinations of GUI inputs. Our empirical analysis allowed to observe that semantic program changes such as adding functionality and repairing bugfixes are the changes more associated with relevant impact on energy performance. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that several coding practices previously identified as energy-greedy do not replicate such behavior in our execution context and can have distinct impacts across several performance indicators: runtime, memory and energy consumption. Some of these practices include some performance issues reported by the Android Lint and Android SDK APIs. We also provide evidence that the evaluated performance indicators have little to no correlation with the performance issues' priority detected by Android Lint. Finally, our results allowed us to demonstrate that there are significant differences in terms of performance between the most used libraries suited for implementing common programming tasks, such as HTTP communication, JSON manipulation, image loading/rendering, among others, providing a set of recommendations to select the most efficient library for each performance indicator. Based on the conclusions drawn and in the extension of the developed work, we also synthesized a set of guidelines that can be used by practitioners to replicate energy studies and build more efficient mobile software.

Abstract
Diagnosis of health disorders relies heavily on detecting biological data and accurately observing pathological changes. A significant challenge lies in detecting targeted biological signals and developing reliable sensing technology for clinically relevant results. The combination of data analytics with the sensing abilities of Optical Fiber Tweezers (OFT) provides a high-capability, multifunctional biosensing approach for biophotonic tools. In this work, we introduced phase as a new domain to obtain light patterns in OFT back-scattering signals. By applying a multivariate data analysis procedure, we extract phase spectral information for discriminating micro and nano (bio)particles. A newly proposed method—Hilbert Phase Slope—presented high suitability for differentiation problems, providing features able to discriminate with statistical significance two optically trapped human tumoral cells (MKN45 gastric cell line) and two classes of non-trapped cancer-derived extracellular nanovesicles – an important outcome in view of the current challenges of label-free bio-detection for multifunctional single-molecule analytic tools. © The Author(s) 2024.

Abstract
This paper presents a 1-bit graphene-based reflective reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), namely a reflectarray antenna, that operates in the Ka-band (27-31 GHz). The reflectarray unit-cell features a simple structure with one metal layer, a Rogers RT5880 substrate and a Graphene Sandwich Structure (GSS) on top. The GSS comprises two layers of graphene separated by a diaphragm paper and a thin PVC layer to enhance its durability. The reflectarray can ensure a 1-bit phase shift resolution, by alternating the bias voltage applied to the graphene. The unit-cell simulation shows that the losses are around 3 dB over the studied band for both unit-cell states. An equivalent circuit model is presented to facilitate the analysis and design of GSS-based unit-cells. The full-wave simulation results of a 32×32 reflectarray indicate a gain of 25 dBi for a steering angle of 10 deg., displaying a 1 dB gain bandwidth of 15%, confirming the promise of the graphene-based radiating elements. © 2024 18th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation, EuCAP 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Abstract
We model the financial markets as a game and make predictions using Markov chain estimators. We extract the possible patterns displayed by the financial markets, define a game where one of the players is the speculator, whose strategies depend on his/her risk-to-reward preferences, and the market is the other player, whose strategies are the previously observed patterns. Then, we estimate the market's mixed probabilities by defining Markov chains and utilizing its transition matrices. Afterwards, we use these probabilities to determine which is the optimal strategy for the speculator. Finally, we apply these models to real-time market data to determine its feasibility. From this, we obtained a model for the financial markets that has a good performance in terms of accuracy and profitability.

Abstract
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are in significant focus within 6G research. However, RISs face a power consumption challenge in the reconfigurable elements which may restrict its future scale-up to large areas. We address this issue by proposing a unit cell based on a non-volatile memristor-based switching mechanism. A 1-bit memristor-based reconfigurable RIS unit cell was designed in the Ka-band, and validated using CST and HFSS simulation platforms. The required control circuit to enable the digital control of the memristor has also been proposed. The proposed unit cell achieves losses of less than 1 dB over a frequency band of 25 - 28.3 GHz and a phase difference of 180 degrees +/- 20 degrees at a central frequency of 26.7 GHz, with an operational bandwidth of approximately 1 GHz. Furthermore, an exemplary 16x16 RIS was designed and simulated based on the proposed unit cell to demonstrate its capability to achieve beam steering.

Abstract
Climate change has driven agriculture to alter farming methods for food production. This paper presents a new concept for monitoring, acquisition, management, analysis, and synthesis of ecological data, which captures the environmental determinants and direct gradients suited to a particular requirement for specific plant cultivation and sustainable agriculture. The purpose of this study is to investigate a smart seablite cultivation system. A novel digital agricultural method was developed and applied to digitised seablite cultivation. Machine learning was used to predict the future growth conditions of plants (seablites). The study identified the illustrative maps of seablite origins, a conceptual seablite smart farming model, essential factors for growing seablite, a digital circuit for cultivating seablite, and digital data of seablite growth phases comprised the digital data. The findings indicate that: (1) An indicator of soil salinity is a quantity of sodium chloride extracted from a seablite sample indicating its origin of environmental determinants. (2) Saline soil, saline water, pH, moisture, temperature, and sunlight are essential factors for seablite development. These factors are dependent on climate change and were measured using a smart seablite cultivation system. (3) Digital circuits of seablite cultivation provide a better understanding of the relationship between the essential factors for seablite growth and seablite growth phases. (4) Deep neural networks outperformed vector machines, with 86% accuracy at predicting future growth of seablites. Therefore, this finding showed that the essential seablite development factors can be manipulated as key controllers for agriculture in response to climate change and agriculture can be planned. Basic digitisation of specific plants aids plant migration. Digital agriculture is an important practice for agroecosystems.