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Publications

2024

Business Process Automation in SMEs: A Systematic Literature Review

Authors
Moreira, S; Mamede, HS; Santos, A;

Publication
IEEE ACCESS

Abstract
Business Process Automation has been gaining increasing importance in the management of companies and organizations since it reduces the time needed to carry out routine tasks, freeing employees for other, more creative and exciting things. It can be applied in the most varied business areas. Organizations from any sector of activity can also adopt it. Given these benefits, the granted success in transforming business processes would be expected. However, automation initiatives still fail. Adopting this technology can raise social, technological, ethical, methodical, and organizational issues. These facts have triggered the necessity for a summary that could extract more information about how to implement Business Process Automation (BPA), attending to the administrative processes, especially when applied in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This study aims not only to review the available literature on how to implement BPA but also to typify the processes that can be automated, which technologies or tools exist for making that change, and influence factors in the procedure of BPA. We have covered more than 300 research papers published between 2016 and 2023 in reputable scientific data sources like Scopus, Web of Science/Clarivate, and ScienceDirect/Elsevier. The review revealed some paths for BPA, with some common steps. In addition, some common process characteristics fundamental to automation are exposed, as well as factors that are critical to an organization for successful automation. The results indicate that BPA is an established area in Business Process Management related to technologies/tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or Cognitive-Robotic Process Automation (C-RPA), Workflow Management Systems (WfMS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Blockchain. As far as we observed, this Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a unique study that covers all the environmental variables for applying automation in business processes.

2024

The Status and Management of Web-Related Security at Higher Education Institutions in Poland

Authors
Barreto, J; Rutecka, P; Cicha, K; Pinto, P;

Publication
International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy

Abstract
In an era marked by escalating cyber threats, the need for robust cybersecurity measures is paramount, especially for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). As custodians of sensitive information, HEIs must ensure secure channels for data transmission to protect their stakeholders. These institutions should increase their cyber resilience, recognizing the heightened risk they face from cybercriminal activities. A breach in an HEI’s cybersecurity can have severe consequences, ranging from data confidentiality breaches to operational disruptions and damage to institutional reputation. This paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the cybersecurity mechanisms in HEIs within Poland. The focus is on assessing the adoption of important web security protocols—Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC)—and the implementation of security headers on HEI websites. This study aims to provide a snapshot of the current cyber defense maturity in HEIs and to offer actionable insights for enhancing web security practices. The findings indicate a high adoption rate of HTTPS among HEIs, yet reveal significant gaps in web security practices. Also, there is a low adherence to security headers and an absence regarding DNSSEC implementation across the surveyed institutions. These results highlight crucial areas for improvement and underscore the need for HEIs in Poland to strengthen their web security measures, safeguarding their data and enhancing the overall cybersecurity resilience. © 2024 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

2024

Document Level Event Extraction from Narratives

Authors
Cunha, LF;

Publication
ADVANCES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, ECIR 2024, PT V

Abstract
One of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction (IE) is Event Extraction (EE), an extensively studied and challenging task [13,15], which aims to identify and classify events from the text. This involves identifying the event's central word (trigger) and its participants (arguments) [1]. These elements capture the event semantics and structure, which have applications in various fields, including biomedical texts [42], cybersecurity [24], economics [12], literature [32], and history [33]. Structured knowledge derived from EE can also benefit other downstream tasks such as Question Answering [20,30], Natural Language Understanding [21], Knowledge Base Graphs [3,37], summarization [8,10,41] and recommendation systems [9,18]. Despite the existence of several English EE systems [2,22,25,26], they face limited portability to other languages [4] and most of them are designed for closed domains, posing difficulties in generalising. Furthermore, most current EE systems restrict their scope to the sentence level, assuming that all arguments are contained within the same sentence as their corresponding trigger. However, real-world scenarios often involve event arguments spanning multiple sentences, highlighting the need for document-level EE.

2024

New skills in symbolic data analysis for official statistics

Authors
Verde R.; Batagelj V.; Brito P.; Silva A.P.D.; Korenjak-Cerne S.; Dobša J.; Diday E.;

Publication
Statistical Journal of the IAOS

Abstract
The paper draws attention to the use of Symbolic Data Analysis (SDA) in the field of Official Statistics. It is composed of three sections presenting three pilot techniques in the field of SDA. The three contributions range from a technique based on the notion of exactly unified summaries for the creation of symbolic objects, a model-based approach for interval data as an innovative parametric strategy in this context, and measures of similarity defined between a class and a collection of classes based on the frequency of the categories which characterize them. The paper shows the effectiveness of the proposed approaches as prototypes of numerous techniques developed within the SDA framework and opens to possible further developments.

2024

A case study on phishing detection with a machine learning net

Authors
Bezerra, A; Pereira, I; Rebelo, MA; Coelho, D; de Oliveira, DA; Costa, JFP; Cruz, RPM;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DATA SCIENCE AND ANALYTICS

Abstract
Phishing attacks aims to steal sensitive information and, unfortunately, are becoming a common practice on the web. Email phishing is one of the most common types of attacks on the web and can have a big impact on individuals and enterprises. There is still a gap in prevention when it comes to detecting phishing emails, as new attacks are usually not detected. The goal of this work was to develop a model capable of identifying phishing emails based on machine learning approaches. The work was performed in collaboration with E-goi, a multi-channel marketing automation company. The data consisted of emails collected from the E-goi servers in the electronic mail format. The problem consisted of a classification problem with unbalanced classes, with the minority class corresponding to the phishing emails and having less than 1% of the total emails. Several models were evaluated after careful data selection and feature extraction based on the email content and the literature regarding these types of problems. Due to the imbalance present in the data, several sampling methods based on under-sampling techniques were tested to see their impact on the model's ability to detect phishing emails. The final model consisted of a neural network able to detect more than 80% of phishing emails without compromising the remaining emails sent by E-goi clients.

2024

Personalized choice model for forecasting demand under pricing scenarios with observational data-The case of attended home delivery

Authors
Ali, ÖG; Amorim, P;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FORECASTING

Abstract
Discrete choice models can forecast market shares and individual choice probabilities with different price and alternative set scenarios. This work introduces a method to personalize choice models involving causal variables, such as price, using rich observational data. The model provides interpretable customer- and context-specific preferences, and price sensitivity, with an estimation procedure that uses orthogonalization. We caution against the nalive use of regularization to deal with the high-dimensional observational data challenge. We experiment with the attended home delivery (AHD) slot choice problem using data from a European online retailer. Our results indicate that while the popular non-personalized multinomial logit (MNL) model does very well at the aggregate (day-slot) level, personalization provides significantly and substantially more accurate predictions at the individual-context level. But the nalive personalization approach using regularization without orthogonalization wrongly predicts that the choice probability will increase if the slot price increases, rendering it unfit for forecasting demand with pricing scenarios. The proposed method avoids this problem. Further, we introduce features based on potential consideration sets in the AHD slot choice context that increase accuracy and allow for more realistic substitution patterns than the proportional substitution implied by MNL.

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