Abstract
CoffeeMush is an innovative and sustainable project developed as part of the European Project Semester (EPS) at ISEP in 2024. This student project aims to tackle waste management environmental problems by turning coffee waste into mushrooms, a valuable food source. CoffeeMush consists of a smart device providing optimal conditions for mushroom cultivation, complemented by a user-friendly Android application for remote monitoring and control. The design was guided by ethical, sustainability, market and technical considerations. The paper describes the theoretical background of the project, the technical design, and the prototype development and testing. The results show the feasibility of CoffeeMush as a practical and environmentally friendly solution for urban mushroom cultivation, and its impact on sustainable food production and waste reduction. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

Abstract
The growing integration of intermittent renewable energy sources poses new challenges to power system stability [...]

Abstract
With the growing interest in underwater exploration and monitoring, autonomous underwater vehicles have become essential. The recent interest in onboard deep learning (DL) has advanced real-time environmental interaction capabilities relying on efficient and accurate vision-based DL models. However, the predominant use of sonar in underwater environments, characterized by limited training data and inherent noise, poses challenges to model robustness. This autonomy improvement raises safety concerns for deploying such models during underwater operations, potentially leading to hazardous situations. This article aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of sonar-based DL under the scope of robustness. It studies sonar-based DL perception task models, such as classification, object detection, segmentation, and simultaneous localization and mapping. Furthermore, this article systematizes sonar-based state-of-the-art data sets, simulators, and robustness methods, such as neural network verification, out-of-distribution, and adversarial attacks. This article highlights the lack of robustness in sonar-based DL research and suggests future research pathways, notably establishing a baseline sonar-based data set and bridging the simulation-to-reality gap.

Abstract
In healthcare, diagnoses usually rely on physician expertise. However, complex cases may benefit from consulting similar past clinical reports cases. In this paper, we present MedLink (http://medlink.inesctec.pt), a tool that given a free-text medical report, retrieves and ranks relevant clinical case reports published in health conferences and journals, aiming to support clinical decision-making, particularly in challenging or complex diagnoses. To this regard, we trained two BERT models on the sentence similarity task: a bi-encoder for retrieval and a cross-encoder for reranking. To evaluate our approach, we used 10 medical reports and asked a physician to rank the top 10 most relevant published case reports for each one. Our results show that MedLink’s ranking model achieved NDCG@10 of 0.747. Our demo also includes the visualization of clinical entities (using a NER model) and the production of a textual explanation (using a LLM) to ease comparison and contrasting between reports. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
In the spring of 2023, a team of European Project Semester (EPS) students enrolled at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) chose to foster socialisation in urban spaces. Public spaces are ideal sites to promote social interaction and community involvement. The aim of this project is then to use such places to divert attention from smartphones by promoting physical social interaction. In recent years, the combination of interactive games and technology has emerged as a potential strategy to increase the use and allure of public areas. The proposed solution, named Shift it, is a puzzle game that combines technology with old school gaming, providing a fun and unique socialising experience. The game, to be installed in public areas, has as key features inclusiveness (invites all people to play), fun (creates a healthy competitive setup) and empathy (creates puzzles by taking and scrambling user pictures). This paper presents the proposed design, which was based on state-of-the-art, ethics, market and sustainability analyses, followed by the development and testing of a proof-of-concept prototype. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) offers an immersive experience by simulating realistic environments, reducing the need for physical spaces and equipment. This technology addresses the challenges of traditional testing and learning, which often involve high costs, hardware limitations, and health concerns. In this paper, we use Blender, an open-source 3D creation software, to model a virtual vineyard and a wine sensory analysis laboratory. The vineyard is populated with various plants across a large virtual space, and the sensory lab is designed to simulate wine-tasting processes. The virtual lab enables users to explore and understand the sensory characteristics of wine in a controlled, immersive environment, providing an effective alternative to physical labs. Our simulations demonstrate that VR can replicate real-world environments with high fidelity and improve user engagement. The results suggest that using VR for wine sensory analysis can enhance educational outcomes, reduce costs, and offer an innovative platform for research and learning. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.