2026
Autores
Conde, MA; Rodríguez-Sedano, FJ; García-Peñalvo, FJ; Suganuma, L; Gonçalves, J; Jormanainen, I; Yigzaw, S;
Publicação
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
Autores
Costa, VV; Costa, D; Veloso, B; Rocha, EM;
Publicação
Abstract
2026
Autores
Zhao, RR; Sun, JB; Jiang, J; Gama, J;
Publicação
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
Autores
Reis, MJCS; Serôdio, C; Branco, F;
Publicação
ELECTRONICS
Abstract
Image reconstruction from incomplete measurements is a fundamental problem in signal and image processing, with applications ranging from medical imaging to computational photography. In recent years, deep learning approaches have shown promising performance, particularly when combined with physics-inspired formulations such as deep unrolling. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of classical interpolation and variational reconstruction methods, direct convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and unrolled data-consistency CNN architectures for image reconstruction under different sampling patterns. We consider three representative mask types: structured block masks, nonuniform masks, and random sampling patterns, with sampling ratios ranging from 10% to 50%. Experiments are conducted on the public BSDS500 image dataset, using a fixed grayscale preprocessing pipeline and a reproducible train/validation/test split. Experimental results demonstrate that reconstruction performance strongly depends on the sampling pattern. For random masks, the full unrolled DC-CNN achieves the best quantitative and qualitative performance, reaching a PSNR of 30.98 dB and an SSIM of 0.921 at 50% sampling. In contrast, for structured block and nonuniform masks, TV-based inpainting provides the strongest overall performance, showing that classical model-based reconstruction remains highly competitive when the sampling pattern contains spatially coherent missing regions. A block-size sensitivity analysis further confirms that the difficulty of structured-mask reconstruction is governed by the geometric severity of the missing region. Statistical analysis using paired tests with Holm correction confirms that the main performance differences are significant across the evaluated configurations. Furthermore, we show that a lightweight unrolled model with shared weights and reduced depth achieves a substantially lower parameter count and lower computational cost than the full unrolled architecture, although with reduced accuracy in the most favorable random-sampling cases. These findings provide practical insights into the relationship between sampling strategies and reconstruction performance, offering guidance for the design of efficient and robust learning-based reconstruction systems.
2026
Autores
Pfahringer, B; Japkowicz, N; Larrañaga, P; Ribeiro, RP; Dutra, I; Pechenizkiy, M; Cortez, P; Pashami, S; Jorge, AM; Soares, C; Abreu, PH; Gama, J;
Publicação
ECML/PKDD (8)
Abstract
2026
Autores
Currie, CSM; M'Hallah, R; Oliveira, BB;
Publicação
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.
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