Ivo Pereira

Abstract
The exponential growth of data in the digital age has led to a significant demand for innovative approaches to assess data in a manner that is both effective and efficient. Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) is a category of services that offers considerable potential for organisations to extract valuable insights from their data while reducing the requirement for heavy technical expertise. This article explores the use of MLaaS within the realm of marketing applications. In this study, we provide a comprehensive analysis of MLaaS implementations and their benefits within the domain of marketing. Furthermore, we present a platform that possesses the capability to be customised and expanded to address marketing's unique requirements. Three modules are introduced: Churn Prediction, One-2-One Product Recommendation, and Send Frequency Prediction. When applied to marketing, the proposed MLaaS system exhibits considerable promise for use in applications such as automated detection of client churn prior to its occurrence, individualised product recommendations, and send time optimisation. Our study revealed that AI-driven campaigns can improve both the Open Rate and Click Rate. This approach has the potential to enhance customer engagement and retention for businesses while enabling well-informed decisions by leveraging insights derived from consumer data. This work contributes to the existing body of research on MLaaS in marketing and offers practical insights for businesses seeking to utilise this approach to enhance their competitive edge in the contemporary data-oriented marketplace.

Abstract
All types of sports are potential application scenarios for automatic and real-time visual object and event detection. In rink hockey, the popular roller skate variant of team hockey, it is of great interest to automatically track player movements, positions, and sticks, and also to make other judgments, such as being able to locate the ball. In this work, we present a real-time pipeline consisting of an object detection model specifically designed for rink hockey games, followed by a knowledge-based event detection module. Even in the presence of occlusions and fast movements, our deep learning object detection model effectively identifies and tracks important visual elements in real time, such as: ball, players, sticks, referees, crowd, goalkeeper, and goal. Using a curated dataset consisting of a collection of rink hockey videos containing 2525 annotated frames, we trained and evaluated the algorithm's performance and compared it to state-of-the-art object detection techniques. Our object detection model, based on YOLOv7, presents a global accuracy of 80% and, according to our results, good performance in terms of accuracy and speed, making it a good choice for rink hockey applications. In our initial tests, the event detection module successfully detected an important event type in rink hockey games, namely, the occurrence of penalties.

Abstract
Digital Marketing sets a sequence of strategies responsible for maximizing the interaction between companies and their target audience. One of them, known as Customer Success, establishes long-term techniques capable of projecting the sustainable value of a given customer to a company, monitoring the indexers that translate its activities. Therefore, this paper intends to address the need to develop an innovative tool that allows the creation of a temporal knowledge base composed of the behavioral evolution of customers. The CRISP-DM model benefits the processing and modeling of data capable of generating knowledge through the application and combination of the results obtained by machine learning algorithms specialized in time series. Time Series K-Means allows the clustering and differentiation of consumers characterized by their similar habits. Through the formulation of profiles, it is possible to apply forecasting methods that predict the following trends. The proposed solution provides the understanding of time series that profile the flow of customer activity and the use of the evidenced dynamics for the future prediction of these behaviors. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
In recent years growing volumes of data have made the task of applying various machine learning algorithms a challenge in a great number of cases. This challenge is posed in two main ways: training time and processing load. Normally, problems in these two categories may be attributed to irrelevant, redundant, or noisy features. So as to avoid this type of feature most pre-processing pipelines include a step dedicated so selecting the most relevant features or combining existing ones into a single better representation. These techniques are denominated dimensionality reduction techniques. In this work, we aim to present a short look at the current state of the art in this area. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Since its appearance in 2008, blockchain technology has found multiple uses in fields such as banking, supply chain management, and healthcare. One of the most intriguing uses of blockchain is in voting systems, where the technology can overcome the security and transparency concerns that plague traditional voting systems. This paper provides a thorough examination of the implementation of a blockchain-based voting system. The proposed system employs cryptographic methods to protect voters' privacy and anonymity while ensuring the verifiability and integrity of election results. Digital signatures, homomorphic encryption (He), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus method underpin the system. A review of the literature on the use of blockchain technology for voting systems supports the analysis and the technical and logistical constraints connected with implementing the suggested system. The study suggests solutions to problems such as managing voter identification and authentication, ensuring accessibility for all voters, and dealing with network latency and scalability. The suggested blockchain-based voting system can provide a safe and transparent platform for casting and counting votes, ensuring election results' privacy, anonymity, and verifiability. The implementation of blockchain technology can overcome traditional voting systems' security and transparency shortcomings while also delivering a high level of integrity and traceability.