Abstract
Recommendation systems can play an important role in today's digital content platforms by supporting the suggestion of relevant content in a personalised manner for each customer. Such content customisation has not been consistent across most media domains, and particularly on radio streaming and gaming aggregators, which are the two real-world application domains focused in this work. The challenges faced in these application areas are the dynamic nature of user preferences and the difficulty of generating recommendations for less popular content, due to the overwhelming choice and polarisation of available top content. We present the design and implementation of a Reinforcement Learning-based Recommendation System (RLRS) for web applications, using a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) agent and, as a reward function, a weighted sum of the user Click Distribution (CD) across the recommended items and the Dwell Time (DT), a measure of the time users spend interacting with those items. Our system has been deployed in real production scenarios with preliminary but promising results. Several metrics are used to track the effectiveness of our approach, such as content coverage, category diversity, and intra-list similarity. In both scenarios tested, the system shows consistent improvement and adaptability over time, reinforcing its applicability.

Abstract
Developers of data-intensive georeplicated applications face a difficult decision when selecting a database system. As captured by the CAP theorem, CP systems such as Spanner provide strong consistency that greatly simplifies application development. AP systems such as AntidoteDB providing Transactional Causal Consistency (TCC), ensure availability in face of network partitions and isolate performance from wide-area round-trip times, but avoid lost-update anomalies only when values can be merged. Ideally, an application should be able to adapt to current data and network conditions by selecting which transactional consistency to use for each transaction. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that a georeplicated database system can be built at its core providing only TCC, hence, being AP, but allow an application to execute some transactions under Snapshot Isolation (SI), hence CP. Our main result is showing that this can be achieved even when all the interaction happens through the TCC database system, without additional communication channels between the participants. A preliminary experimental evaluation with a proof-of-concept implementation using AntidoteDB shows that this approach is feasible.

Abstract
The objective of this paper is to delineate the ongoing doctoral research work that is focused on the development of a digital model intended to emulate the real-Time operation of an electrolyzer that is powered by a DC/DC converter. The digital model of the converter and the proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer (EL) is presented, and it is based on an electrical equivalent model. A primary contribution of this study is the analysis of the errors resulting from the discretization process. Furthermore, the implementation and development of the digital model requires a comprehensive study of the errors and key affecting factors. Additionally, the formulation of a mechanism to reduce these errors is essential for advancing this topic. Preliminary results obtained using the digital emulator developed demonstrated its capacity to reproduce the voltage and current response applied to the electrolyzer with a reduced error compared to the continuous-Time model. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Abstract
The increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across various sectors of society raises complex ethical challenges requiring systematic and scalable oversight mechanisms. While tools such as AIF360 and Aequitas address specific dimensions, namely fairness, there remains a lack of comprehensive frameworks capable of auditing multiple ethical principles simultaneously. This paper introduces a multidimensional AI auditing tool designed to evaluate systems across key dimensions: fairness, explainability, robustness, transparency, bias, sustainability, and legal compliance. Unlike existing tools, our framework enables simultaneous assessment of these dimensions, supporting more holistic and accountable AI deployment. We demonstrate the tool’s applicability through use cases and discuss its implications for building trust and aligning AI development with fundamental ethical standards.

Abstract
Modelling complex information systems often entails the need for dealing with scenarios of inconsistency in which several requirements either reinforce or contradict each other. This lecture summarises recent joint work with Juliana Cunha, Alexandre Madeira and Ana Cruz on a variant of transition systems endowed with positive and negative accessibility relations, and a metric space over the lattice of truth values. Such structures are called paraconsistent transition systems, the qualifier stressing a connection to paraconsistent logic, a logic taking inconsistent information as potentially informative. A coalgebraic perspective on this family of structures is also discussed.

Abstract