Cookies
O website necessita de alguns cookies e outros recursos semelhantes para funcionar. Caso o permita, o INESC TEC irá utilizar cookies para recolher dados sobre as suas visitas, contribuindo, assim, para estatísticas agregadas que permitem melhorar o nosso serviço. Ver mais
Aceitar Rejeitar
  • Menu
Publicações

2026

A Scalable Approach for Unified Large Events Models in Soccer

Autores
Mendes Neves, T; Meireles, L; Mendes Moreira, J;

Publicação
MACHINE LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES. APPLIED DATA SCIENCE TRACK AND DEMO TRACK, ECML PKDD 2025, PT X

Abstract
Large Events Models (LEMs) are a class of models designed to predict and analyze the sequence of events in soccer matches, capturing the complex dynamics of the game. The original LEM framework, based on a chain of classifiers, faced challenges such as synchronization, scalability issues, and limited context utilization. This paper proposes a unified and scalable approach to model soccer events using a tabular autoregressive model. Our models demonstrate significant improvements over the original LEM, achieving higher accuracy in event prediction and better simulation quality, while also offering greater flexibility and scalability. The unified LEM framework enables a wide range of applications in soccer analytics that we display in this paper, including real-time match outcome prediction, player performance analysis, and game simulation, serving as a general solution for many problems in the field.

2026

Deep neural networks in medical microbiology for bacterial colonies classification

Autores
José Duarte Pereira; Bruno Veloso; João Gama;

Publicação
Scientific Reports

Abstract
Abstract While automation has transformed many areas inside clinical laboratories, microbiology still relies heavily on manual tasks, particularly the culture of samples on agar plates and their subsequent manual review for microorganism identification and antibiotic susceptibility profiling. Bacterial colony detection and classification require trained professionals, making the process time-consuming and prone to human error. Developing deep learning models to automate these tasks could improve microbiology workflows and accelerate clinical decision-making. In this study we trained and evaluated five object detection architectures (Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet with ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 backbones, and YOLOv8) on the Annotated Germs for Automated Recognition (AGAR) dataset for bacterial colony classification. Transfer learning, cross-subset generalization, and Weighted Box Fusion (WBF) ensemble methods were applied to enhance and characterize performance. Additionally, we created and publicly released a curated dataset of 165 agar plate images containing colonies of S. aureus , P. aeruginosa , and E. coli cultured across four distinct culture media. YOLOv8m achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 69.0% on the AGAR dataset, outperforming the best Detectron2 model (Faster R-CNN ResNet-101, 63.1%) by 5.9 percentage points. A four-model WBF ensemble combining both architectures reached 70.5% mAP (95% CI: 68.4–71.7). Cross-subset evaluation showed that a single model trained on the full dataset generalizes well to individual imaging conditions, making subset-specific fine-tuning largely unnecessary. On the curated dataset, a mixed ensemble reached 58.7% mAP (95% CI: 57.1–63.7). These results demonstrate that architecture choice and training data diversity are the primary drivers of performance for colony detection on agar plates.

2026

Enhancing logistics through a vehicle routing problem with deliveries, pickups, and backhauls

Autores
Santos, MJ; Jorge, D; Bonomi, V; Ramos, T; Póvoa, A;

Publicação
INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTIONS IN OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
Today, logistics activities are driven by the pressing need to simultaneously increase efficiency, reduce costs, and promote sustainability. In our research, we tackle this challenge by adapting a general vehicle routing problem with deliveries and pickups to accommodate different types of customers. Customers requiring both delivery and pickup services are mandatory, while those needing only a pickup service (backhaul customers) are optional and are only visited if profitable. A mixed-integer linear programming model is formulated to minimize fuel consumption. This model can address various scenarios, such as allowing mandatory customers to be served with combined or separate delivery or pickup visits, and visiting optional customers either during or only after mandatory customer visits. An adaptive large neighborhood search is developed to solve instances adapted from the literature as well as to solve a real-case study of a beverage distributor. The results show the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating the potential to utilize the available capacity on vehicles returning to the depot to create profitable and environmentally friendly routes, and so enhancing efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable logistics activities.

2026

CitiLink-Summ: A Dataset of Discussion Subjects Summaries in European Portuguese Municipal Meeting Minutes

Autores
Marques, M; Fernandes, AL; Pacheco, AF; Rebouças, R; Cantante, I; Isidro, J; Cunha, LF; Jorge, A; Guimarães, N; Nunes, S; Leal, A; Silvano, P; Campos, R;

Publicação
WWW

Abstract
Municipal meeting minutes are formal records documenting the discussions and decisions of local government, yet their content is often lengthy, dense, and difficult for citizens to navigate. Automatic summarization can help address this challenge by producing concise summaries for each discussion subject. Despite its potential, research on summarizing discussion subjects in municipal meeting minutes remains largely unexplored, especially in low-resource languages, where the inherent complexity of these documents adds further challenges. A major bottleneck is the scarcity of datasets containing high-quality, manually crafted summaries, which limits the development and evaluation of effective summarization models for this domain. In this paper, we present CitiLink-Summ, a new corpus of European Portuguese municipal meeting minutes, comprising 120 documents and 2,880 manually hand-written summaries, each corresponding to a distinct discussion subject. Leveraging this dataset, we establish baseline results for automatic summarization in this domain, employing state-of-the-art generative models (e.g., BART, PRIMERA) as well as large language models (LLMs), evaluated with both lexical and semantic metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, METEOR, and BERTScore. CitiLink-Summ provides the first benchmark for municipal-domain summarization in European Portuguese, offering a valuable resource for advancing NLP research on complex administrative texts.

2026

A machine learning analysis to identify biomarkers on Holter data of white matter lesions in Fabry disease patients

Autores
Araújo, B; Moura, AR; Veloso, B; Azevedo, O; Gago, MF; Erlhagen, W; Bicho, E; Ferreira, F;

Publicação
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DATA SCIENCE AND ANALYTICS

Abstract
Fabry disease (FD) is a rare genetic disorder associated with cardiac abnormalities and often overlooked brain white matter lesions (WMLs). Despite the importance of early WMLs detection, diagnosis is frequently delayed. The aim is to identify electrocardiographic biomarkers linked to WMLs in middle-aged FD patients using machine learning, assessing their potential as non-invasive diagnostic tools. This retrospective study analyzed electrocardiographic data from FD patients aged 40-59. A feature selection process based on variance inflation factor analysis identified nine relevant features, including heart rate variability and QT interval parameters. Machine learning classifiers-logistic regression, support vector machines, random forest, and k-nearest neighbors-were trained and evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and AUC. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis was used to interpret model predictions. The random forest model achieved the highest accuracy (0.81) using all nine features. A subset consisting of SDANN 5 and QTc Min also performed well (accuracy 0.75) in other models. SHAP analysis highlighted SDANN 5 as a key predictor. Machine learning applied to ECG data shows promise for early WML detection in FD, supporting the integration of computational methods into diagnostics for complex genetic diseases.

2026

CitiLink-Minutes: A Multilayer Annotated Dataset of Municipal Meeting Minutes

Autores
Campos, R; Pacheco, AF; Fernandes, AL; Cantante, I; Rebouças, R; Cunha, LF; Isidro, J; Evans, J; Marques, M; Batista, R; Amorim, E; Jorge, A; Guimaraes, N; Nunes, S; Leal, A; Silvano, P;

Publicação
ADVANCES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, ECIR 2026, PT IV

Abstract
City councils play a crucial role in local governance, directly influencing citizens' daily lives through decisions made during municipal meetings. These deliberations are formally documented in meeting minutes, which serve as official records of discussions, decisions, and voting outcomes. Despite their importance, municipal meeting records have received little attention in Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), largely due to the lack of annotated datasets, which ultimately limit the development of computational models. To address this gap, we introduce CitiLink-Minutes, a multilayer dataset of 120 European Portuguese municipal meeting minutes from six municipalities. Unlike prior annotated datasets of parliamentary or video records, CitiLink-Minutes provides multilayer annotations and structured linkage of official written minutes. The dataset contains over one million tokens, with all personal identifiers de-identified. Each minute was manually annotated by two trained annotators and curated by an experienced linguist across four complementary dimensions: (1) personal information, (2) metadata, (3) subjects of discussion, and (4) voting outcomes, totaling over 38,000 individual annotations. Released under FAIR principles and accompanied by baseline results on metadata extraction, topic classification, and vote labeling, CitiLink-Minutes demonstrates its potential for downstream NLP and IR tasks, while promoting transparent access to municipal decisions.

  • 35
  • 4525