Abstract

Abstract
Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) are bound to play a fundamental role in the maintenance of offshore wind farms. Robust navigation for inspection vehicles should take into account the operation of docking within a harbouring structure, which is a critical and still unexplored maneuver. This work proposes an end-to-end docking approach for ASVs, based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), which teaches an agent to tackle collision-free navigation towards a target pose that allows the berthing of the vessel. The developed research presents a methodology that introduces the concept of illegal actions to facilitate the vessel's exploration during the learning process. This method improves the adopted Actor-Critic (AC) framework by accelerating the agent's optimization by approximately 38.02%. A set of comprehensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the presented method in scenarios with simulated environmental constraints (Beaufort Scale and Douglas Sea Scale), and a diversity of docking structures. Validation with two different real ASVs in both controlled and real environments demonstrates the ability of this method to enable safe docking maneuvers without prior knowledge of the scenario. © 2024 The Author(s)

Abstract

Abstract
AbstractBreakthroughs in sequencing technologies led to an exponential growth of genomic data, providing unprecedented biological in-sights and new therapeutic applications. However, analyzing such large amounts of sensitive data raises key concerns regarding data privacy, specifically when the information is outsourced to third-party infrastructures for data storage and processing (e.g., cloud computing). Current solutions for data privacy protection resort to centralized designs or cryptographic primitives that impose considerable computational overheads, limiting their applicability to large-scale genomic analysis.We introduce Gyosa, a secure and privacy-preserving distributed genomic analysis solution. Unlike in previous work, Gyosafollows a distributed processing design that enables handling larger amounts of genomic data in a scalable and efficient fashion. Further, by leveraging trusted execution environments (TEEs), namely Intel SGX, Gyosaallows users to confidentially delegate their GWAS analysis to untrusted third-party infrastructures. To overcome the memory limitations of SGX, we implement a computation partitioning scheme within Gyosa. This scheme reduces the number of operations done inside the TEEs while safeguarding the users’ genomic data privacy. By integrating this security scheme inGlow, Gyosaprovides a secure and distributed environment that facilitates diverse GWAS studies. The experimental evaluation validates the applicability and scalability of Gyosa, reinforcing its ability to provide enhanced security guarantees. Further, the results show that, by distributing GWASes computations, one can achieve a practical and usable privacy-preserving solution.

Abstract
Hydrogen is currently getting more and more attention in the European climate strategy as a promising enabling technology to decarbonize industry, transport sector and to provide a long-term, high-capacity energy storage solution. However, to truly contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions, hydrogen must be produced respecting a principle of additionality, to ensure that it is produced using renewable energy sources and that its production does not decrease the green energy supplied to other loads. This study tracks the share of renewables generation in the energy mix used to produce hydrogen by applying a power flow tracing technique integrated with an optimal power flow analysis. This method allows the minimization of the system operation costs, while maximizing the green hydrogen production and considering the additionality principle. The system cost function is also modified to include the sizing and allocation of conventional batteries in the grid, and assess their ability to further increase the share of green energy in hydrogen production.

Abstract
Barcelos is a historic city in Portugal with many tourist attractions, attracting more and more visitors who come to the city with the aim of exploring it. The main objective of this article is to boost tourism in the city of Barcelos, specifically highlighting tourist, historical and leisure spots, based on the development of a mobile application using augmented reality technologies and geolocation. This application intends to allow the users to know historical points of interest in Barcelos, as well as interact with a certain point. The results of this investigation were evaluated by testing the application by end users, with the aim of identifying whether the application meets their needs, in particular the promotion of tourist and historical points. © 2023