Joao Barroso

• PhD
• Full Professor at University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro

In the field of gaming artificial intelligence, selecting the appropriate machine learning approach is essential for improving decision-making and automation. This paper examines the effectiveness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) within interactive gaming environments, focusing on complex decision-making tasks. Utilizing the Unity engine, we co...

Within the scope of the Mobilizing Agenda for the Development of Intelligent Green Mobility Products and Systems (A-MoVeR), specifically in the second PPS2 defined the presentation of a “new electric motorcycle, with high autonomy, aimed at promoting comfortable, efficient and green urban mobility"". In this context, we intend to develop user inter...

We studied how Blender, a free and open-source 3D creation software, could create a detailed virtual wine sensory laboratory setting. • Blender was used to model a realistic vineyard surrounding the lab with different parameters and a virtual sensory lab that can effectively enhance participants' understanding of the wine's flavor quality. • The vi...

Microtasks have become increasingly popular in the digital labor market since they provide easy access to a crowd of people with varying skills and aptitudes to perform remote work tasks that even the most capable algorithmic systems are unable to complete in a timely and efficient fashion. However, despite the latest advancements in crowd-powered...

Accessibility in digital labor is a research line that has been trending over the last few years. The usage of crowdsourcing, especially in the form of microtasks, can become an inclusive solution to support accessible digital work. Integrating cognitive abilities tests and task fingerprinting has proven to be effective mechanisms for microtask per...

Virtual assistants offer a new type of solution to handle interaction between human and machine and can be applied in various business contexts such as Industry or Education. When designing and building a virtual assistant the developers must ensure a set of parameters to achieve a good solution. Various platforms and frameworks emerged to allow de...

This research focuses on developing a wearable device that aims to enhance problem-solving and communication abilities within the context of Industry 4.0. The wearable is being developed in the Continental Advanced Antenna, and it allows operators to notify material shortages on the manufacturing line and helps minimize workflow disturbance. The we...

Online microtask labor has increased its role in the last few years and has provided the possibility of people who were usually excluded from the labor market to work anytime and without geographical barriers. While this brings new opportunities for people to work remotely, it can also pose challenges regarding the difficulty of assigning tasks to...

Extreme weather events, such as windstorms, hurricanes, and heat waves, exert a significant impact on global natural catastrophes and pose substantial challenges for weather forecasting systems. To enhance the accuracy and preparedness for extreme weather events, this study explores the potential of using expert crowdsourcing in storm forecasting r...

In the last 30 years, several academic and commercial projects have explored the context-awareness concept in multiple domains. Ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence are features associated with the 4th generation industry empowering space to interact and respond appropriately according to context. In the scope of Industry 4.0, context-awar...

The buffering capacity of human saliva is not sufficient to maintain a constant pH after contact with the wine. • α-Amylase enzyme activity and concentration depend on the degree of stress the individual is subjected to during the saliva collection. • α-Amylase activity significantly increases in the presence of alcoholic and acidic beverages and d...

When crowd workers provide their contributions in a shared working environment, they may be influenced by the inputs of other contributors in implicit ways. Stigmergy in crowdsourcing consists of tracking changes in work activities to guide crowd workers based on the digital traces left by other workers. In such scenarios, there is no direct commun...

Facial expression is a way of communication that can be used to interact with computers or other electronic devices and the recognition of emotion from faces is an emerging practice with application in many fields. There are many cloud-based vision application programming interfaces available that recognize emotion from facial images and video. In...

Our study provides valuable insights into the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and Human Resource Management (HRM). We have minimised bias and ensured reliable findings by employing a systematic literature review and the PRISMA statement. Our comprehensive synthesis of the studies included in this research, along with a bibliometri...

The study of data quality in crowdsourcing campaigns is currently a prominent research topic, given the diverse range of participants involved. A potential solution to enhancing data quality processes in crowdsourcing is cognitive personalization, which involves appropriately adapting or assigning tasks based on a crowd worker's cognitive profile....

The massive industrialization of products in a factory environment requires testing the product at a stage before its exportation to the sales market. For example, the end-of-line tests at Continental Advanced Antenna contribute to the validation of an antenna’s functionality, a product manufactured by this organization. In addition, the storage of...

With the increase of distance learning, in general, and e-learning, in particular, having a system capable of determining the engagement of students is of primordial importance, and one of the biggest challenges, both for teachers, researchers and policy makers. Here, we present a system to detect the engagement level of the students. It uses only...

Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, popular Virtual Assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, can be applied to a wide variety of business areas. One area in which Virtual Assistants can be very useful is in Education, specially due to the pandemics that is occurring during the last years, as it can provide to students,...

Physical activity is movement of the body or part of the body to make muscles more active and to lose the energy from the body. Regular physical activity in the daily routine is very important to maintain good physical and mental health. It can be performed at home, a rehabilitation center, gym, etc., with a regular monitoring system. How long and...

In this paper, we describe a preliminary study on a multisensory music experience for people with hearing loss. Our main goal is to provide a music event through visual and tactile stimuli, granting a multisensory experience using haptic interfaces and taking advantage of visual feedback, vibrations and pressure to induce feelings. In this context,...

A typical example of a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a system that allows a person to move a ball displayed on a computer screen to the left or to the right, simply by imagining the movement of the left or right hand, respectively. Since the term Brain-Computer Interface was coined in 1973, the interest and efforts in this field have grown trem...

This work focuses on the issues encountered when using current evaluation tools to assess the accessibility and usability of web and mobile applications. Therefore, we present a case study, where we tested three accessibility assessment tools against the official website of Portuguese Institute for Employment and Vocational (IEFP), used by millions...

The current technological advances have pushed the quantification of exercise intensity to new era of physical exercise sciences. Monitoring physical exercise is essential in the process of planning, applying, and controlling loads for performance optimization and health. A lot of research studies applied various statistical approaches to estimate...

Vocational high school is a secondary education whose practice portion is larger than its theoretical portion. This allows students to do more hands-on practice in the laboratory, as skill competency is very important in vocational education. Through practice, students have the skills to become competent and skilled technicians in the future. When...

Today digital labor increasingly advocates for the inclusion of people who are excluded from society in some way. The proliferation of crowdsourcing as a new form of digital labor consisting mainly of microtasks that are characterized by a low level of complexity and short time periods in terms of accomplishment has allowed a wide spectrum of peopl...

The advance of industrialization regarding the optimization of production to obtain greater productivity and consequently generate more profits has led to the emergence of Industry 4.0, which aims to create an environment called smart manufacturing. On the other hand, the Internet of Things is a global network of interrelated physical devices, such...

The Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm comes as a direct action by the German government to improve the industrial production process, by enhancing the ability to take action during the process and produce customized products, while maintaining the mass production industrial context. The I4.0 solutions rely on cybernetics systems that can enhance the use...

Crowdsourcing has received considerable attention over the last fifteen years and has been the subject of several experiments that demonstrate its large potential for use in real-world situations. With the rapid growth of and access to crowd work environments, there is a need for new ways to ensure more equitable access for all people. Task design...

Industry 4.0 has been changing and improving the manufacturing processes. To embrace these changes, factories must keep up to date with all the new emerging technologies. In the automotive industry, the growing demand for customization and constant car model changes leads to an inevitable grow of complexity of the final product quality inspection p...

The accelerated changes on our planet have led to a growing interest in climate change and its consequences: natural hazards and adverse socio-economic impacts. However, the development of climate research and the proliferation of datasets require an integrated and efficient approach to the analysis, investigation, and visualization of atmospheric...

In Portugal, the dropout rate of university courses is around 29%. Understanding the reasons behind such a high desertion rate can drastically improve the success of students and universities. This work applies existing data mining techniques to predict the academic dropout mainly using the academic grades. Four different machine learning technique...

In this paper, a new framework for accurate reliability analysis is proposed based on improving the directional simulation by using metaheuristic algorithms. Usually for highly nonlinear and complex performance functions, finding the unit vector direction requires very high calculations or impossible practically. Hence, the novel improved version i...

This research aims at investigating which web accessibility and usability tools, with the focus on the ones that warrant automation, are available to assess the quality of interfaces for people with disabilities and/or special needs, enabling them to navigate and interact with web and mobile apps. Our search strategy identified 72 scientific articl...

Mobile devices, as smartphones and tablets, have presented an exponential growth, being part of our everyday life, particularly considering children [1]. Their daily habits are undoubtedly influenced by technology and the applications they use can affect socialization and learning processes [2]. Specifically, games are the most popular type of appl...

The Portuguese population is aging at an increasing rate, which introduces new problems, particularly in rural areas, where the population is small and widely spread throughout the territory. These people, mostly elderly, have low income and are often isolated and socially excluded. This work researches and proposes an affordable Ambient Assisted L...

Currently, solutions based on the Internet of Things (IoT) concept are increasingly being adopted in several fields, namely, industry, agriculture, and home automation. The costs associated with this type of equipment is reasonably small, as IoT devices usually do not have output peripherals to display information about their status (e.g., a screen...

The aim of this study was to develop a non-contact method based on computer vision to determine the heart rate and, ultimately, the exercise intensity. The method was based on analyzing facial color changes during exercise by using RGB, HSV, YCbCr, Lab, and YUV color models. Nine university students participated in the study (mean age = 26.88±6.01...

Nowadays, the Portuguese population is aging at a fast pace. The situation is more severe in the interior regions of the country, where the rural areas have few people and have been constantly losing population; these are mostly elderly who, in some cases, live socially isolated. They are also often deprived of some types of social, health and tech...

In this paper, the study of the design and implementation of a game-based application for learning new basic concepts and/or re-learning these concepts within a cognitive rehabilitation perspective, is presented. Specifically, in this first version, the topics considered were: colours, animals, objects, and vehicles. The solution was developed to b...

The dropout of university students has been a factor of concern for educational institutions, affecting various aspects such as the institution’s reputation and funding and rankings. For this reason, it is essential to identify which students are at risk . In this study, algorithms based on decision trees and random forests are proposed to solve th...

Visualization can be defined as a technique that allows us to obtain the perception of an object/event in a clear and consistent way. The use of visualization in education is a key factor to explain complex information in a clear way. Therefore, it is essential to have tools capable of visualizing various types of data. An example of a data type is...

The harsh impacts of extreme weather events like cyclones or precipitation extremes are increasingly being felt with hazardous consequences. These extreme events are exceptions to well-known weather patterns and therefore are not forecasted with current automatic computational methods. In this context, the use of human computation to annotate extre...

The demand for online services is increasing. Services that would require a long time to understand, use and master are becoming as transparent as possible to the users, that tend to focus only on the final goals. Combined with the advantages of the unmanned vehicles (UV), from the unmanned factor to the reduced size and costs, we found an opportun...

Data and services are available anywhere at any time thanks to the Internet and mobile devices. Nowadays, there are new ways of representing data through trendy technologies such as augmented reality (AR), which extends our perception of reality through the addition of a virtual layer on top of real-time images. The great potential of unmanned aeri...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second International Conference on Technology and Innovation in Learning, Teaching and Education, TECH-EDU 2020, held in Vila Real, Portugal, in December 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held in a fully virtual format. The 27 revised full papers...

Dyscalculia is a specific neurological affliction that disrupts a person’s ability to understand and manipulate numbers. We intend to develop a serious game for children who attend primary school (up to 4th grade) and whose purpose is making the learning of basic mathematics (simple arithmetic) easier, by introducing specific mathematical problems...

In this study, the development of a mobile application, for people with visual disabilities, is presented. The solution allows assistance to easily walk outside and be warned from the obstacles that could appear. Specifically, the application alerts, with audio stimulus, the user for the incoming dangerous objects by identifying them at a certain d...

e-Learning promotes asynchronous and synchronous access to education, free from geographical barriers, allowing a great number of people, that otherwise could not study, continue their academic life. Access, however, should be equally granted for All, not limited to the instrumental level, providing a dynamic model that meets the needs of the stude...

Facial expression analysis is a widespread technology applied in various research areas, including sports science. In the last few decades, facial expression analysis has become a key technology for monitoring physical exercise. In this paper, a deep neural network is proposed to recognize seven basic emotions and their corresponding probability va...

The academic performance of a higher education student can be affected by several factors and in most cases Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have programs to intervene, prevent failure or students dropping out. These include student tutoring, mentoring, recovery classes, summer school, etc. Being able to identify the borderline cases is extremel...

In this paper, we aimed at exploring the use of iconographic navigation to support inclusive and accessible search for Web content through an extension for Google Chrome browser, entitled Extension Icon. Despite Extension Icon was developed to be a solution that allows people with intellectual disabilities to search autonomously using an iconograph...

The automotive industry has an extremely high-quality product standard, not just for the security risks each faulty component can present, but the very brand image it must uphold at all times to stay competitive. In this paper, a prototype model is proposed for smart quality inspection using machine vision. The engine labels are detected using Fast...

Accessibility is important to include people with disabilities in public life. People with disabilities experience problems in their lives due to products which aren’t designed for them. Addressing these problems is the responsibility of all humanity and the search for solutions should increase. Improving disabled persons’ lives is only possible by...

The fourth author name was missed in the original publication. The correct list of authors should read as “Hugo Fernandes, Paulo Costa, Vitor Filipe, Hugo Paredes, João Barroso”. It has been corrected in this erratum. The original article has been updated.

The capability of drones to perform autonomous missions has led retail companies to use them for deliveries, saving time and human resources. In these services, the delivery depends on the Global Positioning System (GPS) to define an approximate landing point. However, the landscape can interfere with the satellite signal (e.g., tall buildings), re...

The possibility to engage in autonomous flight through geolocation-based missions turns Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) into valuable tools that save time and resources in services like deliveries and surveillance. Amazon is already developing a drop-by delivery service, but there are limitations regarding the client’s id, that can be analyzed in th...

e-Learning promotes asynchronous and synchronous access to education, free from geographical barriers, allowing a great number of people, that oth-erwise could not study, continue their academic life. Access, however, should be equally granted for All, not limited to the instrumental level, providing a dynamic model that meets the needs of the stud...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Technologies and Learning, ICITL 2020, held in Porto, Portugal, in November 2020. The 65 full papers presented together with 2 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 127 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical s...

The ageing population and the increasing longevity of individuals is a challenging reality for healthcaretoday. Longevity often leads to increased dependence and the need for continued care, whichis often left to informal caregivers given the inability of the elderly care network to provide. The informal care provided to the dependent elderly occur...

If done properly, physical exercise can help maintain fitness and health. The benefits of physical exercise could be increased with real time monitoring by measuring physical exercise intensity, which refers to how hard it is for a person to perform a specific task. This parameter can be estimated using various sensors, including contactless techno...

Much effort is put into Information Technology (IT) to achieve better efficiency and quality of expressing communication between autistic children with the surrounding. This paper presents an application that aims to help the autistic child to interact and express their feeling with their loved ones in easy manner. The major objective of the projec...

Information can be conveyed to the user by means of a narrative, modeled according to the user’s context. A case in point is the weather, which can be perceived differently and with distinct levels of importance according to the user’s context. For example, for a blind person, the weather is an important element to plan and move between locations....

In this work we reviewed the current state-of-the art regarding the usage of robots, in particular telepresence robots, on educational related activities. We also researched the current consumer and corporate grade telepresence robotic equipment and tested three of these devices. Lastly, we reviewed the problem of disabled students, including stude...

The usage of unmanned vehicles for professional, recreational and healthy purposes has increased and is a huge signal of their advantages. Among other benefits, they reduce or even cancel the need of having human lives aboard, which means that there is no risk of injuries in dangerous tasks. Although, most of the time the users are near the vehicle...

AppVox is a mobile application that provides support for children with speech and language impairments in their speech therapy sessions, while also allowing autonomous training at home. The application simulates a vocalizer with an audio stimulus feature, which can be used to train and amend the pronunciation of specific words through repetition. I...

The overall objective of this work is to review the assistive technologies that have been proposed by researchers in recent years to address the limitations in user mobility posed by visual impairment. This work presents an “umbrella review.” Visually impaired people often want more than just information about their location and often need to relat...

Two-thirds of the world's population currently lives in areas that experience water scarcity for at least one month every year. And like humans, plants, and especially grapes in vineyards, need the correct amount of water in order to grow healthy. Therefore, to assist the irrigation process, we do not only need to use reliable measuring systems to...

Experiences with online learning in higher education are increasing in number. This is due to advancements in technology, technological savviness of teachers and students, evolution of teaching practices, and changes in student expectations. That is why understanding learners’ and teachers’ needs, expectations, and perceptions of their proficiency...

The peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is characterized by leg pain during walking, and a recommended treatment for this disease is to perform supervised physical activity. In this chapter, a system that monitories the physical activity containing one application for smartwatch, one application for smartphone, and a back-end webservice is presented....

In this paper an augmentative and alternative communication mobile application for people with language and speech impairments, called Diga Olá, is presented. With this mobile application, we aimed to assist people with speech and language impairment in their communication process, by presenting an alternative mobile solution in Portuguese language...

Many cloud vision APIs are available on the internet to recognize emotion from facial images and video analysis. The capacity to recognize emotions under various poses is a fundamental requirement in the area of emotion recognition. In this paper, the performance of two famous emotion recognition APIs is evaluated under the facial images of various...

Kinematic analysis of human movement is very important in several areas, such as in sports (e.g., for athletic performance analysis), health (e.g., rehabilitation of people with motor disabilities) and others. The study of the kinematics of the human body involves several methods that resort to the analysis of several parameters that come from the...