Miguel Sales Dias

Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon | ISCTE · Department of Information Science and Technology

Purpose There are several studies showing that end-users' participation in the architectural design process of houses is critical to their satisfaction (e.g. Önder et al., 2010; Ammar et al., 2013). Housing that is not adjusted to inhabitants' needs leads to modification works (Davidson et al., 2007) that could be avoided if their design was define...

The aim of this work was to validate the measurements of three physiological parameters, namely, body temperature, heart rate, and peripheral oxygen saturation, captured with an out-of-the-lab device using measurements taken with clinically proven devices. The out-of-the-lab specialized device was integrated into a customized mHealth application, e...

Aortic stenosis (AS) is a critical cardiovascular condition that necessitates precise diagnosis for effective patient care. Despite a limited dataset comprising only 202 images, our study employs transfer learning to investigate the efficacy of five convolutional neural network (CNN) models, coupled with advanced computer vision techniques, in accu...

The inhabitants' participation in their houses' design process is critical for the customization of houses to their needs and aspirations and, thus, their satisfaction. The provision of mass-housing customization can be addressed using digital technologies, as they offer the generation of a wide range of solutions that can respond to the inhabitant...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) account for a significant portion of global mortality, emphasizing the need for effective strategies. This study focuses on myocardial infarction, pulmonary thromboembolism, and aortic stenosis, aiming to empower medical practitioners with tools for informed decision making and timely interventions. Drawing from data...

Data sharing and service reuse in the health sector pose significant privacy and security challenges. The European Commission recognizes health data as a unique and cost-effective resource for research, while the OECD emphasizes the need for privacy-protecting data governance systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to health data access...

The adoption of more environmentally friendly and sustainable fleets for last-mile parcel delivery within large urban centers, such as e-cargo bikes, has gained the interest of the community. The logistics infrastructure network, had to adapt to the requirements of this new type of fleet, and micro-hubs and nano-hubs emerged. In this paper we tackl...

Our paper addresses the mobility patterns in Lisbon in the vicinity of historical and transportation points of interest, with a case study conducted in the parish of Santa Maria Maior, a vibrant touristic neighborhood. We propose a data science-based approach to analyze such patterns. Our dataset includes five months of georeferenced mobile phone d...

Covid-19 has rapidly spread and affected millions of people worldwide. For that reason, the public healthcare system was overwhelmed and underprepared to deal with this pandemic. Covid-19 also interfered with the delivery of standard medical care, causing patients with chronic diseases to receive subpar care. As chronic heart failure becomes more c...

This paper presents an analysis of space perception and how visual cues, such as landmarks and sound, are perceived and impact people's behaviour while exploring a given outdoor space. The primary goal of the research is to investigate how auditory sensations and visual stimuli influence people's behaviour in outdoor built environments. Our techniq...

Citizens are the daily users of urban spaces and their facilities. It is important that they collaborate with local authorities for effective management, development, and maintenance of the cities they live in. Public participation although important is still developing in several European cities because its implementation poses difficulties. In th...

The increase in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, and their adverse effects on the environment, has prompted the search for alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. One of the solutions gaining ground is the electrification of various human activities, such as the transport sector. This trend has fueled a growing need for electrical...

The problem of energy consumption and the importance of improving existing buildings’ energy performance are notorious. This work aims to contribute to this improvement by identifying the latest and most appropriate machine learning or statistical techniques, which analyze this problem by looking at large quantities of building energy performance c...

The high level of energy consumption of buildings is significantly influencing occupant behavior changes towards improved energy efficiency. This paper introduces a systematic literature review with two objectives: to understand the more relevant factors affecting energy consumption of buildings and to find the best intelligent computing (IC) metho...

The increase of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, and their adverse effects on the environment, have prompted the search for alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. One of the solutions gaining ground is the electrification of various human activities, such as the transport sector. This trend has fueled a growing need for electrical...

Currently, an echocardiography expert is needed to identify calcium in the aortic valve, and a cardiac CT-Scan image is needed for calcium quantification. When performing a CT-scan, the patient is subject to radiation, and therefore the number of CT-scans that can be performed should be limited, restricting the patient’s monitoring. Computer Vision...

Transportation data in a smart city environment is increasingly becoming available. This data availability allows building smart solutions that are viewed as meaningful by both city residents and city management authorities. Our research work was based on Lisbon mobility data available through the local municipality, where we integrated and cleaned...

New technologies applied to transportation services in the city, enable the shift to sustainable transportation modes making bike-sharing systems (BSS) more popular in the urban mobility scenario. This study focuses on understanding the spatiotemporal station and trip activity patterns in the Lisbon BSS, based in 2018 data taken as the baseline, an...

The development of the Internet of Things and mobile technology is connecting people and cities and generating large volumes of geolocated and space-time data. This paper identifies patterns in the Lisbon GIRA bike-sharing system (BSS), by analyzing the spatiotemporal distribution of travel distance, speed and duration, and correlating with environ...

Cities are moving towards new mobility strategies to tackle smart cities’ challenges such as carbon emission reduction, urban transport multimodality and mitigation of pandemic hazards, emphasising on the implementation of shared modes, such as bike-sharing systems. This paper poses a research question and introduces a corresponding systematic lite...

We present an Environmental Analysis and Safety Advisor system capable of identify the environmental barriers and hazards found in the homes of elderly people. This augmented reality tool runs on a portable computing device and can be used by informal and formal caregivers without specific knowledge of Accessible Design, to evaluate the safeness of...

Physiological arousal has been increasingly applied to monitor exploration (or navigation) of a virtual environment (VE), especially when the VE is designed to evoke an anxiety-related response. The present work aims to evaluate human physiological reactions to safe and unsafe VEs. We compared the effect of the presence of handrails in the VE in tw...

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Science curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. The authors describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the...

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Science curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. The authors describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the...

This paper focuses on space perception and how visual cues, such as landmarks, may influence the way people move in a given space. Our main goal with this research is to compare people's movement in the real world with their movement in a replicated virtual world and study how landmarks influence their choices when deciding among different paths. T...

This paper presents a digital tool that enables the city inhabitants or visitors to acquire in real time, relevant information about several aspects of a given city, augmenting their real experience of the place. We used digital technologies, particularly an in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) tool referred to as SeeARch,that augments in situ...

Silent speech approaches can profit not only from an understanding of the brain and motor stages associated with speech production, but also from a direct use of the information coming from these stages. Therefore, in this chapter, readers can find a short overview of recent work regarding the study of brain and muscular activity related to speech...

Brain and muscular activity originates the change in shape or position of articulators such as the tongue or lips and, as a consequence, the vocal tract assumes different configurations. Most of these changes, namely of articulators and tract, are internal and are not easy to measure but, in some cases, like the lips or the tongue tip, such changes...

In the previous chapters, we covered the main concepts and technologies behind silent speech interfaces (SSIs). While that material provides the reader with the necessary knowledge to understand the different concepts and proposed solutions, the technical aspects behind designing and developing interactive SSI systems are still a challenge given th...

In previous chapters, we have seen how various silent speech interface (SSI) modalities gather information concerning the different stages of speech production, covering brain and muscular activity, articulation, acoustics, and visual speech features. In this chapter, the reader is introduced to the combination of different modalities, not only to...

This book provides a broad and comprehensive overview of the existing technical approaches in the area of silent speech interfaces (SSI), both in theory and in application. Each technique is described in the context of the human speech production process, allowing the reader to clearly understand the principles behind SSI in general and across diff...

This paper focus on the development and evaluation of a computer tool that enriches physical scale models of buildings, which are commonly used during architecture and civil engineering design processes. The main goal of this work is to enable designers, namely architects, to use the affordances of the physical scale models, by enhancing them with...

Resumo As instalações das instituições de Ensino Superior, que no caso do ISCTE-IUL estão concentradas num campus no centro de Lisboa, são usadas diariamente por vários milhares de utentes, acolhem inúmeros eventos e o exercício próprio da instituição e requerem investimentos constantes de manutenção, renovação e adaptação. Ao contrário de outros a...

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is an interdisciplinary research area that has been attracting interest from several research communities specialized in machine learning, computer vision, medical and gaming research. The potential applications range from surveillance systems, human computer interfaces, sports video analysis, digital shopping assis...

To evaluate the reading performance of children, human assessment is usually involved, where a teacher or tutor has to take time to individually estimate the performance in terms of fluency (speed, accuracy and expression). Automatic estimation of reading ability can be an important alternative or complement to the usual methods, and can improve ot...

Assisting older adults at work is of critical importance in nowadays fast- emerging computerized environments. Therefore, it is paramount to provide support to mitigate age-related cognitive degradation and to relieve their fear towards technological changes. In this demo paper, we present CogniWin, an integrated framework for providing personal...

This paper describes an augmented reality app running on a Windows tablet that recognizes image features on a city paper map and overlays, in real-time, digital content related to the relevant buildings of the city. The system register in 3D the location of those buildings in the map, enriching the user experience with several multimedia informatio...

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Science curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. The authors describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the...

The authors describe a new Digital Planetarium system and application "Galactica", for interactive visualization of astrophysical data and phenomena in immersive virtual reality VR settings, based in OpenSceneGraph OSG. Galactica enables a visual and aural experience of a virtual space traveler, that can go anywhere in the Solar System and the Milk...

Human activity recognition has become one of the most active research topics in image processing and pattern recognition. Manual analysis of video is labour intensive, fatiguing, and error prone. Solving the problem of recognizing human activities from video can lead to improvements in several application fields like surveillance systems, human com...

Gaze information has the potential to benefit Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) tasks, particularly when combined with speech. Gaze can improve our understanding of the user intention, as a secondary input modality, or it can be used as the main input modality by users with some level of permanent or temporary impairments. In this paper we describe...

The use of speech interaction is important and useful in a wide range of applications. It is a natural way of interaction and it is easy to use by people in general. The development of speech enabled applications is a big challenge that increases if several languages are required, a common scenario, for example, in Europe. Tackling this challenge r...

This paper presents an innovative virtual assistant system, which aims to address older adults’ needs in a professional environment by proposing promising and innovative virtual assistance mechanisms. The system, named CogniWin, is expected to alleviate eventual age related memory degradation and gradual decrease of other cognitive capabilities (i....

Elderly people face problems when using current forms of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Developing novel and natural methods of interaction would facilitate resolving some of those issues. We propose that HCI can be improved by combining communication modalities, in particular, speech and gaze, in various ways. This study presents elderly speech...

For the problem of object category recognition, we have studied different families of descriptors exploiting RGB and 3D information. We have proven practically that 3D shape-based descriptors are more suitable for this type of recognition due to low shape intra-class variance, as opposed to texture-based. Performance evaluation on training-set subs...

This paper presents usability tests results with real users during the prototype development phase of two applications for seniors care, AALFred and SmartCompanion. To this aim, usability testing was performed considering a Living Lab approach. Seniors were invited to use the applications in an environment that simulates the one they would use the...

Nasality is a very important characteristic of several languages, European Portuguese being one of them. This paper addresses the challenge of nasality detection in surface electromyography (EMG) based speech interfaces. We explore the existence of useful information about the velum movement and also assess if muscles deeper down in the face and ne...

The PaeLife project is a European industry-academia collaboration in the framework of the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL JP), with a goal of developing a multimodal, multilingual virtual personal life assistant to help senior citizens remain active and socially integrated. Speech is one of the key interaction modalities of AALFred, th...

Each human face is unique. It has its own shape, topology, and distinguishing features. As such, developing and testing facial tracking systems are challenging tasks. The existing face recognition and tracking algorithms in Computer Vision mainly specify concrete situations according to particular goals and applications, requiring validation method...

In the problem of object category recognition, we have studied different families of descriptors exploiting RGB and 3D information. Furthermore, we have proven practically that 3D shape-based descriptors are more suitable for this type of recognition due to low shape intra-class variance, as opposed to image texture-based. In addition, we have also...

In this paper we use analysis tools from Space Syntax and objective observation of the human behaviour, to understand the impact of landmarks in the walking patterns of users of spaces. Our case study was a large exterior public open space (University Campus), in which participants could walk freely and simultaneously be tracked by several sensors....

The complexity of today´s architecture solutions brings the need to integrate, in the design process, digital tools for creation, visualization, representation and evaluation of design solutions. This paper proposes the adoption of a new Virtual Reality (VR) tool, referred to as VIARmodes, to support the architectural design process with an improve...

The use of new computing technologies in architecture design has evolved the working methods and the way designers relate with the space they are designing. To express their ideas, designers use tools such as physical scale models of buildings in urban settings, sketches and rigorous drawings that are often difficult to understand by non-designers....

Research shows that the activation of aging stereotypes has significant effects over older people’s performance across multiple domains. The significance of these results has promoted interventions to change ageist representations in society. However, little is known about the activation of the reversed “outcome-stereotype” link. Therefore, in this...

The PaeLife project is a European industry-academia collaboration whose goal is to provide the elderly with easy access to online services that make their life easier and encourage their continued participation in the society. To reach this goal, the project partners are developing a multimodal virtual personal life assistant (PLA) offering a wide...

This paper describes a project with the overall goal of providing a natural interaction communication platform accessible and adapted for all users, especially for people with speech impairments and elderly, by sharing knowledge between Industry and Academia. The platform will adopt the princi-ples of natural user interfaces such as speech, silent...

The most promising approaches for surface Electromyography (EMG) based speech interfaces commonly focus on the tongue muscles. Despite the interesting results in small vocabularies tasks, it is yet unclear which articulation gestures these sensors are actually detecting. To address these complex aspects, in this study we propose a novel method, bas...

Em arquitetura, a maquete, seja para estudo ou para a comunicação da proposta de projeto, desempenha um papel fundamental como ferramenta nos processos criativos de planeamento e conceção de projetos. No entanto, existem por vezes dificuldades associadas a esta abordagem, como o sejam, o tempo gasto e os custos envolvidos na sua produção e modifica...

The acoustic models used by automatic speech recognisers are usually trained with speech collected from young to middle-aged adults. As the characteristics of speech change with age, such acoustic models tend to perform poorly on children’s and elderly people’s speech. In this study, we investigate whether the automatic age group classification of...