Adopting digitalization, innovation, and new technologies in the tourism sector is contingent upon smart tourism tools (STTs) availability. Such tools can facilitate the optimization of efficiency and sustainability in tourism operations. Moreover, awareness of past initiatives in smart tourism may catalyze the aforementioned uptake. The objective of the EUROSTIT project is to develop a comprehensive observatory that will provide a broad overview of the various Smart Tourism Tools and Initiatives currently available in Europe. A set of published catalogs was employed as a source of bootstrap content for a prototype version within the context of the European RESETTING project, which preceded this project proposal. The prototype is deficient in advanced, user-friendly search functionality and content classification. The plethora of technological solutions, coupled with the wealth of past experiences and lessons learned, necessitates a meticulous and methodical approach to identifying the optimal technological solutions and the underlying principles that must be adhered to to achieve the desired outcomes. A validated taxonomy, developed within the scope of RESETTING, will be employed to classify all European STTs identified. The EUROSTIT Observatory will constitute an independent entity associated with the ISTAR-IUL research unit, focusing on issues and challenges pertaining to the digital transformation of tourism, a sector with a significant impact on Portugal's balance of payments. The EUROSTIT team will critically examine the smart tourism ecosystem, thereby advancing scientific knowledge and transferring it to society. Furthermore, it will contribute to the definition of research methodologies, the formulation and evaluation of policies for promoting sustainable tourism (in terms of the environment, society, and the economy), and the provision of analysis and advice. The project is comprised of four interrelated tasks. The initial task entails the construction of ...

The main objective of this project is to provide a flexible system that can be independently deployed by public administration authorities to monitor public spaces, where special events are planned, or anticipated to occur, that are expected to lead to crowding aggregation.

The main objective of the AtlanticCrossing proposal is to develop a partnership between two higher education institutions, one Portuguese, Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, and one from the United States of America, Bridgewater State University - BSU. This partnership is designed to be mutually beneficial, aiming to initiate the effort to develop joint specializations, postgraduate programs, and the awarding of joint academic degrees in the near future in scientific areas of mutual interest, such as Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, and Language Technologies, Business Innovation, and Teaching-Learning. By collaborating, both institutions could leverage each other’s strengths and resources, enhancing the quality of education and research. The proposal also aims to develop skills for faculty and students through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), applied in Curricular Units (CUs) of undergraduate courses at both universities, focusing on the aforementioned scientific areas. The program includes activities throughout the academic year in a COIL environment and two short-term stays (1 week) for faculty and students: one organized at Iscte in mid-January, with the visit of BSU faculty and students, and the other at BSU, at the first week of June, reciprocally. We will coordinate joint and interdisciplinary research projects with an emphasis on Cybersecurity and Language Technologies. This will be conducted within the framework of project-based and applied research initiatives. Additionally, we will facilitate Iscte’s participation in BSU's annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, providing a platform for Iscte students to present their innovative results at this US event. In the field of Cybersecurity, we will organize comprehensive joint training sessions employing challenge-based and competitive environments, such as “Capture the Flag” and “Hackathon”. We will utilize BSU's CyberRange infrastructure - an exclusive resource in Massachusetts—...

The global COVID-19 crisis triggered major changes across societies around the world disrupting the way we live and conduct business. Across Europe, the measures and restrictions enforced due to the pandemic have led to sudden changes in many paradigms paving the way for new business models and market exchanges. This dramatic disruption has accelerated some socio-economic trends, which were visible before the COVID-19 crisis, such as the adoption of sophisticated technology and data solutions to facilitate human-centered, people-smart, and sustainable operation models; the incorporation of sustainability and climate mitigation as non-negotiable principles of operating and doing businesses and last but not least, relying on smart data evidence-based solutions to guide decision making for optimal commercial and sustainability performance. The tourism industry is one of the global economic sectors that is most severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated with its economic downturn, according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. UNWTO data states that the current crisis is responsible for a global fall in export revenues of between EUR 750-900 billion and a loss of direct jobs that could be between 100 and 200 million. With the fall in profits and lack of certainty for stable markets, the recovery shortly of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which according to UNWTO shoulder 80% of global tourism, is at stake. With lost revenues and subsequently, talent drain to other economic sectors, tourism SMEs face the need to adapt at a time of crisis with constraint capacities. Through the design of a dynamic technological solution (platform) for knowledge-transfer and experience exchange made available to a network of tourism SME clusters across six countries, this project will demonstrate how digitalization can accelerate innovation and uptake of new sustainability solutions in a sector that is built up mostly of small enterprises with limited resources for n...

The objective of this project is to explore the use of visual programming paradigms to enable non-programmers to be part of the Data Science workforce. In contrast to existing approaches, which require programming, Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWMS) can become an alternative to support the visual programming of data science projects. Such systems (e.g. Taverna and Kepler) use a simple graphical, graph-based structure to develop applications. This simplicity has shown to be suitable in several scientific areas such as bioinformatics, geophysics, and climate analysis. Despite the success of SWMS in data intensive research, they did not reach a state where non-programmers data scientists can use them. They still require some programming and scripting skills to code individual processing tasks. That is why research teams using those systems are usually composed of scientists and software developers. We propose to extend current SWMS to support the parameterization of generic prebuild workflow templates. Workflow templates capture the processing tasks of data science projects. A template can be seen as a formalized best practice that data scientists can use to solve common data analysis challenges. Templates are developed by multidisciplinary teams of experts and reused by non-programmer data scientists. Parameterized workflows have been used successfully in the field of enterprise computing since 1970 to increase software reuse (e.g. SAP’s parameterized workflows to automate business process models). We claim that the same type of benefits can be obtained by parameterizing scientific workflow templates.

This project aims to guarantee the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of the territories and the value chains that support tourism products, through the development of the sustainability of companies involved in tourism. The project has sustainability management tools aimed at certification, marketing, and monitoring the sustainability of tourism products: i-SUSTENTURIS, e-SUSTENTURIS, and Itinerant SUSTENTURIS Workshops. I-SUSTENTURIS is a certification system composed of a set of sustainability indicators (environmental, social, and destination), which will serve to measure and accredit the sustainability of tourism products, even those produced by micro and small companies, usually without the possibility of access to this resource. E-SUSTENTURIS is a collaborative B2B (business to business) marketing platform, which aims to give visibility to sustainable tourism products developed locally, so that they can be integrated into more comprehensive offers resulting from cooperation between the various players in the tourism industry, including agents and global tour operators with an impact on intermediation with consumers and international markets. Itinerant SUSTENTURIS Workshops enable the transmission of knowledge about internal management practices responsible for the development of corporate sustainability to improve the sustainability of tourism products, taking into account the results in the i-SUSTENTURIS indicators. In particular, they will promote the introduction of sustainability into company policies, through the development of action plan plans for sustainability, the correction of product performance based on indicators, and the adaptation of local companies' products to tourism. The SUSTENTURIS project is innovative at several levels: in its focus on the sustainability of tourism products; in the evaluation of sustainability indicators calculated with a life cycle approach, in a transparent and traceable way, not only being a labe...