The 15th edition of the European BEST Engineering Competition Challenge (EBEC Challenge) was held at FEUP from 4 to 6 March (local round) and challenged dozens of teams formed by students from FEUP and FCUP to design in 24 hours a prototype testing their creativity, problem solving skills, teamwork, and the possibility to be present at the national/regional round, with the winners of all local rounds in Portugal and Spain, in a final that will take place at the Polytechnic University of Madrid between 5 and 8 May 2023.

This competition is divided in two modalities, Case Study (theoretical test where a real problem of a company is given to solve) and Innovative Design (practical test where the main goal is to build a prototype, with a limited number of materials and at a low cost), being the “magic FoRMuLa” team the winner of this last modality, composed by four students of the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering.

Lucas Santos, Francisco Pires, Rita Ramada and Mafalda Magalhães worked their magic and in 24 hours created a prototype capable of picking up rubbish from a water tank, both at the surface and at depth, and depositing it on a platform. To achieve their goal the team could only use materials available in the designated shop, which had a credit cost associated with them. Lucas Santos tells us that they were limited to existing stock, so having quickly started to run out of some essential materials, they were forced to make quick decisions between planning ahead for the prototype, managing the credits spent (which would influence the final score) and purchasing the materials they needed while they were still in stock.

And what was the secret to success? “Teamwork was one of the keys to our success, as each member brought different skills and knowledge to the challenge. Communication and coordination between each of us was key to ensure everyone was on the same page and working towards the same goals,” tell us the winning team whose decision to enter the EBEC Challenge was motivated by the desire to test their practical skills and the challenge of competing against other students.

Since the academic year 2013/2014 EBEC Challenge Porto is credited with 1.5 ECTS as a training action of 40.5 hours. The Case Study competition is called “EBEC Porto 24h – Case Study” and the Innovative Design competition is called “EBEC Porto 24h – Team Design” having been a success in each edition.

Photo: BEST Porto

“Can the dissemination of science be a profitable business? Never before has the scientific community felt so much pressure to validate and legitimize what is produced. Can Open Access repositories be the solution?”

These are questions raised by DEI faculty members Carlos Baquero, João Cardoso, Pedro Diniz and Rui Maranhão, which open the recently published guest column in Expresso, transcribed below:

The publication of scientific articles in conferences and reference journals is one of the most important activities for the dissemination and progress of science and knowledge. Recently FCCN, via B-On (online knowledge library), established another protocol in order to create more favorable conditions for the national scientific community to publish scientific articles in Open Access. Publishing in Open Access has the advantage of allowing the reading of articles without subscription costs.

Whereas in the classic publication system the costs were usually covered by institutions subscribing to journals for their researchers’ use and they could usually opt for Open Access at additional cost, in the single Open Access system these costs are transferred to the point of publication and usually covered by a research project assigned to the authors. These protocols aim to reduce these costs, usually with discounts on the article processing fee.

Without going into the polemic on the lucrative business of publishing houses specializing in science, it is easy to observe that there has been a transfer of the moment when publishing houses are financed. In the classical system authors submitted their work, it was evaluated by other scientists, improved and, if accepted, published in the journals, without any transaction involving the author (it was usually the libraries that assumed these costs).

Under Open Access, which generally requires such processing fees, the author has to secure funding after the article is accepted in order for it to be published. Although in theory you are not paying for acceptance of the article, and this depends only on its quality, economic incentives change the landscape somewhat, as there may be more pressure on publishers to maximise the number of articles published.

Despite this risk, publishers have an interest in preserving their prestige and the prestige of the journals they publish. By selecting a small number of articles of the highest quality, they provide an important editorial selection role to their readers, to the fields of science themselves, and improve the potential impact of each article. Several classic journals support both modes of publication, with Open Access being only one option and accepted publications being published at no cost to the author.

Results published in top journals such as Science and Nature have enormous visibility both in the scientific community and sometimes in society at large. However, as these publications are very selective, they require several months of preparation by the authors, prior to the actual submission of the article, and significant improvement and additional work during the demanding peer-review process. In a “fast food” society there does not always seem to be time for these lengthy “slow science” processes.

In the last decade, along with the growth of Open Access, there has also been a growing supply of Open Access journals that promise very short peer-review times, making them very desirable for junior researchers wishing to enhance their academic profiles. To take the proverb “Quick and well, there’s no who” we can observe that there are limits to the efficiency gains that can be made when reviewers are usually other scientists, unpaid by the publisher, with little time available, particularly when they are well-known scientists.

In these publishers, achieving efficiency invariably leads to editorial boards with several hundred members, usually little known, in contrast to the usual ten or so names recognized by the community and with a clear role in the selection of articles in reference journals.

Other mechanisms to ensure a profitable business model seem to rely on the creation of numerous special issues by invitation and on the massive invitation to various scientists to prepare these issues; often in areas that they do not dominate or in which they are not recognized. Scientists have even been enticed by offers and reductions in Open Access costs, a strategy that ensures the involvement of many and the reach required for a profitable business model. All of these factors greatly diminish the perceived quality of the articles selected.

This decline in publication quality has recently been discussed in other European countries, with somewhat disparate approaches. The potential impacts of these practices on the quality of science have been discussed in a paper from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; in our neighbour Spain the increasing migration to rapid publication media has been discussed. In some countries, such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom, these channels for the dissemination of scientific results are simply ignored or even unknown. There is even a rejection posture in reference institutions, in which researchers with extensive or significant part of their publications in these channels are not taken seriously.

Perhaps this phenomenon of rapid publication of unripe results is not unrelated to the observation that there is less and less impact of research on the transformation of society, as documented in a recent article in Nature.

The rapid and massified publication via these publishers has been too tempting for early career scientists, for a scientific community subject to immense competitive pressure and where regular publication is essential for career development. In Portugal, we can see that the growth in the proportion of Open Access publications over the last decade (black line) would not have occurred if the effect of publications in two large accelerated publishers were discounted (red line shows what the proportion would be like without these publications that we call Accelerated Open Access). The effect would be even larger if other smaller journals associated with what might even be called predatory practices were discounted.

While Open Access can be positive for better dissemination of research results, this should not be at the expense of lowering the quality of publications. Just as a little occasional fast food has little impact on our health, so a certain amount of fast science seems reasonable. Not all research always produces the results the authors would like; there is competition and sometimes other teams publish first.

However, it is no longer healthy, as with a primarily fast food diet, for the bulk of publications from a given researcher, team or institution to begin to be of this type as a rule. Many articles that could reach top journals end up not realizing their full potential by being directed to these rapid publication channels.

Indeed, the existence of pre-publication repositories such as arXiv and medRxiv enables rapid and open dissemination and it is suggested that these channels (rather than Accelerated Open Access) be used for that very purpose, allowing authors to refine their articles and even raise their quality (in terms of data extensibility and/or more robust reasoning for conclusions) by publishing them in other channels with longer peer-review stages.

Worse than the development of a quick, metro curriculum, the current approach is itself counterproductive for authors, as it does not allow them to realise their full potential and may, in the long term, impact negatively on their careers. A cornerstone of the system is individual research freedom; authors are sovereign in their choice of publication targets. However, it is important to be aware of the existence of journals with more massive and potentially predatory strategies. Twenty years ago, it was relatively simple to distinguish good journals from journals with practices that could be classified as predatory, the latter being very artisanal and unprofessional. Today the line is much more blurred, partly as a result of extremely profitable and very successful business models.

It seems therefore very important to us that the national scientific community avoids the dominance of “fast science”, namely by avoiding that the new generations of scientists fall into the temptation of the easy enticement of these business models that gravitate towards science.

This guest column was published in Expresso on 21 February 2023 (09:33).

In the week that marks the Rare Disease Day, which since its creation in 2008 is celebrated on the last day of February, the 28th, or 29th, the rarest day of the year, we learn about PLAY-THE-ODDS, a project led by the University of Porto that encourages families to talk about the risk of hereditary cancer and rare diseases.

This project, which included in the research team António Coelho (DEI), Hernâni Oliveira (alumni PDMD) and Juliana Monteiro (PDMD), is part of a research line of the Psychology Center of the University of Porto, dedicated to the well-being of families with hereditary cancer risk. This line of research began in 2018 with a joint project with IPO Porto, the TOGETHER project, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030980). TOGETHER studied the processes of psychological adaptation to the performance of genetic susceptibility tests to cancer. All the scientific output can be found here and has been compiled in this White Paper. We find in this documentation very useful content about genetic syndromes of risk for cancer and prevention of hereditary cancer, family adaptation to genetic cancer risk, and some of the main genetic syndromes of risk for cancer and their characteristics and the importance of health services.

In the course of TOGETHER, both families and health professionals indicated the need for specific preparation to disclose to their children the presence of a syndrome in the family, as well as to deal with the challenges of this condition over time.

PLAY-THE-ODDS is an 18-month exploratory project, funded by FCT (EXPL/PSI-GER/1270/2021), which responds to this need. Based on scientific research, and using participatory methodologies, PLAY-THE-ODDS brings together people with hereditary cancer syndromes and their families, genetic counseling specialists, psychologists, communication designers, and gamification experts to co-create solutions. Specific preparation to disclose to children the presence of a hereditary cancer syndrome in the family, as well as to deal with the challenges of this condition over time, is a need that families have come to feel.

According to Célia Sales, the principal investigator, “this reality can be very distressing. The person with the syndrome is dealing with his or her own diagnosis and, at the same time, with the fear that he or she may have passed this condition on to their children. They don´t know if they should tell their children, or how, or when the time is right. Our goal is to create a prototype of an interactive communication tool to help parents and children communicate about hereditary cancer risk, which can be integrated in routine genetic counseling and psycho-oncology settings as a support resource for families.”
One of the novelties brought by this project is its co-creation approach: the project brings together people with hereditary cancer syndromes and their families, health professionals (Genetic Counseling and Psychology) and technology professionals (Communication Design and Human-Centered Design) in the active search for solutions to the real needs of their daily lives. For Hernâni Oliveira, co-principal investigator, “this project is innovative because it is the family itself and the health professionals who, together with specialists in technology, define the solution that helps them the most, a real solution defined by those who live this reality”.

Communicating health-related problems and the possibility of hereditary cancer is not an easy task, especially in a family context, where the generational difference can be an added difficulty. Serious games can help bridge these differences and serve as facilitators to help both in communicating the implications of the disease for all family members, and in helping the patient better internalize and understand the situation they are in.

With this in mind João Monteiro Leite, recent M.EIC graduate, collaborated in the project through the dissertation “Collaborative platform for soundwalks to improve health literacy and communication”, where he developed a framework for a platform that will host several solutions aiming to help patients better understand their condition and the associated genetic risks, as well as facilitate the communication of this syndrome to other relatives. These solutions should also assist users in understanding the risks they face, as well as the measures that exist to deal with these. One such solution, the main focus of this thesis, is the development of a soundwalk, which presents a narrative story with some challenges designed to help facilitate communication between the parental dyad.

+ information about PLAY-THE-ODDS, can be obtained from the researcher Juliana Monteiro through the email jmonteiro.playtheodds@gmail.com.

After a short interregnum in its activities, the ACM FEUP’s student chapter is back with the appointment of the new board on February 8, at 17:30, in room I-105.

Tiago Viana (Chair), João Ramos (Vice-Chair), Carolina Gonçalves (Secretary), João Coelho (Treasurer), Filipe Correia (Chairperson), Marco Costa (Chairperson) and Pedro Landolt (Chairperson), constitute the new team that, under the mentorship of Professor André Restivo, Director of L.EIC, intends to establish a community of students interested in the several emerging areas of computer science, and to train students capable in domains such as competitive programming and computer security.

ACM’s Professional and Student chapters worldwide serve as hubs of activity for ACM members and the computing community at large. They provide seminars, lectures, learning forums and networking opportunities with peers and experts across the computing spectrum.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) was founded in 1947, and today is the world’s largest educational and scientific society, uniting  computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.