Category: News

On September, 18 of 2022, an article authored by Diogo Silva and José Eduardo Silva [1], will be presented in a peer-reviewed international conference, namely  the IAC-22 – 73rd International Astronautical Congress -Paris, France ( SYMPOSIUM E2 – Title: 50th STUDENT CONFERENCE, Part 1).

The article presents the development of an Earth observation system using a Raspberry PI as a data processing platform.

The detection component consists of a custom-made VHF quadrifilar helical antenna, a software-defined radio (SDR) USB Dongle and a Raspberry Pi (RPI).

The system aims to implement a daily meteorological service publishing in social networks the atmosphere status activity over Portugal and much of the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and its Atlantic adjacent area.

The abstract is available online, published under an open-access license ( https://iafastro.directory/iac/paper/id/72201/summary/ ) and also available on this page.

From the 23rd to the 27th of May, Maria João Sousa participated in the “EGU General Assembly 2022”, which took place in Vienna (Austria).

The annual event was organized by the European Geosciences Union.

The following publication was reached:

From the 5th to the 6th of May, Alexandra Moutinho participated in the “5^th Meeting of Young Researchers of LAETA”, which took place at Instituto Superior Técnico, in an in-person format.

The event was organized and sponsored by the Associated Laboratory for Energy, Transport and Aeronautics (LAETA).

The presentation related to the attached reference was carried out.

From the 1st to the 5th of May, Maria João Sousa participated in the “25th ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programs and Related Research”, which took place at Biarritz (France), in an in-person format. The event was  organized and sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES).

In this context, the following contribution was presented:

• “Leveraging High-Altitude Balloons and Mobile Robotics for Real-Time Wildfire Detection and Monitoring Systems”, submitted in the topic of “Utilisation of Balloons for Research Applications”.

From the 22nd to the 24th of November, Maria João Sousa, student of the PhD program in Mechanical Engineering, participated in the “IST PhD Open Days 2021”, which took place at Instituto Superior Técnico, in an in-person format.

The event held guest speaker talks, panel discussions, as well as pitch competitions and poster presentations of PhD students’ work.

In this context, the following contribution was presented:

• “Decentralized Intelligent Sensor Networks for Wildfire Detection and Monitoring Systems”, Poster presented by Maria João Sousa.

This work has as scientific advisors Professor Alexandra Moutinho (IDMEC) and Professor Miguel Almeida (ADAI).

On July, 14th of 2021, an article authored by Pedro Messias, Maria João Sousa and Alexandra Moutinho [1], was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE), a flagship annual international conference of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society focused on fuzzy systems.

The paper presents a fire data annotation method that leverages semantic segmentation based on computer vision and optimization techniques, namely through superpixel aggregation and color features.

The approach introduces interpretable linguistic models that generate pixel-wise fire segmentation and annotations, which are explainable through simple fine-tunable rules that can support subsequent annotation validation by fire domain experts.

The article is available online ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9494421/ ), and also available on this page.

On 23^rd of June 2021, Maria João Sousa, Alexandra Moutinho and Miguel Almeida presented a paper entitled “The role of fire intelligence in climate change mitigation and adaptation” at the 7th International Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance 2021, which took place in virtual format.

View or download the presentation:

On May 20th, the field trials coordinated by the Forest Fire Studies Centre of ADAI took place in Windfarm of Vila Nova, in the Municipality of Miranda do Corvo and District of Coimbra (Portugal).

The Eye in the Sky project was part of the organisation of these trials, which were attended by around 80 researchers from various national research units, and were supported by three firefighter crews and three sapper crews.

The fire experiments were carried out on 10 plots in the Lousã Mountain, within the scope of several national and international projects related with wildfires in topics like the use of unmanned aerial means for fire characterisation, automatic suppression means on the ground and in the air, house protection systems, analysis of fire interference in the communication network, smoke emission and dispersion analysis, fire georeferencing systems using mobile phones, analysis of the extreme fire behaviour and impact of fire on gas containers, among other topics.

In these trials, the Eye in the Sky project captured aerial images of the various fires carried out with the aim of developing fire detection and monitoring capabilities.

The 2nd Workshop – Scientific Research and Technological Development Projects on Forest Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting was held in three sessions on 30 April, 7 May and 14 May, 2021.

• The book of abstracts that can be downloaded here [in Portuguese]   | Download

In the scope of this event, on the 07th May, the Principal Investigator Alexandra Moutinho made a presentation of the main developments obtained in the Eye in the Sky project until the date of the presentation.

• The slides used can be found here   | Download