Propostas atribuídas ano letico 2025/2026

An important characteristic of any ubiquitous system is that it should be quite selective on when to interrupt the user, making in this way a cute use of a scarce resource - user attention. With this in mind the system most only access user attention when it has something quite relevant and new for her/him (compare this with a navigation system that continuously sends instructions independently of the path being or not familiar to the user).

With this in mind it is important to develop systems, namely navigation systems, that wake up when they find information that is surprising and useful from the perspective of the current user and that at the remaining time are silent and do not interfere with critical activities, like driving.

This project involves the development of state of the art algorithms for information filtering supported on concepts of surpriseness and usefulness for.

To test the concept we will use contextualized navigation information.

This project is related with project CityMotion, being developed within a collaboration between FCTUC/DEI, IST, FEUP, MIT Sensible City Lab, and MIT ITS Lab.

During the first semester, the student will perform the following tasks:

- October 15th - Contact with the state of the art (1.5 months)

- December 30th - Version alpha of SURPRISE (1.5 month)  

- January 15th - Paper submission (2 months)

- February 27th - Intermediate report including requirements specification for version 1 of SURPRISE (1 month)

During the second semester, the student will perform the following tasks:

- March 30th – New reading on the scientific literature (1 months)

- May 30th - Implementation of version beta of SURPRISE (2.5 months)

- June 30th – Experiments. (1.5 months)

- July 10th - MSc thesis (1 months)