This study examines how digital technologies influence the competitiveness of manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with a focus on labor productivity and export performance. Using a sample of 669 firms in the Portuguese ornamental stone sector, a framework was applied to evaluate five levels of digital maturity through a quantitative approach. This analysis covers five years after the investment and combines digital profiling with scenario-based forecasts. Results, presented in figures and tables, indicate a positive link between digital maturity and firm performance, with higher digitalisation levels correlating with increased productivity and export efficiency. For example, the most digitally mature firms experienced labor productivity increase significantly, and their digital investments yielded returns very handsomely for every euro invested. These findings, while illustrative, depend on specific contextual factors and assume ongoing digital adoption. This study offers a replicable model for evaluating digital revolution in traditional industries, supporting SME policy development and strategic planning.

Data and services are available anywhere at any time thanks to the Internet and mobile devices. Nowadays, there are new ways of representing data through trendy technologies such as augmented reality (AR), which extends our perception of reality through the addition of a virtual layer on top of real-time images. The great potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for carrying out routine and professional tasks has encouraged their use in the creation of several services, such as package delivery or industrial maintenance. Unfortunately, drone piloting is difficult to learn and requires specific training. Since regular training is performed with virtual simulations, we decided to propose a multiplatform cloud-hosted solution based in Web AR for drone training and usability testing. This solution defines a configurable trajectory through virtual elements represented over barcode markers placed on a real environment. The main goal is to provide an inclusive and accessible training solution which could be used by anyone who wants to learn how to pilot or test research related to UAV control. For this paper, we reviewed drones, AR, and human–drone interaction (HDI) to propose an architecture and implement a prototype, which was built using a Raspberry Pi 3, a camera, and barcode markers. The validation was conducted using several test scenarios. The results show that a real-time AR experience for drone pilot training and usability testing is achievable through web technologies. Some of the advantages of this approach, compared to traditional methods, are its high availability by using the web and other ubiquitous devices; the minimization of technophobia related to crashes; and the development of cost-effective alternatives to train pilots and make the testing phase easier for drone researchers and developers through trendy technologies.

The absence of essential security protocols in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks introduces cybersecurity vulnerabilities and turns them into potential targets for various attack types. Although machine learning has been used for intrusion detection in the IIoT, datasets with representative data of common attacks of IIoT network traffic are limited and often imbalanced. Data augmentation techniques address these problems by creating artificial data in classes with fewer samples. In this work, we evaluate the use of data augmentation when training intrusion detection models based on IIoT traffic data. We compare Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and variations on the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling TEchnique (SMOTE) and evaluate their capability to enhance intrusion detection performance. We examine the performance of five intrusion detection algorithms when trained with augmented datasets to models trained with the original non-augmented dataset. To ensure a fair comparison, we evaluated the algorithms’ performance in the different scenarios using the same test dataset, which does not contain synthetic data. The results show the need for a systematic evaluation before employing data augmentation, as its impact on classification performance depends on the algorithm, data, and used technique. While deep neural networks benefit from data augmentation, the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), which achieved superior performance in intrusion detection between all evaluated classifiers (with F1-Score over 91%), didn’t have any performance improvement when trained with augmented data. The evaluation of data generated by GPT-based methods shows such methods (especially GReaT) generate invalid data for both numerical and categorical features in a way that leads to performance degradation in multiclass classification.