Urbanization has a massive effect on the environment, both locally and globally. With an ever-increasing scale of construction and manufacturing and misuse of energy resources come poorer air quality, growing mortality rates and more rapid climate change. For these reasons, a healthy and safe built environment is ever more in demand. Global debates focus on sustainable development of the built environment; a rational approach to its analysis is multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. Alternative MCDM methods applied to the same problem often produce different results. In the search for a more reliable tool, this study proposes that a system of MCDM methods should be applied to a single problem. This article assesses 21 neighborhoods in Vilnius in the context of a healthy and safe built environment in view of the principles of sustainable development. MCDM methods were used for this purpose: entropy, Criterion Impact LOSs (CILOS) and Integrated Determination of Objective Criteria Weights (IDOCRIW) methods were used to determine the objective weights of the criteria, while expert judgement determined the subjective weights. With the overall weights determined, the Vilnius neighborhoods were assessed through the application of COmplex PRoportional ASsessment (COPRAS), Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) methods. The final results were then processed using the rank average method, Borda count and Copeland’s method.

Affective, emotional, and physiological states (AFFECT) detection and recognition by capturing human signals is a fast-growing area, which has been applied across numerous domains. The research aim is to review publications on how techniques that use brain and biometric sensors can be used for AFFECT recognition, consolidate the findings, provide a rationale for the current methods, compare the effectiveness of existing methods, and quantify how likely they are to address the issues/challenges in the field. In efforts to achieve the key goals of Society 5.0, Industry 5.0, and human-centered design better, the recognition of emotional, affective, and physiological states is progressively becoming an important matter and offers tremendous growth of knowledge and progress in these and other related fields. In this research, a review of AFFECT recognition brain and biometric sensors, methods, and applications was performed, based on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Due to the immense variety of existing sensors and sensing systems, this study aimed to provide an analysis of the available sensors that can be used to define human AFFECT, and to classify them based on the type of sensing area and their efficiency in real implementations. Based on statistical and multiple criteria analysis across 169 nations, our outcomes introduce a connection between a nation’s success, its number of Web of Science articles published, and its frequency of citation on AFFECT recognition. The principal conclusions present how this research contributes to the big picture in the field under analysis and explore forthcoming study trends.

Aspects of sustainable construction investment and real estate development (CIRED) and their interrelations during the period pre-, intra-, and post-COVID-19, are presented in the research. Applications of the topic model, environmental psychology theory, building life cycle method, and certain elements of bibliometrics, webometrics, article level metrics, altmetrics, and scientometrics make it possible to perform a quantitative analysis on CIRED. The CIRED topic model was developed in seven steps. This paper aims to present a literature review on CIRED throughout the pandemic and to look at the responses from the real estate and construction sector. This sector is a field that appears to be rapidly expanding, judging from the volume of current research papers. This review focuses on last year’s leading peer-reviewed journals. A combination of various keywords was applied for the review and the criteria for paper selections included construction investment, real estate development, civil engineering, COVID-19, and sustainability, as well as residential, industrial, commercial, land, and special purpose real estate, along with their risks, strategies, and trends. The articles reviewed for this paper, which analyzes three hypotheses, look at pre-, intra-, and post-pandemic CIRED. The three hypotheses were validated by analyzing scientific publications from around the world. Two innovative elements make this study stand out among the most advanced research on pre-, intra-, and post-pandemic CIRED. The first of the two innovations is the integrated analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19-related national policies, and business investment strategies relevant to CIRED and the interests of investors as well as on the impact a CIRED policy and investors make on the spread of COVID-19. In addition, this research demonstrates a marked increase in the effectiveness of a CIRED analysis, when the life cycle of a CIRED, the involved stakeholders with their own individual interests, the COVID-19 situation, and the external micro-, meso-, and macro-environments are covered comprehensively as a single entity.

The concept of university–industry partnership sustainability (UIPS) stands for well-adjusted progress among key players from universities and industry by sustaining their welfare, both in the present and in the future. This paper sought to develop an evaluation system for UIPS. The need for such a system is justified at three levels: the micro level (i.e., research and innovation performance, transfer and absorptive capability, and technology development), the meso level (i.e., institutional arrangements, communication networks, and local and indigenous rules) and the macro level (i.e., supply and demand, regulations, financing, taxes, culture, traditions, market, climate, politics, demographics, and technology). The UIPS evaluation system developed in this study offers the possibility of calculating a fair value of UIPS and providing recommendations for improving university–industry (U–I) partnerships. This can be of great importance for entrepreneurial universities that would like to strengthen their corporate links and/or reduce/reverse the “hollowing effect” of globalisation in disadvantaged regions. Additionally, this paper also contains discussions on the advantages, limitations, and managerial implications of this proposal.