Walkability indicators are a pivotal method to evaluate the role of the built environment in people’s decisions regarding active mobility, contributing to help promote more sustainable and equitable regions. Currently, there is a lack of literature describing the trends and findings from recent studies, and how research on this topic has responded to COVID-19. In this work, we apply the PRISMA methodology to perform a systematic literature review of studies that employed walkability indicators to uncover associations between walkability and different topics, such as physical activity, health and mobility, in the aftermath of the pandemic. Results show that the growth rate of studies in this period almost doubled compared to the three years prior to the outbreak. We explore the main subjects addressed in recent literature and found that most studies resorted to well-known indicators, predominantly to Walk Score®, while fewer works developed and applied new indicators. General findings point to a positive association between walkability and physical activity, overall health and active mobility. Moreover, in recent works, walkability’s relationship with environmental metrics is not clear and there is a lack of studies linking walkability indicators to COVID-19. More than two years after the worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, our work provides an effective resource for researchers to understand recent trends in studies employing walkability indicators.

The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak motivated the development of a myriad of weekly and daily indicators that track economic activity to estimate and predict the consequences of the pandemic. With some exceptions, these indicators are calculated at the country level and are mainly focused on tracking economic factors, disregarding local urban phenomena. To address this, we present the Urban Dynamic Indicator (UDI), a novel composite indicator designed to measure a city's daily urban dynamic. The UDI is applied to Porto municipality, in Portugal, and it corresponds to a latent factor obtained through a factor analysis over seasonal adjusted daily data regarding traffic intensity, public transportation usage, internet usage in public buses, NO 2 emissions and noise level. The UDI's values show that, by the end of 2020, despite the approach of economic activity to its pre-pandemic values, as suggested by the Portuguese Daily Economic Indicator (DEI), Porto urban dynamic did not recover completely. The UDI enriches the information available for Porto city planners and policymakers to respond to crisis situations and to gauge the application of local policies that contribute to urban sustainable planning. Furthermore, the methodology defined in this work can be followed for the development of daily urban dynamic indicators elsewhere.

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The segmentation of emails into functional zones (also dubbed email zoning) is a relevant preprocessing step for most NLP tasks that deal with emails. However, despite the multilingual character of emails and their applications, previous literature regarding email zoning corpora and systems was developed essentially for English.In this paper, we analyse the existing email zoning corpora and propose a new multilingual benchmark composed of 625 emails in Portuguese, Spanish and French. Moreover, we introduce OKAPI, the first multilingual email segmentation model based on a language agnostic sentence encoder. Besides generalizing well for unseen languages, our model is competitive with current English benchmarks, and reached new state-of-the-art performances for domain adaptation tasks in English.

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