Abstract
Individuals currently spend a considerable part of their day-to-day lives interacting with computer or smartphone screens. This study seeks to contradict this and is based on participant observation during a trip from 16-28 August 2018, to Istanbul and to South Asia. We have found that the role of technology may be a medium which shows that we are similar in many ways, despite being separated by large distances and by language. Observation is essentially a tool to uncover meanings, which a visitor and researcher may see. In particular, in the Maldives, on Meedhoo island, we saw a superior form of living. Harmony was the main element we saw on the island, including between genders, which we saw as being equal, despite what is to be found written in the media about certain cultures and religions. Albeit, Istanbul, in Turkey, revealed a culture that still remains very different from the West.

Abstract
This paper describes the development of a Multi-purpose Urban Sensing Equipment, named Billy, designed by a multinational and multidisciplinary team enrolled in the European Project Semester (EPS) at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP). The project is set to design, develop and test an interactive billboard in compliance with the relevant EU regulation and the allocated budget. The Team benefited from the different background, multidisciplinary skills and the newly acquired skills of the members, like marketing, sustainability and design ethics, in activities both inside and outside of the University. The challenge was to design a multi-purpose urban sensing and displaying equipment to inform citizens of nearby environmental conditions. The Team decided to design a system to monitor and display the temperature, humidity, air pressure and air quality of leisure areas, featured with a proximity detection sensor for energy saving. Billy will not only monitor and display this local information, but also the air quality determined by other billboards placed in other locations, creating a distributed urban sensing network. The system has been successfully prototyped and tested using the ESPduino Wi-Fi enabled micro-controller, different sensors and displays (screen and map-based). The results show not only that the prototype functions according to derived specifications and design, but that the team members were able to learn, together and from each other, how to solve this multidisciplinary problem. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Classifying web queries into a set of categories is a crucial task to better understand the user's intent behind a query, contextualize their search and provide more relevant results to the user. However, web queries are typically short and ambiguous making the query classification a non-trivial problem. In this article, we present a new automatic approach for identifying and characterizing queries in the health domain. This method makes use of the search engine counts through a semantic similarity measure called Normalized Google Distance (NGD) combined with Support Vector Machines to classify queries into three dimensions: health-related, severity and semantic type. To evaluate our methods, we used two datasets in different languages, Portuguese and English, and built another for evaluating the last dimension. Overall, the results achieved were satisfactory. The most generic classification obtains better results than more specific ones. The NGD proved to be a valuable assent in query classification.

Abstract
A low-computational intensive laser control approach is proposed for implementing an embedded control system, using pattern recognition by relevant principal component analysis for laser induced breakdown spectroscopy applications. The laser energy is directly related to the resulting spectral pattern and is determined by iterations in the feature space. Results show that single shot iterations until optimum energy can be significantly reduced by pattern recognition. A performance benchmark with minerals, alloys and pellets from material collected from a drill demonstrated an average of 50% improvement, significantly reducing sample deterioration and improving measurement safety.

Abstract
Supplier development contributes to supply chain integration and performance, thus playing an essential role in any industry. In the retail market, no formal procedures exist for the selection-assignment of supplier development programs, meaning that respective management is complex and unclear given actor and requirement heterogeneities. Multi-criteria techniques are currently used for selection and evaluation processes. However, no models exist that integrate clustering and multi-criteria techniques together to efficiently select-assign supplier development programs. This study proposes a four-phase methodology - diagnosis, program design, assignment, and proposal - that considers supplier clustering through K-means and multi-criteria fuzzification. Additionally, case-study analysis of 149 retail suppliers in Colombia clustered businesses into high (8), medium (32), and low (109) risk sets, each of which was assigned tailored development programs. The obtained results support use of the proposed methodology to improve supply chain performance for organisations with many suppliers requiring development programs.

Abstract