Abstract
One of the teacher's first goals should be to motivate students to learn. Involving students in the learning process using project-based learning could be a useful and powerful tool to prepare the students for them professional future. As part of a degree course in Biomedical Engineering, from a Portuguese University, students were asked to look at society and identify a possible failure related to the biomedical field. From the identification of this fault, the project consisted in the planning and its possible resolution. In this article we present the case study of a student's team, whose project was candidate and winner for a national prize in the field of health innovation. Despite the particularization of this case study, the students considered the experience innovative and simultaneously motivating. They also highlighted the added value of a project going beyond the classroom. Therefore, in addition to allowing them to obtain classification to the curricular unit, this type of teaching and learning could have a special impact on civil society.

Abstract

Abstract
The adoption of serious games as a complement to traditional classroom training is still an emerging theme, but it offers relevant potentialities for both students and teachers. This study describes the integration process of serious games in an entrepreneurship course over five years (2014-2018). In the first three years, the ENTRExplorer was adopted, while in the last two years the FLIGBY was used. The experience of using entrepreneurship serious games is analyzed according to multiple perspectives, such as complexity, generation of more entrepreneurial or group working skills, engagement, interactivity, learning outcomes, or even the impact on the intention to establish a new venture. The findings allowed a comparative analysis of the two games, indicating significant differences in some of those dimensions. Nevertheless, the learning outcomes provided by each game were considered relevant by the students, showing that both games can be useful in the process of learning and acquiring entrepreneurship competencies.

Abstract
The many well-established advantages of distributed generation (DG) make their usage in active distribution networks prevalent. However, uncontrolled operation of DG units can negatively interfere with the performance of other equipment, such as tap-changers, in addition to resulting in sub-optimal usage of their potential. Thus, adequate scheduling/control of DG units is critical for operators of the distribution system to avoid those adverse effects. A linearised model of a multi-objective method for coordinating the operation of photovoltaics, battery storage systems, and tap-changers is proposed. Three objective functions are defined for simultaneously enhancing voltage profile, minimising power losses, and reducing peak load power. The formulated multi-objective problem is solved by means of the epsilon-constraint technique. A novel decision-making methodology is offered to find the Pareto optimality and select the preferred solution. To assess to proposed model's performance, it is tested using 33-bus IEEE test system. Consequently, tap-changers suffer lessened stress, the batteries state-of-charge is kept within adequate limits, and the DG units operation is at higher efficiency. The obtained results verify the effectiveness of this approach.

Abstract
Fault-tolerance is a core feature in distributed database systems, particularly the ones deployed in cloud environments. The dependability of these systems often relies in middleware components that abstract the DBMS logic from the replication itself. The highly configurable nature of these systems makes their throughput very dependent on the correct tuning for a given workload. Given the high complexity involved, machine learning techniques are often considered to guide the tuning process and decompose the relations established between tuning variables. This paper presents a machine learning mechanism based on reinforcement learning that attaches to a hybrid replication middleware connected to a DBMS to dynamically live-tune the configuration of the middleware according to the workload being processed. Along with the vision for the system, we present a study conducted over a prototype of the self-tuned replication middleware, showcasing the achieved performance improvements and showing that we were able to achieve an improvement of 370.99% on some of the considered metrics.

Abstract
Carrying out the task of the exploration of a scene by an autonomous robot entails a set of complex skills, such as the ability to create and update a representation of the scene, the knowledge of the regions of the scene which are yet unexplored, the ability to estimate the most efficient point of view from the perspective of an explorer agent and, finally, the ability to physically move the system to the selected Next Best View (NBV). This paper proposes an autonomous exploration system that makes use of a dual OcTree representation to encode the regions in the scene which are occupied, free, and unknown. The NBV is estimated through a discrete approach that samples and evaluates a set of view hypotheses that are created by a conditioned random process which ensures that the views have some chance of adding novel information to the scene. The algorithm uses ray-casting defined according to the characteristics of the RGB-D sensor, and a mechanism that sorts the voxels to be tested in a way that considerably speeds up the assessment. The sampled view that is estimated to provide the largest amount of novel information is selected, and the system moves to that location, where a new exploration step begins. The exploration session is terminated when there are no more unknown regions in the scene or when those that exist cannot be observed by the system. The experimental setup consisted of a robotic manipulator with an RGB-D sensor assembled on its end-effector, all managed by a Robot Operating System (ROS) based architecture. The manipulator provides movement, while the sensor collects information about the scene. Experimental results span over three test scenarios designed to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. In particular, the exploration performance of the proposed system is compared against that of human subjects. Results show that the proposed approach is able to carry out the exploration of a scene, even when it starts from scratch, building up knowledge as the exploration progresses. Furthermore, in these experiments, the system was able to complete the exploration of the scene in less time when compared to human subjects.