Abstract
The consolidation of smart grids is inevitably related with the development and actual implementation of different functionalities envisioned for future electric grids. This paper presents the major implementations of smart grid projects in Portugal, which resulted from a close collaboration between academia and industry. An overview of the entire development process is presented culminating with the real implementation of the developed concepts. The architectures and functional models are presented as the initial step in defining the management and control functionalities for future smart distribution networks. The intermediate step consists in validating the advances introduced by smart grids. Simulation tools are emphasized considering both electrical and communications aspects. Finally, a laboratory infrastructure implemented to be used as a real test bed and a pilot deployed in a large city are presented in the end. The associated learning has provided relevant information for future developments.

Abstract
The sensors that acquire 3D data play an important role in many applications. In addition, they have been used in the robotic field for several purposes, for instance, enhancing the navigation of mobile robots, object detection, scene reconstruction, 3D inspection of parts and others. Moreover, a significant amount of devices with distinct cost, accuracy and features have been released in the recent years which increases the difficulty of comparing each sensor in a proper manner or choosing the most suitable device for a specific task and operation field. This paper compares the Kinect v1, Kinect v2, Structure Sensor and Mesa Imaging SR4000. The noise of each sensor is characterized for different distances and considering objects with different colors. Therefore, this paper proposes a simple but quantitative benchmark for evaluating 3D devices that characterizes the most relevant features for the robotic field and in accordance with different type of operations.

Abstract
Learning programming is a complex task that poses significant challenges. Students face different kinds of difficulties at complex levels that traditional teaching/learning methods are nor able to cope with. For this reason, several authors have researched the pedagogical effectiveness of program visualization and animation, and developed some tools. Animation can help students on the analysis and understanding of given programs, and can also guide on the development of new ones. It is very important to give students the opportunity to practice solving programming exercises by themselves. Receiving feedback is essential for knowledge acquisition. New tools arose ( especially in the area of programming contests) to allow for the submission of solutions ( programs developed by the students) to the problem statements presented by the teacher and to assess them, returning immediately information about the submitted answer. These tools can be incorporated into teaching activities, allowing students to test their work getting immediate feedback. Automatic evaluation systems significantly improve students performance. In this article are shown these two approaches, animation and automatic assessment, and proposed a new pedagogical practice resulting from the combination of both.

Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of tomography, a mechanism to lower management overhead for component-based IoT applications. Previous research has shown the advantages of component-based software engineering, wherein applications are built and reconfigured at runtime through the composition of components. While this approach promotes code-reuse and dynamic reconfiguration, the introspection and reconfiguration of distributed applications is cumbersome and inefficient. Tomography addresses this problem by reimagining the visitor design pattern for distributed component based compositions. We evaluate the performance of this approach in a case-study of discovering/introspecting and reconfiguring a real-world IoT application. We show that in comparison to classic management operations, tomography reduces both the number of explicit queries and the volume of network messages. This significantly reduces management effort and energy consumption. © 2015 ACM.

Abstract

Abstract
We propose an abstract framework for modelling state-based systems with internal behaviour as e.g. given by silent or epsilon-transitions. Our approach employs monads with a parametrized fixpoint operator dagger to give a semantics to those systems and implement a sound procedure of abstraction of the internal transitions, whose labels are seen as the unit of a free monoid. More broadly, our approach extends the standard coalgebraic framework for state-based systems by taking into account the algebraic structure of the labels of their transitions. This allows to consider a wide range of other examples, including Mazurkiewicz traces for concurrent systems and non-deterministic transducers.