Abstract
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) developers aim to narrow the gap between the level of abstraction used by domain users and the one provided by the DSL, in order to help taming the increased complexity of computer systems and real-world problems. The quality in use of a DSL is essential for its successful adoption. We illustrate how a usability evaluation process can be weaved into the development process of a concrete DSL - FlowSL - used for specifying humanitarian campaign processes lead by an international Non-Governmental Organization. FlowSL is being developed following an agile process using Model-Driven Development (MDD) tools, to cope with vague and poorly understood requirements in the beginning of the development process.

Abstract
This paper presents a set of exploratory experiments addressed to analyse and evaluate the performance of baseline speech processing components in European Portuguese for distant voice command recognition applications in domestic environments. The analysis, conducted in a multi-channel multi-room scenario, showed the importance of adequate room detection and channel selection strategies to obtain acceptable performances. Two different computationally inexpensive channel selection measures for room detection, channel selection and cluster selection have been investigated. Experimental results show that the strategies based on envelope-variance measure consistently outperformed the remaining methods investigated, and particularly, that channel selection strategies can be more convenient than baseline beamforming methods, such as delay-and-sum, for this type of multi-room scenarios.

Abstract

Abstract
Current approaches to game design improvements rely on gameplay testing, an iterative process following the test, try and fix pattern, relying on target audience feedback via standard questionnaires. Besides being a very time consuming phase, it is also highly subjective. In this paper, we demonstrate a generalizable approach for building predictive models of players' affective reactions across games and genres. Our aim is two-fold: 1) That game developers can use these models to more easily and accurately tune game parameters, allowing improved gaming experiences, and 2) That these models can be used as the basis for parameterisable and adaptive affective gaming. This paper describes our preliminary results regarding a novel, physiological-based method for emotional player profiling, which consists on the following three phases: (i) monitoring players' emotional states and game events, (ii) identifying player's emotional reactions to game events and (iii) individual and cluster-based modelling of players emotional reactions.

Abstract
This paper proposes new clustering criteria for distinguishing Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) strains using their spectrometric signature. These criteria are introduced in an agglomerative hierarchical clustering context, and consist of: (a) minimizing the total volume of clusters, as given by their respective convex hulls; and, (b) minimizing the global variance in cluster directionality. The method is deterministic and produces dendrograms, which are important features for microbiologists. A set of experiments, performed on yeast spectrometric data and on synthetic data, show the new approach outperforms several well-known clustering algorithms, including techniques commonly used for microorganism differentiation.

Abstract
Normalized Relative Delay (NRD) is a phase-related feature that can be extracted from the harmonic structure of a periodic sound, using accurate frequency and phase estimation. We present research results showing that NRD coefficients reflect the phase structure of glottal pulses and possess a speaker discrimination capability. We use both synthetic and natural voiced vowels uttered by children, adult males and females, to illustrate both the shift-invariance property of NRDs, as well as their speaker discrimination potential, using a Fisher related criterion of data scattering.