Abstract
The onset of the global crisis has emphasised the persistence of substantial differences in development and social progress within the euro area. The specific case of countries located in the southern periphery region has come to the centre stage, due to the harsh economic conditions that all these countries have experienced in the recent past. In the aftermath of the American subprime creditbubble, these countries’ high indebtedness raised doubts as to their ability to sustain publicfinances, with the financial crisis developing and gaining momentum due to the fragilities presentedin the economy. To varying degrees of severity, all of these economies have since been forced to introduce strong fiscal tightening pogrammes in order to achieve fiscal consolidation, which have translated into recession and rising unemployment. This book undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the causes of the crisis in southern European countries, showing that the ‘Achilles heel’ of these economies is rooted in the dismal evolution of productivity and in a specialisation pattern excessively based on the so-called ‘traditional’, low and low-medium tech industries, which yield low margins, declining export shares and, ultimately, withering international competitiveness. Such evidence suggests that the southern European periphery industrial growth model has reached itslimits, demanding a multidimensional policy approach capable of overcoming the magnitude and complexity of the present crisis. Without denying the need to adjust public and private balance sheets, it is argued that finding a sustainable path out of the present problems requires addressing the challenges of productivity growth and competitiveness in the long term. © 2014 selection and editorial material, Aurora A.C. Teixeira, Ester G. Silva and Ricardo Paes Mamede; individual chapters, the contributors

Abstract

Abstract
The acquisition camera for the GRAVITY/VLTI instrument implements four functions: a) field imager: science field imaging, tip-tilt; b) pupil tracker: telescope pupil lateral and longitudinal positions; c) pupil imager: telescope pupil imaging and d) aberration sensor: The VLTI beam higher order aberrations measurement. We present the dedicated algorithms that simulate the GRAVITY acquisition camera detector measurements considering the realistic imaging conditions, complemented by the pipeline used to extract the data. The data reduction procedure was tested with real aberrations at the VLTI lab and reconstructed back accurately. The acquisition camera software undertakes the measurements simultaneously for all four AT/UTs in 1 s. The measured parameters are updated in the instrument online database. The data reduction software uses the ESO Common Library for Image Processing (CLIP), integrated in to the ESO VLT software environment.

Abstract
Wearable systems are expected to contribute for improving traditional biopotential signals monitoring devices due to higher freedom and unobtrusiveness provided to the wearer. Textile electrodes present advantages compared with the conventional Ag/AgCl electrodes for the capturing of biopotentials, namely in terms of skin irritation due to the hydrogel and the need of a technician to place the electrodes on the correct positions. Due to the lack of hydrogel, textile electrodes present different electrical contact characteristics. The skin-electrode impedance is an important feature since it affects the captured signal quality. Although a low impedance is desired, a comfortable wearable system should not require the electrodes to be covered by the hydrogel or be moistened. A forearm sleeve provided with textile electrodes was used to study the electrode-skin impedance and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of surface electromyographic (EMG) signals on a long-term use basis. The sleeve can be adjusted for different levels of tightening to control the pressure applied on the electrodes. The obtained results provide valuable information on the pressure that the textile garments of a sleeve or vest should apply on the recording electrodes, in order to assure a good electrical and mechanical contact between the electrodes and the skin and decrease the noise due to motion. It was observed that the electrode-skin impedance measurement alone is not sufficient to establish a relation with the SNR. The extraction of parameters from an electrical equivalent model of the electrode-skin interface allows to determine a relation with the model parameters and the SNR. The evaluation of these parameters during long-term monitoring will allow assessing the quality of biopotential measurements in textile electrodes. © 2014 IEEE.

Abstract
The ability to have an automated real time detection of user interest during a web session is very appealing and can be very useful for a number of web intelligence applications. Low level interaction events associated with user interest manifestations form the basis of user interest models. However such data sets present a number of challenges from a machine learning perspective, including the level of noise in the data and class imbalance (given that the majority of content will not be of interest to a user). In this paper we evaluate a large number of machine learning techniques aimed at learning from class imbalanced data using two data sets collected from a real user study. We use the AUC, recall, precision and model complexity to compare the relative merits of these techniques and conclude that useful models with AUC above 0.8 can be obtained using a mix of sampling and cost based methods. Ensemble models can provide further accuracy but make deployment more complex.

Abstract
In the end of a requirements elicitation phase, it is expectable that all information can be properly perceived by the implementation teams. In our work, we faced the problem of dealing with a large set of requirements that need to be implemented by different teams, to ensure on-time delivery. The teams are physically separated and with different working cultures and skills. The system requirements were (semi-) automatically derived from user requirements, are framed within a logical architecture (of the intended system) and the desired high-level execution scenarios are defined and included in the requirements description. Due to the large size of the architecture and to the nature of the working environment, the architecture must be divided before being delivered. In this paper, we present our approach for dividing the logical architecture of the intended system into modules to be delivered for implementation. The division in constructed upon requirement views that provide information about the modules, their interfaces, the intended execution scenarios, and the interfaces with other modules or systems. The approach is evaluated using the ISOFIN project.