Abstract
The purpose of this study was the development of a clustering methodology to deal with arterial pressure waveform (APW) parameters to be used in the cardiovascular risk assessment. One hundred sixteen subjects were monitored and divided into two groups. The first one (23 hypertensive subjects) was analyzed using APW and biochemical parameters, while the remaining 93 healthy subjects were only evaluated through APW parameters. The expectation maximization (EM) and k-means algorithms were used in the cluster analysis, and the risk scores (the Framingham Risk Score (FRS), the Systematic COronary Risk Evaluation (SCORE) project, the Assessing cardiovascular risk using Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (ASSIGN) and the PROspective Cardiovascular munster (PROCAM)), commonly used in clinical practice were selected to the cluster risk validation. The result from the clustering risk analysis showed a very significant correlation with ASSIGN (r = 0.582, p < 0.01) and a significant correlation with FRS (r = 0.458, p < 0.05). The results from the comparison of both groups also allowed to identify the cluster with higher cardiovascular risk in the healthy group. These results give new insights to explore this methodology in future scoring trials.

Abstract
Today E-Government institutions face a lot of challenges related to the quality and effectiveness of the services they provide. In most cases, their users are more demanding, imposing new ways of acting and dealing with their needs, requesting often expeditious and effective attendance. Independently for their nature, we believe that such pertinent characteristics begin to be sustained immediately as we start to study and model E-Government processes. Modeling and simulation are useful tools on the assurance of the availability of E-Government services in many aspects, contributing significantly to improve processes implementation, ranging from their inception to their final software application roll-up and maintenance. In this paper we studied the use of YAWL - a work flowing language - for modeling E-Government processes, showing through a real world application case how it can help us in the construction of effective models that may be used as a basis for understanding and building the correspondent software applications.

Abstract
Balancing services are used for maintaining the continuous balance between generation and load in the system and keep the frequency stable on its nominal value. The demand for balancing services is increasing with the growing penetration of wind generation into the electricity industry. It is clearly seen that a major challenge of the coming environment for the electricity market is reducing the procurement cost of balancing services. This paper presents a probabilistic spot market model based on integration of day-ahead spot market and the real-time balancing market which aims to trade off preventive actions in the day-ahead spot market with corrective actions in the real-time balancing market. The proposed model is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem. To solve it, the inner optimization problem (reflecting the real-time balancing market) was substituted by its equivalent Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions. Conventional spot market model is used as a benchmark in this study. The proposed and conventional spot market designs are applied to modified Nordic 32-bus example system. Comparison of results point out the benefits of the proposed approach over the traditional model.

Abstract
Device miniaturization is pointing towards tolerating imperfect hardware provided it is "good enough". Software design theories will have to face the impact of such a trend sooner or later. A school of thought in software design is relational: it expresses specifications as relations and derives programs from specifications using relational algebra. This paper proposes that linear algebra be adopted as an evolution of relational algebra able to cope with the quantification of the impact of imperfect hardware on (otherwise) reliable software. The approach is illustrated by developing a monadic calculus for component oriented software construction with a probabilistic dimension quantifying (by linear algebra) the propagation of imperfect behaviour from lower to upper layers of software systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.

Abstract
Over the years, the increased search and exchange of information lead to an increase of traffic intensity in todays optical communication networks. Coherent communications, using the amplitude and phase of the signal, reappears as one of the transmission techniques to increase the spectral efficiency and throughput of optical channels. In this context, this paper present a survey on format conversion of modulated signals using MZISOAs, based exclusively on all-optical techniques through wavelength conversion. We also present two proposal using all-optical techniques: One for the conversion of amplitude modulation signals to a continuous phase modulation format, and another technique for the conversion of OOK signals to QPSK and QAM signals. Both approaches are experimentally validated.

Abstract
This paper proposes a framework to decompose and develop metafeatures for Metalearning (MtL) problems. Several metafeatures (also known as data characteristics) are proposed in the literature for a wide range of problems. Since MtL applicability is very general but problem dependent, researchers focus on generating specific and yet informative metafeatures for each problem. This process is carried without any sort of conceptual framework. We believe that such framework would open new horizons on the development of metafeatures and also aid the process of understanding the metafeatures already proposed in the state-of-the-art. We propose a framework with the aim of fill that gap and we show its applicability in a scenario of algorithm recommendation for regression problems.