Abstract
We consider a system where an agent (Alice) aims at transmitting a message to a second agent (Bob) over a set of parallel channels, while keeping it secret from a third agent (Eve) by using physical layer security techniques. We assume that Alice perfectly knows the set of channels with respect to Bob, but she has only a statistical knowledge of the channels with respect to Eve. We derive bounds on the achievable outage secrecy rates, by considering coding either within each channel or across all parallel channels. Transmit power is adapted to the channel conditions, with a constraint on the average power over the whole transmission. We also focus on the maximum cumulative outage secrecy rate that can be achieved. Moreover, in order to assess the performance in a real life scenario, we consider the use of practical error correcting codes. We extend the definitions of security gap and equivocation rate, previously applied to the single additive white Gaussian noise channel, to Rayleigh distributed parallel channels, on the basis of the error rate targets and the outage probability. Bounds on these metrics are also derived, considering the statistics of the parallel channels. Numerical results are provided, that confirm the feasibility of the considered physical layer security techniques.

Abstract
Machine learning studies automatic methods for acquisition of domain knowledge with the goal of improving systems performance as the result of experience. In the past two decades, machine learning research and practice has focused on batch learning usually with small data sets. The rationale behind this practice is that examples are generated at random accordingly to some stationary probability distribution. Most learners use a greedy, hill-climbing search in the space of models. They are prone to overfitting, local maximas, etc. Data are scarce and statistic estimates have high variance. A paradigmatic example is the TDIT algorithm to learn decision trees [14]. As the tree grows, less and fewer examples are available to compute the sufficient statistics, variance increase leading to model instability Moreover, the growing process re-uses the same data, exacerbating the overfitting problem. Regularization and pruning mechanisms are mandatory. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Abstract
There is relatively little guidance on the situated ergonomic assessment of medical devices, and few case studies that detail this type of evaluation. This paper reports results of a detailed case study that focuses on the design and use of a modern blood glucose meter on an oncology ward. We spent approximately 150 h in-situ, over 11 days and 4 nights, performing observations and interviews with users. This was complemented by interviews with two staff with oversight and management responsibility related to the device. We identified 19 issues with the design and use of this device. These issues were grouped into 7 themes which can help guide the situated study of medical devices: usability, knowledge gaps and mental models, workarounds, wider tasks and equipment, the patient, connection between services, and policy. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd and The Ergonomics Society.

Abstract
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a middleware infrastructure that provides a way to integrate loosely-coupled heterogeneous software applications based on the services principles. The life-cycle management of services in such environments is a critical issue for the component's reuse, maintenance and operation. This paper introduces a service life-cycle management module that extends the traditional functionalities with advanced monitoring and data analytics to contribute for the robustness, reliability and self-organization of networks of clusters based on ESB platforms. The realization of this module was embedded in the JBoss ESB, considering a sniffer mechanism to collect the service messages crossing the bus and a Liferay portal to display relevant information related to the services' health.

Abstract
Academia has been criticized for being in an "ivory tower", somewhat distant from what is going on in the practical world. How should we measure the return of investment in education worldwide? One such measure could be the satisfaction and preparedness felt by students when making the transition from classroom to the practical world of entrepreneurial and corporate business. Herein we analyse how three companies have been approaching internationalization, in order to increase the comprehension of what is going on in the real world, and to then tie it to curricula in higher education institutions on the subject. There is seen to be a necessity to perhaps also include lower-level material in internationalization curricula, as graduate students will tend to be involved in lower-level front-and back-office activities in organizations seeking to internationalize; but perhaps more important is specific sales training, for commercial contacts [1], but also to prepare for partnerships with universities and to promote mobility within the network. Effective collaboration with a number of entities, up-and down-stream, is a growing requirement in organizations. Finally, our research confirms other findings with regards to firms in Portugal following a gradual internationalization process.

Abstract
Visual motion perception from a moving observer is the most often encountered case in real life situations. It is a complex and challenging problem, although, it can promote the arising of new applications. This article presents an innovative and autonomous robotic system designed for active surveillance and a dense optical flow technique. Several optical flow techniques have been proposed for motion perception however, most of them are too computationally demanding for autonomous mobile systems. The proposed HybridTree method is able to identify the intrinsic nature of the motion by performing two consecutive operations: expectation and sensing. Descriptive properties of the image are retrieved using a tree-based scheme and during the expectation phase. In the sensing operation, the properties of image regions are used by a hybrid and hierarchical optical flow structure to estimate the flow field. The experiments prove that the proposed method extracts reliable visual motion information in a short period of time and is more suitable for applications that do not have specialized computer devices. Therefore, the HybridTree differs from other techniques since it introduces a new perspective for the motion perception computation: high level information about the image sequence is integrated into the estimation of the optical flow. In addition, it meets most of the robotic or surveillance demands and the resulting flow field is less computationally demanding comparatively to other state-of-the-art methods.