Abstract
The phenomenon of cheating in higher education is of overwhelming importance in that the students engaging in these acts are unlikely to have the skills necessary for their future professional life. Despite its relevance, the empirical evaluation of cheating in universities has been almost exclusively focused on the US context. Little is known about cheating at the European level, let alone in Portugal. Even less is explored at the regional level. In this paper we present evidence on the perception of cheating by Portuguese undergraduate students of economics/business degrees. We undertake a large-scale survey, involving 2675 students from all Portuguese mainland public universities (10). We found that copying-favourable environments are associated with a higher propensity to cheat. Moreover, in universities where 'codes of honour' exist, this propensity tends to be lower. Finally, the propensity to copy seems to be highly influenced by the cultural systems and socially-related factors of different regions. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Abstract
The increased integration of wind power into the electric grid, as nowadays occurs in Portugal, poses new challenges due to its intermittency and volatility. Wind power prediction plays a key role in tackling these challenges. A novel hybrid approach, combining particle swarm optimization and adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system, is proposed in this paper for short-term wind power prediction. Results from a real-world case study are presented. Conclusions are duly drawn.

Abstract
The cost of deploying a ubiquitous system to enhance a physical environment is likely to be considerable. The success of its deployment is highly dependent on its context: the physical environment and the activities that are to be carried out within it. This paper provides an initial exploration of whether stochastic process algebras (in particular PEPA with a Fluid Flow semantics) might be used to explore consequences before deployment. The focus of the exploration is to aid understanding of how a proposed system supports users within the environment. The challenge is to provide notations and techniques that will enable the analysis of potentially complex systems.

Abstract
In order to obtain depth information about a scene in computer vision, one needs to process pairs of stereo images. The calculation of dense depth maps in real-time is computationally challenging as it requires searching for matches between objects in both images. The task is significantly simplified if the images are rectified, a process which horizontally aligns the objects in both images. The process of stereo images rectification has several steps with different computational requirements. The steps include 2D searches for high fidelity matches, precise matrix calculations, and fast pixel coordinate transformations and interpolations. In this project, the complete process is effectively implemented in a Spartan-3 FPGA, taking advantage of a MicroBlaze soft core for slow but precise calculations, and of fast dedicated hardware support for achieving the real-time requirements. The implemented system successfully performs real-time rectification on the images from two video cameras, with a resolution of 640×480 pixels and a frame rate of 25 fps, and is easily configured for videos with higher resolutions. The experimental results show very good quality, with rectified images having a maximum vertical disparity of two pixels, thereby showing that stereo image rectification can be efficiently achieved in an low-resource FPGA (with 64KB for program instructions and data). © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract
This paper is on wind energy conversion systems with full-power converter and permanent magnet synchronous generator. Different topologies for the power-electronic converters are considered, namely matrix and multilevel converters. Also, a new fractional-order control strategy is proposed for the variable-speed operation of the wind turbines. Simulation studies are carried out in order to adequately assess the quality of the energy injected into the electric grid. Conclusions are duly drawn.

Abstract
This paper presents a method (GEIAS) for the automatic processing of digital images obtained from Gel Electrophoresis. The performance of GEMS was tested using 12 images, obtained from 4 gels with 3 different exposures with a total of 1082 bands, comparing the results provided by GEIAS and 3 other software tools. The GEIAS is able to fully automatically detect; DNA lanes while the other 3 software tools tested can only do this in a semi-automatic or manual way. For the correct location of DNA bands, GEIAS required a manual correction of the location in 10.0% of the bands, and the other software tools 13.0%, 15.0% and 25.4%. The average error in the estimation of molecular weight was tested using a total of 5443 bands in 12 image using 672 reference/observed lane pairs. The average error was found to be 9.2% for GEIAS and 11.2%, 14.4% and 13.1% for the other software tools tested.