Abstract

Abstract
The electricity markets restructuring process encouraged the use of computational tools in order to allow the study of different market mechanisms and the relationships between the participating entities. Automated negotiation plays a crucial role in the decision support for energy transactions due to the constant need for players to engage in bilateral negotiations. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate bilateral contract prices, which is essential to support market players in their decisions, enabling adequate risk management of the negotiation process. The proposed approach uses an adaptation of the Q-Learning reinforcement learning algorithm to choose the best from a set of possible contract prices forecasts that are determined using several methods, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), among others. The learning process assesses the probability of success of each forecasting method, by comparing the expected negotiation price with the historic data contracts of competitor players. The negotiation scenario identified as the most probable scenario that the player will face during the negotiation process is the one that presents the higher expected utility value. This approach allows the supported player to be prepared for the negotiation scenario that is the most likely to represent a reliable approximation of the actual negotiation environment.

Abstract
This paper proposes a robust optimization framework for energy hub management. It is well known that the operation of energy systems can be negatively affected by uncertain parameters, such as stochastic load demand or generation. In this regard, it is of high significance to propose efficient tools in order to deal with uncertainties and to provide reliable operating conditions. On a broader scale, an energy hub includes diverse energy sources for supplying both electrical load and heating/cooling demands with stochastic behaviors. Therefore, this paper utilizes the Information Gap Decision Theory (IGDT) to tackle this uncertainty as an efficient robust optimization tool with low complexity to ensure the optimal operation of the system according to the priorities of the decision maker entity. The proposed optimization framework is also implemented on a benchmark energy hub which includes different energy sources and evaluated under different working conditions. © 2017 IEEE.

Abstract
Bad posture while working or playing videogames can affect our life quality and impose negative economic consequences over time. There's raising concern in companies regarding worker's wellness, many adopting preventive measures. Specialized training in posture is important to prevent occupational activities risks and to foster health promotion. In this paper, we present a study of different classifiers to detect good and bad body postures in workplaces. A set classifiers, namely artificial neural networks, support vector machine, decision trees, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, treebagger and naïve Bayes, were tested in three-dimensional acquisitions of 100 people for automatic determination of the type of body posture. The best classifier was the treebagger with a rating of True Positive and True Negative of 93.3% and 96.2%, respectively.

Abstract
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Abstract
Designing and optimizing HPC applications are difficult and complex tasks, which require mastering specialized languages and tools for performance tuning. As this is incompatible with the current trend to open HPC infrastructures to a wider range of users, the availability of more sophisticated programming languages and tools to assist and automate the design stages is crucial to provide smoothly migration paths towards novel heterogeneous HPC platforms. The ANTAREX project intends to address these issues by providing a tool flow, a Domain Specific Launguage and APIs to provide application's adaptivity and to runtime manage and autotune applications for heterogeneous HPC systems. Our DSL provides a separation of concerns, where analysis, runtime adaptivity, performance tuning and energy strategies are specified separately from the application functionalities with the goal to increase productivity, significantly reduce time to solution, while making possible the deployment of substantially improved implementations. This paper presents the ANTAREX tool flow and shows the impact of optimization strategies in the context of one of the ANTAREX use cases related to personalized drug design. We show how simple strategies, not devised by typical compilers, can substantially speedup the execution and reduce energy consumption.