Abstract
We describe different scenarios where a learning mechanism is capable of acquiring experience on a source task, and subsequently exploit such experience on a target task. The core ideas behind this ability to transfer knowledge from one task to another have been studied in the machine learning literature under different titles and perspectives. Here we describe some of them under the names of inductive transfer, transfer learning, multitask learning, meta-searching, meta-generalization, and domain adaptation.

Abstract

Abstract
The ageing process is naturally accompanied by changes in people's cognitive processes. The European population ageing is a challenge for the European social policy and for the mental health professionals. New technologies can play an important role in the neurocognitive stimulation area as they possess characteristics that might reduce the anxiety levels of patients participating in neurocognitive stimulation or assessment programs. In particular, serious games provide a setting that can be explored to improve the easy access to neurocognitive stimulation and assessment, regardless of place and time, at a lower cost then traditional approaches. This paper presents a serious game aiming to analyse neurocognitive deficits and stimulate the players' deficitary neurocognitive processes. This game is built on top of sound neurocognitive psychotherapy for adults, mainly addressing the cognitive processes of attention and memory. The game will simulate real world scenarios, allowing a better generalization process due to ecological validity.

Abstract

Abstract
The Unit Commitment Problem (UCP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem in power systems. The main goal in the UCP is to schedule a subset of a given group of electrical power generating units and also to determine their production output in order to meet energy demands at minimum cost. In addition, a set of technological and operational constraints must be satisfied. A large variety of optimization methods addressing the UCP is available in the literature. This panoply of methods includes exact methods (such as dynamic programming, branch-and-bound) and heuristic methods (tabu search, simulated annealing, particle swarm, genetic algorithms). This paper proposes two non-traditional formulations. First, the UCP is formulated as a mixed-integer optimal control problem with both binary-valued control variables and real-valued control variables. Then, the problem is formulated as a switching time dynamic optimization problem involving only real-valued controls.

Abstract
Software business continues to expand globally, highly motivated by the reachability of the Internet and possibilities of Cloud Computing. While widely adopted, development for the cloud has some intrinsic properties to it, making it complex to any newcomer. This research is capturing those intricacies using a pattern catalog, with this paper contributing with three of those patterns: Messaging System, a message bus for abstracting service placement in a cluster and orchestrating messages between multiple services; Preemptive Logging, a design principle where services and servers continuously output relevant information to log files, making them available for later debugging failures; and Log Aggregation, a technique to aggregate logs from multiple services and servers in a centralized location, which indexes and provides them in a queryable, user friendly format. These patterns are useful for anyone designing software for the cloud, either to guide or validate their design decisions.