Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
The economic crisis which started in 2008 has demonstrated more clearly the importance of conjuncture aspects for organizational results evidencing associated opportunities and vulnerabilities. In such a context, if on one hand innovation is affected by investment reduction by most enterprises, on the other it has shown to be one of the “antidotes” against the crisis and appears as fertile soil for investments, in the organizational as well as in the territorial context. Enterprises and countries which maintained or even raised efforts toward innovation have demonstrated a higher resilience in times of difficulty. This study aims at identifying opportunities and threats to the innovation performance of firms by means of the study of the crisis effects upon external facilitators and barriers. Besides the literature review, case studies developed in Portuguese and Brazilian enterprises are used for the analysis of the practical effects of the identified aspects in two distinct realities in what concerns the economic crisis. The results show that although Portugal has suffered the crisis effects, in a general way, more than Brazil, when we look to innovation performance, Portugal has shown better results than Brazil during and after the crisis. This study contributes to enterprise and academic purposes since it classifies factors which influence innovation positive or negatively in times of crisis.

Abstract
The world is assisting to the fourth industrial revolution, with several domains of science and technology being strongly developed and, specially, being integrated with each other, allowing to build evolvable complex systems. Data digitization, big-data analysis, distributed control, Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and self-organization, amongst others, are playing an important role in this journey. This paper considers the best practices from previous successful European projects addressing distributed control systems to develop an innovative architecture that can be industrially deployed. For this purpose, a particular design process has to be addressed in order to consider the requirements and functionalities from various use cases. To investigate the known practices, four use cases are enlighted in this paper, which cover a wide spectrum of the European industrial force, as well as industrial standards to support a smooth migration from traditional systems to the emergent distributed systems. © 2016 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract
Attention is strongly connected with learning and when it comes to acquiring new knowledge, attention is one the most important mechanisms. The learner's attention affects learning results and can define the success or failure of a student. The negative effects are especially significant when carrying out long or demanding tasks, as often happens in an assessment. This paper presents a monitoring system using computer peripheral devices. Two classes were monitored, a regular one and an assessment one. Results show that it is possible to measure attentiveness in a non-intrusive way.