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.

Abstract
Empty repositions are a major problem for car rental companies that deal with special types of vehicles whose number of units is small. In order to meet reservation requirements concerning time and location, companies are forced to transfer cars between rental stations, bearing significant costs and increasing the environmental impact of their activity due to the fuel consumption and CO2 emission. In this paper, this problem is tackled under a vehicle-reservation assignment framework as a network-flow model in which the profit is maximized. The reservations are allocated considering the initial and future availability of each car, interdependencies between rental groups, and different reservation priorities. To solve this model, a relax-and-fix heuristic procedure is proposed, including a constraint based on local branching that enables and controls modifications between iterations. Using real instances, the value of this approach is established and an improvement of 33% was achieved when compared to the company's current practices.

Abstract
The onset of the global crisis has emphasised the persistence of substantial differences in development and social progress within the euro area. The specific case of countries located in the southern periphery region has come to the centre stage, due to the harsh economic conditions that all these countries have experienced in the recent past. In the aftermath of the American subprime creditbubble, these countries’ high indebtedness raised doubts as to their ability to sustain publicfinances, with the financial crisis developing and gaining momentum due to the fragilities presentedin the economy. To varying degrees of severity, all of these economies have since been forced to introduce strong fiscal tightening pogrammes in order to achieve fiscal consolidation, which have translated into recession and rising unemployment. This book undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the causes of the crisis in southern European countries, showing that the ‘Achilles heel’ of these economies is rooted in the dismal evolution of productivity and in a specialisation pattern excessively based on the so-called ‘traditional’, low and low-medium tech industries, which yield low margins, declining export shares and, ultimately, withering international competitiveness. Such evidence suggests that the southern European periphery industrial growth model has reached itslimits, demanding a multidimensional policy approach capable of overcoming the magnitude and complexity of the present crisis. Without denying the need to adjust public and private balance sheets, it is argued that finding a sustainable path out of the present problems requires addressing the challenges of productivity growth and competitiveness in the long term. © 2014 selection and editorial material, Aurora A.C. Teixeira, Ester G. Silva and Ricardo Paes Mamede; individual chapters, the contributors

Abstract

Abstract
Wearable systems are expected to contribute for improving traditional biopotential signals monitoring devices due to higher freedom and unobtrusiveness provided to the wearer. Textile electrodes present advantages compared with the conventional Ag/AgCl electrodes for the capturing of biopotentials, namely in terms of skin irritation due to the hydrogel and the need of a technician to place the electrodes on the correct positions. Due to the lack of hydrogel, textile electrodes present different electrical contact characteristics. The skin-electrode impedance is an important feature since it affects the captured signal quality. Although a low impedance is desired, a comfortable wearable system should not require the electrodes to be covered by the hydrogel or be moistened. A forearm sleeve provided with textile electrodes was used to study the electrode-skin impedance and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of surface electromyographic (EMG) signals on a long-term use basis. The sleeve can be adjusted for different levels of tightening to control the pressure applied on the electrodes. The obtained results provide valuable information on the pressure that the textile garments of a sleeve or vest should apply on the recording electrodes, in order to assure a good electrical and mechanical contact between the electrodes and the skin and decrease the noise due to motion. It was observed that the electrode-skin impedance measurement alone is not sufficient to establish a relation with the SNR. The extraction of parameters from an electrical equivalent model of the electrode-skin interface allows to determine a relation with the model parameters and the SNR. The evaluation of these parameters during long-term monitoring will allow assessing the quality of biopotential measurements in textile electrodes. © 2014 IEEE.