Abstract
Expression Atlas (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/gxa) is a value-added database providing information about gene, protein and splice variant expression in different cell types, organism parts, developmental stages, diseases and other biological and experimental conditions. The database consists of selected high-quality microarray and RNA-sequencing experiments from ArrayExpress that have been manually curated, annotated with Experimental Factor Ontology terms and processed using standardized microarray and RNA-sequencing analysis methods. The new version of Expression Atlas introduces the concept of 'baseline' expression, i.e. gene and splice variant abundance levels in healthy or untreated conditions, such as tissues or cell types. Differential gene expression data benefit from an in-depth curation of experimental intent, resulting in biologically meaningful 'contrasts', i.e. instances of differential pairwise comparisons between two sets of biological replicates. Other novel aspects of Expression Atlas are its strict quality control of raw experimental data, up-to-date RNA-sequencing analysis methods, expression data at the level of gene sets, as well as genes and a more powerful search interface designed to maximize the biological value provided to the user.

Abstract

Abstract
Acoustic sensing is nowadays a very demanding field which plays an important role in modern society, with applications spanning from structural health monitoring to medical imaging. Fiber-optics can bring many advantages to this field, and fiber-optic acoustic sensors show already performance levels capable of competing with the standard sensors based on piezoelectric transducers. This review presents the recent advances in the field of fiber-optic dynamic strain sensing, particularly for acoustic detection. Three dominant technologies are identified - fiber Bragg gratings, interferometric Mach-Zehnder, and Fabry-Pérot configurations - and their recent developments are summarized. © 2014 The Author(s).

Abstract
Deduplication of primary storage volumes in a cloud computing environment is increasingly desirable, as the resulting space savings contribute to the cost effectiveness of a large scale multi-tenant infrastructure. However, traditional archival and backup deduplication systems impose prohibitive overhead for latency-sensitive applications deployed at these infrastructures while, current primary deduplication systems rely on special cluster filesystems, centralized components, or restrictive workload assumptions. We present DEDIS, a fully-distributed and dependable system that performs exact and cluster-wide background deduplication of primary storage. DEDIS does not depend on data locality and works on top of any unsophisticated storage backend, centralized or distributed, that exports a basic shared block device interface. The evaluation of an open-source prototype shows that DEDIS scales out and adds negligible overhead

Abstract
This paper proposes a novel Energy Aggregator model responsible for managing the flexibility of low voltage customers in order to reduce electricity costs. The flexibility of the customers is represented by the availability of their controllable loads to reduce/ increase power consumption. The flexible loads are managed according to the customers' preferences and the technical limitations of the flexible loads. The Energy Aggregator model developed includes an algorithm designed to manage customers' flexibility in quasi-real-time, with the objective of minimizing the deviations from the energy bought by the aggregator in the market. A scenario with 30 households located in a semi-urban area is used to illustrate the application of the algorithm and validate the proposed approach.

Abstract
"The Fifth Empire" is a single-player action adventure game in 2D. Centering around an adaptation of the myth the Fifth Empire (Nebuchadnezzar's dream and its interpretation by prophet Daniel) [1] is an epic allegory of the human condition, with a reinterpretation of European and Portuguese history as backdrop. This is a project that is still in process, which main goal is the development of an attractive videogame, with a strong and enriched educational purpose, since the game takes place in a real and historical setting. Moreover, through entertainment, the game should promote curiosity about the Portuguese history and motivate a more detailed study by the target audience.