Abstract
This paper presents a new method for automatic common carotid artery detection in B-mode ultrasonography. The proposed method is based on the location of phase symmetry patterns at apropriate scale of analysis. The local phase information is derived from the monogenic signal and isotropic log-normal band-pass filters, and the resulting common carotid artery is located using a dynamic programming optimization algorithm. The experiments show that the proposed method is more robust to noise than previous approaches, although additional research is required for robust common carotid artery detection on the more complicated cases.

Abstract

Abstract
Cluster detection methods are widely studied in Propositional Data Mining. In this context, data is individually represented as a feature vector. This data has a natural nonrelational structure, but can be represented in a relational form through similarity-based network models. In these models, examples are represented by vertices and an edge connects two examples with high similarity. This relational representation allows employing network-based algorithms in Relational Data Mining. Specifically in clustering tasks, these models allow to use community detection algorithms in networks in order to detect data clusters. In this work, we compared traditional non-relational data-based clustering algorithms with clustering detection algorithms based on relational data using measures for community detection in networks. We carried out an exploratory analysis over 23 numerical datasets and 10 textual datasets. Results show that network models can efficiently represent the data topology, allowing their application in cluster detection with higher precision when compared to non-relational methods. Copyright 2013 ACM.

Abstract

Abstract
Engineering education practices have evolved not only due to the natural changes in the contents of the curricula and skills but also, and more recently, due to the requirements imposed by the Bologna revision process. In addition, industry is becoming more demanding, as society is becoming more and more aware of the global needs and consequences of industrial practices. Under this scope, higher education needs not only to follow but also to lead these trends. Therefore, the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP), a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) training partner in Portugal, prepared and presented its Sustainability Action Plan (PASUS), with the main objective of creating a new kind of engineers, with Sustainable Development at the core of their graduation and MsC degrees. In this paper, the main strategies and activities of the referred plan along with the strategic approach, which guided its development and implementation, will be presented in detail. Additionally, a reflection about the above mentioned bridge between concept and application will be established and justified, in the framework of the action plan. Although in most of the situations, there was no prior discussion or specific request, many of the graduation and post-graduation programmes offered by ISEP already include courses that attend to PASUS philosophy. As a consequence, the number of Master thesis, Graduation projects and R&D projects that address sustainability problems has grown substantially, a proof that for ISEP community, sustainability really matters!

Abstract
Vision-based hand gesture interfaces require fast and extremely robust hand detection, and gesture recognition. Hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction is an area of active research in computer vision and machine learning. The primary goal of gesture recognition research is to create a system, which can identify specific human gestures and use them to convey information or for device control. In this paper we present a comparative study of seven different algorithms for hand feature extraction, for static hand gesture classification, analysed with RapidMiner in order to find the best learner. We defined our own gesture vocabulary, with 10 gestures, and we have recorded videos from 20 persons performing the gestures for later processing. Our goal in the present study is to learn features that, isolated, respond better in various situations in human-computer interaction. Results show that the radial signature and the centroid distance are the features that when used separately obtain better results, being at the same time simple in terms of computational complexity.