Abstract
Ageing is no longer an issue belonging just to developed countries. In the present paper we examine the presence of this phenomenon and its expected evolution in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), from 1950 to 2100. The empirical work carried out sustains that LDCs are in the process of becoming ageing countries. Indeed, the old age dependency ratio in LDCs is predicted to converge towards that of the most developed countries between 2010 and 2020. Furthermore, results reveal that ageing dynamics varies according to LDCs regions, disclosing that LDCs from Asia are more likely to be ageing first. The results suggest that, unlike developed countries, LDCs will experience the process of demographic burden (ageing) before they could benefit from the demographic dividend (higher proportion of working group and lower proportion of young age group). © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Abstract

Abstract
Efficient access to large scale video assets, may it be our life memories in our hard drive or a broadcaster archive which the company is eager to sell, requires content to be conveniently annotated. Manually annotating video content is, however, an intellectually expensive and time-consuming process. In this paper we argue that crowdsourcing, an approach that relies on a remote task force to perform activities that are costly or time-consuming using traditional methods, is a suitable alternative and we describe a solution based on gamification mechanisms for collaboratively collecting timed metadata. Tags introduced by registered players are validated based on a collaborative scoring mechanism that excludes erratic annotations. Voting mechanisms, enabling users to approve or refuse existing tags, provide an extra guarantee on the quality of the annotations. The sense of community is also created as users may watch the crowd's favourite moments of the video provided by a summarization functionality. The system was tested with a pool of volunteers in order to evaluate the quality of the contributions. The results suggest that crowdsourced annotation can describe objects, persons, places, etc. correctly, as well as be very accurate in time.

Abstract
Allocation of jobs to machines and subsequent sequencing each machine is known as job scheduling problem. Classically, both operations are done in a centralized and static/offline structure, considering some assumptions about the jobs and machining environment. Today, with the advent of Industry 4.0, the need to incorporate real-time data in the scheduling decision process is clear and facilitated. Recently, several studies have been conducted on the collection and application of distributed data in real-time of operations, e.g., job scheduling and control. In practice, pure distribution and decentralization is not yet fully realizable because of e.g., transformation complexity and classical resistance to change. This paper studies a combination of decentralized sequencing and central optimum allocation in a lithography job-shop problem. It compares the level of applicability of two decentralized algorithms against the central scheduling. The results show better relative performance of sequencing in stochastic cases. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2017.

Abstract
Purpose - This paper aims to study and explore the activities and the use of institutional network resources by industrial business associations (IBAs) to support and facilitate internationalisation processes of small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Other goals are to understand the internationalisation follow-up process and the future vision of IBAs to improve this internationalisation support. Design/methodology/approach - Based on empirical evidence and following an abductive approach, this paper presents a qualitative exploratory field research, providing insights from interviews performed with 20 IBAs based in Portugal. Findings - The findings suggest that the current institutional network support to internationalisation is mainly provided through promotional activities; counselling, training and technical and legal support; information sharing; and cooperation with other institutional entities. Each support category is explored and explained and a new conceptual model is developed to represent these findings. Regarding the internationalisation follow-up, IBAs provide a continuous support for the international operations by using some instruments and mechanisms to assist SMEs after an internationalisation initiative. Finally, collaboration and the use of new information technology are the main aspects to improve IBAs' support in a near future. Research limitations/implications - The qualitative methodological approach adopted in this work can imply a larger difficulty to obtain a generalisation of the findings. Another limitation is that the participating IBAs are based in only one country. Practical implications - Findings can help SMEs to understand the functioning and the benefits of using the institutional network resources of IBAs in overcoming their lack of resources to operate in international markets. IBAs can also understand their current position in terms of internationalisation support and think about new ways for improving this support. Originality/value - This paper contributes to a better understanding of the influence of institutional networks in SME internationalisation by exploring the specific role of one of the institutional actors rather than focusing on the institutional network as a whole. Therefore, this study details the current activities and uncovers other types of support provided by IBAs that are not based on export promotion programmes. New knowledge is also obtained about the specific information content, information sources and means and channels of information sharing used by IBAs for supporting SME internationalisation.

Abstract
We address the task of entity-relationship (E-R) retrieval, i.e, given a query characterizing types of two or more entities and relationships between them, retrieve the relevant tuples of related entities. Answering E-R queries requires gathering and joining evidence from multiple unstructured documents. In this work, we consider entity and relationships of any type, i.e, characterized by context terms instead of pre-defined types or relationships. We propose a novel IR-centric approach for E-R retrieval, that builds on the basic early fusion design pattern for object retrieval, to provide extensible entity-relationship representations, suitable for complex, multi-relationships queries. We performed experiments with Wikipedia articles as entity representations combined with relationships extracted from ClueWeb-09-B with FACC1 entity linking. We obtained promising results using 3 different query collections comprising 469 E-R queries.