Abstract
Knowledge regarding Ecosystem Services (ES) delivery and the socio-ecological factors that influence their proficiency is essential to allow cities to adopt policies that lead to resource-efficient planning and greater resilience. As one of the matrix elements of urban ecological structure, vegetation may play a major role in promoting ES proficiency through planting design. This research addresses the heterogeneity of ES delivered by the urban vegetation of Porto, a Portuguese city. A methodology is proposed to investigate associations between socioeconomic indicators and structural variables of the urban forest, and also which structural variables of the urban forest, if any, differ along a socioeconomic gradient. Our results reveal that before setting planning and management goals, it is crucial to understand local patterns of ES and their relationships with socioeconomic patterns, which can be affected by variables such as building age. This should be followed by the identification of structural variables of the urban forest that better explain the differences, in order to target these through planning and management goals. The conceptual framework adopted in this research can guide adaptation of our methodology to other cities, providing insights for planning and management suitable to site-specific conditions and directly usable by stakeholders.

Abstract
The direct relationship between national cultural practice and entrepreneurship activities is analyzed in this chapter, based on the analysis of 44 countries. Datasets from 2012 and 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report are used to characterize three types of entrepreneurship: Early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA); necessity-driven entrepreneurship (NDE) and opportunity-driven (ODE) entrepreneurship. Data sets on national cultural values are used to analyze five dimensions of Hofstede's work on cultural values (power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, long/short term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance). For that, the authors use the Values Survey Module 2013, which has been adapted from Hofstede 's previous work from 2010 and 2008. The main conclusion is that the three types of entrepreneurship analyzed in this chapter are differently explained by the cultural and expanded models. If the country of origin and the type of economy are useful to explain TEA, they are of no added value to explain necessity-driven or opportunity-driven entrepreneurship.

Abstract
This paper presents the study of variable-speed Pump Storage Powerplant (PSP) in the Portuguese power system. It evaluates the progressive integration in three major locations and compares the power system performance following a severe fault event with consequent disconnection of non-Fault Ride-through (FRT) compliant Wind Farms (WF). To achieve such objective, a frequency responsive model was developed in PSS/E and was further used to substitute existing fixed-speed PSP. The results allow identifying a clear enhancement on the power system performance by the presence of frequency responsive variable-speed PSP, especially for the scenario presented, with high level of renewables integration.

Abstract
This paper describes a preliminary study for producing and distributing a large-scale database of embeddings from the Portuguese Twitter stream. We start by experimenting with a relatively small sample and focusing on three challenges: volume of training data, vocabulary size and intrinsic evaluation metrics. Using a single GPU, we were able to scale up vocabulary size from 2048 words embedded and 500K training examples to 32768 words over 10M training examples while keeping a stable validation loss and approximately linear trend on training time per epoch. We also observed that using less than 50% of the available training examples for each vocabulary size might result in overfitting. Results on intrinsic evaluation show promising performance for a vocabulary size of 32768 words. Nevertheless, intrinsic evaluation metrics suffer from over-sensitivity to their corresponding cosine similarity thresholds, indicating that a wider range of metrics need to be developed to track progress.

Abstract
Software developers have always found it difficult to adopt Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as computing platforms. Recent advances in HLS tools aim to ease the mapping of computations to FPGAs by abstracting the hardware design effort via a standard OpenCL interface and execution model. However, OpenCL is a low-level programming language and requires that developers master the target architecture in order to achieve efficient results. Thus, efforts addressing the generation of OpenCL from high-level languages are of paramount importance to increase design productivity and to help software developers. Existing approaches bridge this by translating MATLAB/Octave code into C, or similar languages, in order to improve performance by efficiently compiling for the target hardware. One example is the MATISSE source-to-source compiler, which translates MATLAB code into standard-compliant C and/or OpenCL code. In this paper, we analyse the viability of combining both flows so that sections of MATLAB code can be translated to specialized hardware with a small amount of effort, and test a few code optimizations and their effect on performance. We present preliminary results relative to execution times, and resource and power consumption, for two OpenCL kernels generated by MATISSE, and manual optimizations of each kernel based on different coding techniques.

Abstract
The development of vision-based navigation systems for mobile robotics applications in outdoor scenarios is a very challenging problem due to frequent changes in contrast and illumination, image blur, pixel noise, lack of image texture, low image overlap and other effects that lead to ambiguity in the interpretation of motion from image data. To mitigate the problems arising from multiple possible interpretations of the data in outdoor stereo egomotion, we present a fully probabilistic method denoted as probabilistic stereo egomotion transform. Our method is capable of computing 6-degree of freedom motion parameters solely based on probabilistic correspondences without the need to track or commit key point matches between two consecutive frames. The use of probabilistic correspondence methods allows to maintain several match hypothesis for each point, which is an advantage when ambiguous matches occur (which is the rule in image feature correspondence problems), because no commitment is made before analysing all image information. Experimental validation is performed in simulated and real outdoor scenarios in the presence of image noise and image blur. Comparison with other current state-of-the-art visual motion estimation method is also provided. Our method is capable of significant reduction of estimation errors mainly in harsh conditions of noise and blur.