Abstract
The development and implementation of a virtual environment that aims to support farmers in managing their land and crops in a more sustainable way is presented in this paper. It allows both textual and 3D visualization of crop-related biophysical parameters, such as height, volume and length. Moreover, the latter can be dynamically altered according to various criteria. A case study was conducted in a Portuguese vineyard. The application was developed using the Unity software, while a real agricultural data feed was provided by mySense interface. The virtual environment can be seen as a valuable decision support system to assist farmers.

Abstract
Learning software programming is challenging for software engineering students. In this paper, students' engagement in learning software engineering programming is considered under the SimProgramming approach using the OC2-RD2 narrative technique to create an immersive learning context. The objectives of this paper are twofold: presenting a narrative-driven immersive learning approach to introduce software engineering concepts and coding techniques to online undergraduate students; and analyzing the students' feedback on this approach. Thematic analysis of the metacognitive tasks was performed on the students' fortnightly reflections about their learning progress. Content analysis was based on interest categories, students' perceptions, metacognitive challenges, narratives, examples and aspects to be kept or to be improved. Data from the content analysis were organized into categories, subcategories, indicators, and recording units and their categorization was peer-reviewed. The narratives were considered by the students as interesting, appealing, akin to professional reality and promoting interaction. Most students thought the approach was helpful for learning software programming.

Abstract
The need of lockdown, due to COVID-19, led many manufacturing companies to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies. Manufacturing companies were strongly affected by workforce shortages associated with the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdown, as well by connectivity losses among business partners. Therefore, these companies are reviewing their strategies to increase productivity, mainly embracing digital manufacturing technologies. Here the adoption of digital technologies aims to improve efficiency and flexibility in their processes, also improving connectivity among business partners. This study investigates how collaborative academia-industry R&D cases accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by manufacturing companies, given the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. Based on multiple case studies, this article reports the challenges and the strategies of three ongoing collaborative industry-academia R&D projects developed during the COVID pandemic situation. The results are presented in four different perspectives derived from industry 4.0 readiness maturity models: interpersonal communication, personal competencies and skills, systems integration, and technological strategy. It highlights the importance of manufacturing companies to have a well-designed digitalization strategy, need of continuous training and development of their workforce, and the support of Research & Technology Organizations (RTO) to bring more maturity to the efforts required during a turbulent situation. The results of this paper can provide relevant decision support for manufacturing companies, and its stakeholders, in face of challenges of the actual pandemic and post-pandemic scenario.

Abstract
Training in VR can reduce risks and costs while allowing frequent and diversified experiential learning activities. We present a novel VR immersive authoring tool for experiential learning courses with industrial machinery. A trainer can create a course from scratch, defining all its components (structure, models, tools, and settings). The actions which trainees should perform can be specified by demonstration. After completing the course, trainees' actions will be matched against the trainer's.

Abstract
In the early days of the world wide web, browsers were developed to navigate through (static) HTML web page documents. This has changed dramatically, and nowadays web pages are dynamic, expressed by programs written in regular programming languages. As a result, browsers are almost operating systems, having to interpret/compile such programs and execute them within the browser itself. Currently, while JavaScript is the main de facto language to express web pages, it does have various short comings and performance inefficiencies. WebAssembly, a new portable and size/load efficient alternative developed by major IT powerhouses, is seen as the future substitute. As WebAssembly aims to be more performance efficient than JavaScript, we aim to look at this current status and present a preliminary study on the performance of these two, based on their runtime and energy efficiency. Preliminary results show that WebAssembly, while still in its infancy, is starting to already challenge JavaScript, with much more room to grow. Additionally, our benchmarking framework is also made available to allow further research and replication.

Abstract
Since the beginning of the Semantic Web and the coining of the term Linked Data in 2006, more than one thousand datasets with over sixteen thousand links have been published to the Linked Open Data Cloud. This rising interest is fuelled by the benefits that semantically annotated and machine-readable information can have in many systems. Alongside this growth we also observe a rise in humans creating and consuming Linked Data, and the opportunity to study and develop guidelines for tackling the new user interaction problems that arise with it. To gather information on the current solutions for modelling user interaction for these applications, we conducted a study surveying the interaction techniques provided in the state of the art of Linked Data tools and applications developed for users with no experience with Semantic Web technologies. The 18 tools reviewed are described and compared according to the interaction features provided, techniques used for visualising one instance and a set of instances, search solutions implemented, and the evaluation methods used to evaluate the proposed interaction solutions. From this review, we can conclude that researchers have started to deviate from more traditional visualisation techniques, like graph visualisations, when developing for lay users. This shows a current effort in developing Semantic Web tools to be used by lay users and motivates the documentation and formalisation of the solutions encountered in the studied tools. Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).