Abstract

Abstract
Interest in robotics field as a teaching tool to promote the STEM areas - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics has grown in the past years. The search for costless solutions to promote robotics is a major challenge and the use of real robots always increases associated costs. An alternative to this is the use of a simulator. The construction of a simulator related with the Portuguese Autonomous Driving Competition using Gazebo as 3D simulator and Robotics Operating System (ROS) as a middleware connection to promote, attract, and enthusiasm university students to the mobile robotics challenges is presented. The proposed simulator focus on the autonomous driving competition task, such as semaphore recognition, localization, and motion control. An evaluation of the simulator is also performed, leading to an absolute error of 5.11% and a relative error of 2.76% on best case scenarios relating to the odometry tests and an accuracy of 99.37% regarding to the semaphore recognition tests performed.

Abstract
Recent developments under the term Smart Grid change how users consume electricity and interact with the power grid. Smart metering and energy management are developments that transform the yet passive energy consumer to a participant that is actively involved in the energy market by using variable energy tariffs or by demand-response services. But such functionality demands a platform that integrates all smart devices in the users property, connects to external services and electricity providers, and has interfaces that provide information and control to the user. AnyPLACE will develop such platform. Based on the latest legislation in the European member states, it will incorporate smart meters and create links to external service providers. Furthermore, it connects the devices in the property of the end-user in order to be able to fully monitor and control the energy consumption. This paper presents the AnyPLACE idea and the problems that are solved on the communications aspect. It provides an in-depth analysis of current European legislation in the context of smart metering and provides the requirements that need to be realized by the platform. Additionally, it proposes a strategy to create a solution that can be used in any place of Europe. The paper also incorporates the security and privacy requirements in different domains and sketches a solution and architecture to fulfill these by incorporating existing open source implementations as provided by the openHAB project.

Abstract
In different areas of knowledge, phenomena are represented by directional-angular or periodic-data; from wind direction and geographical coordinates to time references like days of the week or months of the calendar. These values are usually represented in a linear scale, and restricted to a given range (e.g. [0,2 pi)), hiding the real nature of this information. Therefore, dealing with directional data requires special methods. So far, the design of classifiers for periodic variables adopts a generative approach based on the usage of the von Mises distribution or variants. Since for non-periodic variables state of the art approaches are based on non-generative methods, it is pertinent to investigate the suitability of other approaches for periodic variables. We propose a discriminative Directional Logistic Regression model able to deal with angular data, which does not make any assumption on the data distribution. Also, we study the expressiveness of this model for any number of features. Finally, we validate our model against the previously proposed directional naive Bayes approach and against a Support Vector Machine with a directional Radial Basis Function kernel with synthetic and real data obtaining competitive results.

Abstract
This paper presents the development framework for an energy management platform that is being developed within the AnyPLACE project. In order to ensure that end-users become active participants in services like demand response, a combined approach is necessary in terms of monitoring, automation, and user interfacing. The success in engaging the end-user, as the centerpiece of the energy management challenge, is vital in taking advantage of a more efficient use of energy, as it is shown in this paper. The proposed framework can be run in a single board computer.

Abstract
It is known that code readability has an impact on software quality. This paper introduces a preliminary list of 33 good practices for code readability that could be taught in object oriented programming courses of informatics programs. In this set are included practices with both positive and negative impact, the latter mainly from bad smells. A survey was made with OOP teachers in order to assess the significance of teaching a set of good practices. The results showed that teachers consider it important to teach the defined set. Such result was statistically significant. Still, the same level of significance was not awarded to all practices. Some additional results are presented.