Abstract
INESC TEC is strongly committed to become a center of excellence in maritime technology and, in particular, deep sea technology. The STRONGMAR project aims at creating solid and productive links in the global field of marine science and technology between INESC TEC and established leading research European institutions, capable of enhancing the scientific and technological capacity of INESC TEC and linked institutions, helping raising its staff's research profile and its recognition as a European maritime research center of excellence. The STRONGMAR project seeks complementarity to the TEC4SEA research infrastructure: on the one hand, TEC4SEA promotes the establishment of a unique infrastructure of research and technological development, and on the other, the STRONGMAR project intends to develop the scientific expertise of the research team of INESC TEC.

Abstract
The aim of computer-aided musical orchestration is to find a combination of musical instrument sounds that approximates a target sound. The difficulty arises from the complexity of timbre perception and the combinatorial explosion of all possible instrument mixtures. The estimation of perceptual similarities between sounds requires a model capable of capturing the multidimensional perception of timbre, among other perceptual qualities of sounds. In this work, we use an artificial immune system (AIS) called opt-aiNet to search for combinations of musical instrument sounds that minimize the distance to a target sound encoded in a fitness function. Opt-aiNet is capable of finding multiple solutions in parallel while preserving diversity, proposing alternative orchestrations for the same target sound that are different among themselves. We performed a listening test to evaluate the subjective similarity and diversity of the orchestrations. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.

Abstract

Abstract
Automatic topic detection in document collections is an important tool for various tasks. In particular, it is valuable for studying and understanding socio-political phenomena. A currently relevant example is the automatic analysis of streams of posts issued by different activist groups in the current Brazilian turmoil, through the analysis of the generated streams of texts published on the web. It is useful to determine the relative importance of the different topics identified. We can find in the literature proposals for measuring topic relevance. In this paper, we adopt two of such measures and apply them to data sets extracted from Facebook pages related to Brazilian political activism. On top of the analysis, we then carry an experimental evaluation of the human interpretability for these two measures by comparing their outcomes with the opinion of three Brazilian professionals from the field of Communication Science and media-activists. Copyright 2016 ACM.

Abstract
In this paper a 3D map solution combined with a mobile phone application is presented. This solution enables blind users to perceive their spatial location from tactile stimulation, but also contextual information from a mobile application that provides this information via mobile phone, using audio. In the proposed model, 3d map sections embedding NFC technology support the application scenario described in this work.

Abstract
Recent advances in the cost-efficiency of sequencing technologies enabled the combined DNA-and RNA-sequencing of human individuals at the population-scale, making genome-wide investigations of the inter-individual genetic impact on gene expression viable. Employing mRNA-sequencing data from the Geuvadis Project and genome sequencing data from the 1000 Genomes Project we show that the computational analysis of DNA sequences around splice sites and poly-A signals is able to explain several observations in the phenotype data. In contrast to widespread assessments of statistically significant associations between DNA polymorphisms and quantitative traits, we developed a computational tool to pinpoint the molecular mechanisms by which genetic markers drive variation in RNA-processing, cataloguing and classifying alleles that change the affinity of core RNA elements to their recognizing factors. The in silico models we employ further suggest RNA editing can moonlight as a splicing-modulator, albeit less frequently than genomic sequence diversity. Beyond existing annotations, we demonstrate that the ultra-high resolution of RNA-Seq combined from 462 individuals also provides evidence for thousands of bona fide novel elements of RNA processing-alternative splice sites, introns, and cleavage sites-which are often rare and lowly expressed but in other characteristics similar to their annotated counterparts.