Abstract
Games are a part of human life since ancient times, present not only at childhood but throughout most of our adult life. A growing area of research focuses on the development of games for teaching and learning in various areas of expertise. These are called serious games. They intend to capture the attention, to motivate and to encourage user engagement through the use of recreational and entertainment elements, thus facilitating the learning process. This article describes iLearnTest, a framework for developing serious online games which are capable of supporting education of several subjects, allowing for a suitable training of participants, thus preparing them to meet the job market needs. This paper describes the architecture of the framework, the structure of the game and presents some results from performed experiments as to validate the overall approach. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract
Object manipulation is a key feature in almost every virtual environment. However, it is difficult to accurately place an object in immersive virtual environments using mid-air gestures that mimic interactions in the physical world, although being a direct and natural approach. Previous research studied mouse and touch based interfaces concluding that separation of degrees-of-freedom (DOF) led to improved results. In this paper, we present the first user evaluation to assess the impact of explicit 6 DOF separation in mid-air manipulation tasks. We implemented a technique based on familiar virtual widgets that allow single DOF control, and compared it against a direct approach and PRISM, which dynamically adjusts the ratio between hand and object motions. Our results suggest that full DOF separation benefits precision in spatial manipulations, at the cost of additional time for complex tasks. From our results we draw guidelines for 3D object manipulation in mid-air.

Abstract

Abstract
Several schedulability analyses have been proposed for a variety of parallel task systems with real-time constraints. However, these analyses are mostly restricted to global scheduling policies. The problem with global scheduling is that it adds uncertainty to the lower-level timing analysis which on multicore systems are heavily context-dependent. As parallel tasks typically exhibit intense communication and concurrency among their sequential computational units, this problem is further exacerbated. This paper considers instead the schedulability of partitioned parallel tasks. More precisely, we present a response time analysis for sporadic DAG tasks atop multiprocessors under partitioned fixed-priority scheduling. We assume the partitioning to be given. We show that a partitioned DAG task can be modeled as a set of self-suspending tasks. We then propose an algorithm to traverse a DAG and characterize such worst-case scheduling scenario. With minor modifications, any state-of-the-art technique for sporadic self-suspending tasks can thus be used to derived the worstcase response time of a partitioned DAG task. Experiments show that the proposed approach significantly tightens the worst-case response time of partitioned parallel tasks comparatively to the state-of-the-art when the most accurate technique is chosen.

Abstract
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has been used in several domains for almost two decades as a more efficient way to develop student's new skills. This approach lends itself well to teaching Industrial Communication Systems, allowing the students to acquire skills that enable them to solve a large set of concrete problems in an industrial context. Based on the authors experience in the Integrated Master in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto in Portugal, we have developed a new hardware and software based platform for teaching industrial communications that is affordable and portable and amenable to PBL. This platform is the basis of a new course developed as a module in the MEDIS European project (MEDIS: A Methodology for the Formation of Highly Qualified Engineers at Masters Level in the Design and Development of Advanced Industrial Informatics Systems). This paper describes the course itself, the tools used and includes a brief discussion on the feedback received from early adopters among MEDIS participating universities.

Abstract
Thresholding on coherence is a common practice for identifying the surface scatterers that are less affected by decorrelation noise during post-processing and visualisation of the results from multi-temporal InSAR techniques. Simple selection of the points with coherence greater than a specific value is, however, challenged by the presence of spatial dependence among observations. If the discrepancies in the areas of moderate coherence share similar behaviour, it appears important to take into account their spatial correlation for correct inference. Low coherence areas thus could serve as clear indicators of measurement noise or imperfections in mathematical models. Once exhibiting properties of statistical similarity, they allow for detection of observations that could be considered as outliers and trimmed from the dataset. In this paper we propose an approach based on renowned data mining and exploratory data analysis procedures for mitigating the impact of outlying observations in the final results.