Abstract
The study of games in Artificial Intelligence has a long tradition. Game playing has been a fertile environment for the development of novel approaches to build intelligent programs. Multi-agent systems (MAS), in particular, are a very useful paradigm in this regard, not only because multi-player games can be addressed using this technology, but most importantly because social aspects of agenthood that have been studied for years by MAS researchers can be applied in the attractive and controlled scenarios that games convey. Diplomacy is a multi-player strategic zero-sum board game, including as main research challenges an enormous search tree, the difficulty of determining the real strength of a position, and the accommodation of negotiation among players. Negotiation abilities bring along other social aspects, such as the need to perform trust reasoning in order to win the game. The majority of existing artificial players (bots) for Diplomacy do not exploit the strategic opportunities enabled by negotiation, focusing instead on search and heuristic approaches. This paper describes the development of DipBlue, an artificial player that uses negotiation in order to gain advantage over its opponents, through the use of peace treaties, formation of alliances and suggestion of actions to allies. A simple trust assessment approach is used as a means to detect and react to potential betrayals by allied players. DipBlue was built to work with DipGame, a MAS testbed for Diplomacy, and has been tested with other players of the same platform and variations of itself. Experimental results show that the use of negotiation increases the performance of bots involved in alliances, when full trust is assumed. In the presence of betrayals, being able to perform trust reasoning is an effective approach to reduce their impact. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015.

Abstract
In this chapter the Basic Multi-Project Scheduling Problem (BMPSP) is described, an overview of the literature on multi-project scheduling is provided, and a solution approach based on a biased random-key genetic algorithm (BRKGA) is presented. The BMPSP consists in finding a schedule for all the activities belonging to all the projects taking into account the precedence constraints and the availability of resources, while minimizing some measure of performance. The representation of the problem is based on random keys. The BRKGA generates priorities, delay times, and release dates, which are used by a heuristic decoder procedure to construct parameterized active schedules. The performance of the proposed approach is validated on a set of randomly generated problems. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Abstract

Abstract
Over the last decades the role of information systems (IS) has evolved and has become truly important within organizations. Despite this evidence, not all organizations have the internal resources and know-how required to develop it. The outsourcing of IS services have been presented as an alternative and strategic option in the management of this function in many organizations and various sectors of activity. Developing a better understanding of the main IS services outsourcing practices in the banking sector, given their particularities (eg with regard to confidentiality requirements and secrecy), is the central objective of this work. To this end, a survey was conducted based on a questionnaire in order to characterize, among other things, the services subject to outsourcing, the main motivations, risks, barriers and impacts associated with the outsourcing as well as contracting aspects, customer-supplier relationship and satisfaction. The main results are presented in this paper.

Abstract
We present Symbiosis: a concurrency debugging technique based on novel differential schedule projections (DSPs). A DSP shows the small set of memory operations and data-flows responsible for a failure, as well as a reordering of those elements that avoids the failure. To build a DSP, Symbiosis first generates a full, failing, multithreaded schedule via thread path profiling and symbolic constraint solving. Symbiosis selectively reorders events in the failing schedule to produce a non-failing, alternate schedule. A DSP reports the ordering and data-flow differences between the failing and non-failing schedules. Our evaluation on buggy real-world software and benchmarks shows that, in practical time, Symbiosis generates DSPs that both isolate the small fraction of event orders and data-flows responsible for the failure, and show which event reorderings prevent failing. In our experiments, DSPs contain 81% fewer events and 96% fewer data-flows than the full failure-inducing schedules. Moreover, by allowing developers to focus on only a few events, DSPs reduce the amount of time required to find a valid fix.

Abstract
Stress can negatively impact one's health and well-being, however, despite the recent evolution in stress assessment research methodologies, there is still little agreement about stress conceptualization and assessment. In an attempt to summarize and reflect on this evolution, this paper aims to systematically review research evidence of ecological approaches on psychophysiological stress assessment. Thus, a literature search of electronic databases was conducted spanning 22 years (1990-2012) and 55 studies were reviewed. Studies were considered for inclusion if they contemplated both psychological and physiological measures of stress under ecological settings. This review focuses on five themes: methodology terminology, research population, study design, measurement, and technology. Findings support the need to use a common methodology terminology in order to increase scientific rigor. Additionally, there seems to be an increasing tendency for the use of these methods by multidisciplinary teams among both clinical and nonclinical populations aiming to understand the relationship between stress and disease. Most of the studies reviewed contemplated a time-based protocol and different conceptualizations of stress were found, resulting in the use of different subjective measures. Findings reinforce the importance of combining subjective and objective measures while also controlling for possible time-or situation-dependent confounders'. Advances in technology were evident and different assessment techniques were found. The benefits and challenges of ecological protocols to assess stress are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided, aiming to overcome previous limitations and advance scientific knowledge in the area.