Abstract
In this paper, we describe how a learning platform that takes into account the student's learning preferences, the personality and emotions could prompt better learning results. This model will assess the emotional state of the student in an online learning environment by introducing techniques of Affective Computing that can capture the student emotional state and based on that, adapt the course to the characteristics and needs of the student in order to get an improvement in the learning results. Students, as individuals, differ in their social, intellectual, physical, psychological, emotional, and ethnic characteristics. Also, differ in their learning rates, objectives and motivation turning, their behaviour rather unpredictable. Added to emotion, and in order to obtain an effective model for online learning, student's personality and learning style are also considered. The architecture developed was tested by a group of students of higher education in Oporto. The results indicated that the model created used can support and improve the student's results, verifying that a negative emotional state could influence the learning process.

Abstract
Dance movement is intrinsically connected to the rhythm of music and is a fundamental form of nonverbal communication present in daily human interactions. In order to enable robots to interact with humans in natural real-world environments through dance, these robots must be able to listen to music while robustly tracking the beat of continuous musical stimuli and simultaneously responding to human speech. In this paper, we propose the integration of a real-time beat tracking system with state recovery with different preprocessing solutions used in robot audition for its application to interactive dancing robots. The proposed system is assessed under different real-world acoustic conditions of increasing complexity, which consider multiple audio sources of different kinds, multiple noise sources of different natures, continuous musical and speech stimuli, and the effects of beat-synchronous ego-motion noise and of jittering in ego noise (EN). The overall results suggest improved beat tracking accuracy with lower reaction times to music transitions, while still enhancing automatic speech recognition (ASR) run in parallel in the most challenging conditions. These results corroborate the application of the proposed system for interactive dancing robots.

Abstract
In recent years the focus of research in the fields of iris and face recognition has turned towards alternative traits to aid in the recognition process under less constrained acquisition scenarios. The present work assesses the potential of the periocular region as an alternative to both iris and face in such conditions. An automatic modeling of SIFT descriptors, using a GMM-based Universal Background Model method, is proposed. This framework is based on the Universal Background Model strategy, first proposed for speaker verification, extrapolated into an image-based application. Such approach allows a tight coupling between individual models and a robust likelihood-ratio decision step. The algorithm was tested on the UBIRIS. v2 and the MobBIO databases and presented state-of-the-art performance for a variety of experimental setups.

Abstract
In a time of economic austerity, more pressure is being put on the existing transport systems to be more sustainable and, at the same time, more equitable and socially inclusive. Regular public road transportation traditionally uses fixed routes and schedules, which can be extremely expensive in rural areas and certain periods of the day in urban areas due to low and unpredictable demand. Demand Responsive Transportation systems are a kind of hybrid transportation approach between a taxi and a bus that try to address these problems with routes and frequencies that may vary according to the actual observed demand. Demand Responsive Transportation seems to have potential to answer the sustainability and social inclusion challenges in a context of austerity. However, DRT projects may fail: it is not only important to solve the underlying model in an efficient way, but also to understand how different ways of operating the service affect customers and operators. To help design DRT services, we developed an innovative approach integrating simulation and optimization. Using this simulator, we compared a real night-time bus service in the city of Porto, Portugal, with a hypothetical flexible DRT service for the same scenario.

Abstract
This chapter intends to address the needs and the involvement to support communities of innovation in the process of the generation of new ideas. The relevance of this document focuses on information systems and socio-semantics collaborative networks. The support of collaboration is not a new need to human activities in business. Nevertheless, it has major importance due the temporal limitations of the innovative context. In fact, having an idea is not enough. It is necessary to put it on the ground before the competitors. The authors conclude that technology can facilitate the generation of new ideas, benefit business collaboration, and help increase the rate and efficiency in the generation of new ideas, while reducing the time spent in the negotiation of consensus and decreasing the implicit cost in the overall process. It is expected to contribute to the (re)utilization of the innovation memory and to preserve the organizational knowledge.

Abstract
Considering the results of research on the benefits and difficulties of peer review, this paper describes how teaching faculty, interested in endorsing the acquisition of communication and critical thinking (CT) skills among engineering students, has been implementing a learning methodology throughout online peer review activities. While introducing a new methodology, it is important to weight the advantages found and the conditions that might have restrained the activity outcomes, thereby modulating its overall efficiency. Our results show that several factors are decisive for the success of the methodology: the use of specific and detailed orientation guidelines for CT skills, the students' training on how to deliver a meaningful feedback, the opportunity to counter-argument, the selection of good assignments' examples, and the constant teacher's monitoring of the activity. Results also tackle other aspects of the methodology such as the thinking skills evaluation tools (grades and tests) that most suit our reality. An improved methodology is proposed taking in account the encountered limitations, thus offering the possibility to other interested institutions to use/test and/or improve it.