Abstract
The purpose of this study was the development of a clustering methodology to deal with arterial pressure waveform (APW) parameters to be used in the cardiovascular risk assessment. One hundred sixteen subjects were monitored and divided into two groups. The first one (23 hypertensive subjects) was analyzed using APW and biochemical parameters, while the remaining 93 healthy subjects were only evaluated through APW parameters. The expectation maximization (EM) and k-means algorithms were used in the cluster analysis, and the risk scores (the Framingham Risk Score (FRS), the Systematic COronary Risk Evaluation (SCORE) project, the Assessing cardiovascular risk using Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (ASSIGN) and the PROspective Cardiovascular munster (PROCAM)), commonly used in clinical practice were selected to the cluster risk validation. The result from the clustering risk analysis showed a very significant correlation with ASSIGN (r = 0.582, p < 0.01) and a significant correlation with FRS (r = 0.458, p < 0.05). The results from the comparison of both groups also allowed to identify the cluster with higher cardiovascular risk in the healthy group. These results give new insights to explore this methodology in future scoring trials.

Abstract
Today E-Government institutions face a lot of challenges related to the quality and effectiveness of the services they provide. In most cases, their users are more demanding, imposing new ways of acting and dealing with their needs, requesting often expeditious and effective attendance. Independently for their nature, we believe that such pertinent characteristics begin to be sustained immediately as we start to study and model E-Government processes. Modeling and simulation are useful tools on the assurance of the availability of E-Government services in many aspects, contributing significantly to improve processes implementation, ranging from their inception to their final software application roll-up and maintenance. In this paper we studied the use of YAWL - a work flowing language - for modeling E-Government processes, showing through a real world application case how it can help us in the construction of effective models that may be used as a basis for understanding and building the correspondent software applications. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Abstract
We consider a system where an agent (Alice) aims at transmitting a message to a second agent (Bob) over a set of parallel channels, while keeping it secret from a third agent (Eve) by using physical layer security techniques. We assume that Alice perfectly knows the set of channels with respect to Bob, but she has only a statistical knowledge of the channels with respect to Eve. We derive bounds on the achievable outage secrecy rates, by considering coding either within each channel or across all parallel channels. Transmit power is adapted to the channel conditions, with a constraint on the average power over the whole transmission. We also focus on the maximum cumulative outage secrecy rate that can be achieved. Moreover, in order to assess the performance in a real life scenario, we consider the use of practical error correcting codes. We extend the definitions of security gap and equivocation rate, previously applied to the single additive white Gaussian noise channel, to Rayleigh distributed parallel channels, on the basis of the error rate targets and the outage probability. Bounds on these metrics are also derived, considering the statistics of the parallel channels. Numerical results are provided, that confirm the feasibility of the considered physical layer security techniques.

Abstract
Device miniaturization is pointing towards tolerating imperfect hardware provided it is "good enough". Software design theories will have to face the impact of such a trend sooner or later. A school of thought in software design is relational: it expresses specifications as relations and derives programs from specifications using relational algebra. This paper proposes that linear algebra be adopted as an evolution of relational algebra able to cope with the quantification of the impact of imperfect hardware on (otherwise) reliable software. The approach is illustrated by developing a monadic calculus for component oriented software construction with a probabilistic dimension quantifying (by linear algebra) the propagation of imperfect behaviour from lower to upper layers of software systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.

Abstract
This paper proposes a framework to decompose and develop metafeatures for Metalearning (MtL) problems. Several metafeatures (also known as data characteristics) are proposed in the literature for a wide range of problems. Since MtL applicability is very general but problem dependent, researchers focus on generating specific and yet informative metafeatures for each problem. This process is carried without any sort of conceptual framework. We believe that such framework would open new horizons on the development of metafeatures and also aid the process of understanding the metafeatures already proposed in the state-of-the-art. We propose a framework with the aim of fill that gap and we show its applicability in a scenario of algorithm recommendation for regression problems.

Abstract
This paper presents a new way to formulate and solve the distribution system optimal reconfiguration problem. The system equations representing the network topology, power flow equation and objective function equation are transformed into an artificial dynamic model formulated by using only differential equations, on the basis of an error function defined into a Lyapunov space domain. Possible inequality constraints are handled by using additional slack variables to transform them into equality constraints. The solution of the optimal reconfiguration problem is obtained at the convergence of the artificial dynamics and is based on dynamic optimal power flow formulation. Starting from a time domain continuous problem, a mixed continuous integer solution in Lyapunov space domain is obtained. The results obtained on a test system are shown and discussed.