Abstract
Assessment plays a central role in any educational process as a way of evaluating the students' knowledge on the concepts associated with learning objectives. The assessment of free-text answers is a process that, besides being very costly in terms of time spent by teachers, may lead to inequities due to the difficulty in applying the same evaluation criteria to all answers. This paper describes a system composed by several modules whose main goal is to work as a formative assessment tool for students and to help teachers creating and assessing exams as well monitoring students' progress. The system automatically creates training exams for students to practice based on questions from previous exams and assists teachers in the creation of evaluation exams with various kinds of information about students' performance. The system automatically assesses training exams to give automatic feedback to students. The correction of free-text answers is based on the syntactic and semantic similarity between the student answers and various reference answers, thus going beyond the simple lexical matching. For this, several pre-processing tasks are performed in order to reduce each answer to its more manageable canonical form. Besides the syntactic and semantic similarity between answers, the way the teacher evaluates the answers is also acquired. To accomplish that, the assessment is done using sub scores defined by the teacher concerning parts of the answer or its subgoals. The system has been trained and tested on exams manually graded by History teachers. There is a good correlation between the evaluation of the instructors and the evaluation performed by our system.

Abstract
This work addresses the experimental work of characterization of wood (P. pinaster) bonded joints by means of pure mode I using the double cantilever beam (DCB) configuration test. The approach combines fracture mechanical testing with embedded fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors in the glue line. A method for the determination of the FBG reflection spectra shift based on the spectral geometric mean determination is used. The load-displacement (P-delta) curve and wavelength-displacement (lambda-delta) curve are acquired and related to each other. An quantification of a global internal equivalent uniform strain applied to the FBG was then calculated.

Abstract
The unprecedented advancements in broadband and mobile networks, the proliferation and the incredible appeal of smart devices such as smartphones, and the recent emergence of cloud computing are poised to drive the next generation of ubiquitous media delivery and consumption. As more media services become available, mobile users will waste invaluable time, seeking relevant media items. Therefore, to deliver relevant media services, with rich experience to mobile users, media service providers must consider the services that match user's contextual consumption choices. This paper proposes context-aware recommendation techniques to support the delivery of contextually relevant cloud-based media items to mobile users. The recommendation service works with a contextual user profile service, which relates user preferences to contexts in which such preferences are expressed, relying on a context recognition service, which identifies the user's dynamic contextual situation from smartphone built-in sensors. Experimental evaluations, using real world user and online movie data, established that the context-aware recommendation techniques are promising. © 2014 IEEE.

Abstract
In this paper we describe the models and the simulations that were conducted in order to access the impact of feed-in subsidized generation in the market price in Portugal in the context of the Iberian Electricity Market. In Portugal and Spain feed-in generation (namely wind power) has a large share both in terms of installed capacity and generated energy and the presence of this energy in the hourly balance originates the reduction of the market price and of the number of hours during which traditional generation (namely coal and CCGT stations) are scheduled. This paper aims at evaluating this impact both in the short term (using the real market curves) and in the long term (using a long term generation expansion planning model). The paper includes results for the Iberian power system currently having a total installed capacity above 120 GW and a total demand of 310 TWh by the end of 2013. © 2014 IEEE.

Abstract
In recent years there has been a series of documents such as the European Strategy 20-20-20 to address the issue of energy efficiency in various sectors of activity. The objective is to reduce 20% of energy consumption, 20% of GHG emissions (Greenhouse Gases) and 20% of the energy consumed from renewable sources. Public lighting participates with 2.3% in global electricity consumption, so all contributions to the reduction in energy consumption will be relevant. Decision support in the investment analysis on efficient and sustainable street lighting allows a better use of the installed power. Hence, this paper deals with the reduction of losses in cables of a street lighting installation, depending on the luminaire used, presenting both simulation and experimental results. The economic choice of cables losses will allow improving the efficiency of the street lighting in general, providing also an optimal cost/benefit relationship. Moreover, real-time data acquisition systems of the equipment's consumption can be integrated into a collective awareness system.

Abstract
Safe operation of safety critical systems depends on appropriate interactions between the human operator and the computer system. Specification of such safety-critical systems is fundamental to enable exhaustive and automated analysis of operator system interaction. In this paper we present a structured, comprehensive and computer-aided approach to formally specify and verify user interfaces based on model checking techniques. Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.