Abstract
Online Peer-To-Peer lending has seen some growing media attention since its recent creation. Nonetheless, the systems which provide deal brokerage in this context have yet to be given significant consideration within the scientific community. This paper is part of a broader effort to setup a Peer-to-Peer lending community in Portugal. This work focuses on solving the infrastructural problem of combining investment offers from potential lenders with loan requests from potential borrowers. The combination process must strive for an optimal result, which pleases lenders and borrowers alike, despite their opposing agendas. Simultaneously the combination result should also benefit the platform's business model, so as to keep it sustainable and profitable. Several optimization metaheuristics, powered by a constraint programming module, were applied to efficiently explore the problem's solution space and to find optimal solutions. The results achieved with this approach show how metaheuristic-driven optimization can be successfully applied to Peer-to-Peer lending combination problems. © 2013, IGI Global.

Abstract
Preemptions via virtual channels have been proposed as a means to introduce the notion of priorities and real-time concepts in wormhole-switched NoC-based architectures. This work presents a holistic approach, which utilises a novel three-staged mapping method in order to assess what should be the physical characteristics of the platform (and its interconnect), such that real-time guarantees can be provided, assuming a given workload. We estimate the "gap" between platform characteristics required for the real-time analysis and those of currently available many-core platforms and propose to employ the existing feature of many-core platforms in order to significantly reduce this gap. The experiments demonstrate that virtual channels, an essential prerequisite for the real-time analysis, are not the bottle-neck. The approach presented in this paper can help system designers to select/design the most suitable platform for a given workload, such that all temporal constraints are met and over-dimensioning is avoided. © 2013 ACM.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper describes the development and evaluation process of a user interface for a scheduling system. It is intended to provide the user with a graphical and interactive way in order to define a scheduling problem as well as an interactive way to visualize and adapt a scheduling plan. The realization of these goals was achieved through a modular prototype whose development was based on a methodology focused on the usability evaluation: the star life cycle. In order to evaluate the usability prototype an evaluation session was made, allowing not only the ease of use evaluation, butalso observing the different interaction forms provided by each participant.

Abstract

Abstract
A fiber optic sensor for simultaneous measurement of refractive index and temperature is presented. The sensing probe is realized by introducing a multimode interference device inside a high birefringence fiber loop mirror resulting in a configuration capable of refractive index and temperature discrimination. The multimode interference peak is sensitive to the surrounding refractive index (90 nm/RIU) and slightly responsive to the temperature (0.01 nm/ degrees C). On the other hand, the birefringent fiber loop mirror is highly sensitive to temperature (2.36 nm/ degrees C) and it has almost no response to refractive index. Using a power ratiometric peak detection scheme, a temperature independent refractive index measurement can be achieved with a resolution of +/- 2.25 x 10(-5) RIU.