Abstract

Abstract
Engineering education practices have evolved not only due to the natural changes in the contents of the curricula and skills but also, and more recently, due to the requirements imposed by the Bologna revision process. In addition, industry is becoming more demanding, as society is becoming more and more aware of the global needs and consequences of industrial practices. Under this scope, higher education needs not only to follow but also to lead these trends. Therefore, the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP), a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) training partner in Portugal, prepared and presented its Sustainability Action Plan (PASUS), with the main objective of creating a new kind of engineers, with Sustainable Development at the core of their graduation and MsC degrees. In this paper, the main strategies and activities of the referred plan along with the strategic approach, which guided its development and implementation, will be presented in detail. Additionally, a reflection about the above mentioned bridge between concept and application will be established and justified, in the framework of the action plan. Although in most of the situations, there was no prior discussion or specific request, many of the graduation and post-graduation programmes offered by ISEP already include courses that attend to PASUS philosophy. As a consequence, the number of Master thesis, Graduation projects and R&D projects that address sustainability problems has grown substantially, a proof that for ISEP community, sustainability really matters!

Abstract
Vision-based hand gesture interfaces require fast and extremely robust hand detection, and gesture recognition. Hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction is an area of active research in computer vision and machine learning. The primary goal of gesture recognition research is to create a system, which can identify specific human gestures and use them to convey information or for device control. In this paper we present a comparative study of seven different algorithms for hand feature extraction, for static hand gesture classification, analysed with RapidMiner in order to find the best learner. We defined our own gesture vocabulary, with 10 gestures, and we have recorded videos from 20 persons performing the gestures for later processing. Our goal in the present study is to learn features that, isolated, respond better in various situations in human-computer interaction. Results show that the radial signature and the centroid distance are the features that when used separately obtain better results, being at the same time simple in terms of computational complexity.

Abstract
This paper presents a framework for the analysis of software artifacts. We revise and propose techniques that aid in the manipulation and combination of target-language specific tools, and in handling and controlling the results of such tools. We also propose to integrate under our framework techniques that are capable of performing language independent analyses. The final result of our work is an analysis environment that is modular and flexible and that allows easy and elegant implementations of complex analysis suites. We finally conduct a proof of concept for our framework by analyzing a well-known, widely used open-source software package.

Abstract
This paper presents a new control system, based on field programmable gate array technology, targeting the power-train control of multi-motor electric vehicles (EVs). The control chip builds around a reusable intellectual property core named propulsion control unit, which features motor control functions with field-orientation methods, and energy loss minimization of induction motors. In order to improve the EV safety, the control system was extended with a wheel slip controller based on the sliding mode framework. The robustness to parametric and modeling uncertainties is the main attraction in this design, thanks to a simple connection that was found between the driving torque request and the model uncertainty. To overcome the chattering issue, which arrives from the discontinuous nature of the sliding control, the conditional integrator approach was employed, enabling a smooth transition to a Proportional+Integral control law, with anti-windup, when the tire slip is close to the setpoint. The controller asymptotic stability and robustness was analytically investigated through the Lyapunov method. Experimental results, obtained with a multi-motor EV prototype under low grip conditions, demonstrate a good slip regulation and robustness to disturbances.

Abstract