Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases are a growing epidemiological burden in today's society. A great deal of effort has been made to find solutions able to perform non-invasive monitoring and early diagnosis of such pathologies. The pulse wave velocity and certain waveform characteristics constitute some of the most important cardiovascular risk indicators. Optical sensors are an attractive instrumental solution in this kind of time assessment applications due to their truly non-contact operation capability and better resolution than commercial devices. This study consisted on the experimental validation and a clinical feasibility for a non-invasive and multi-parametric optical system for evaluation of the cardiovascular condition. Two prototypes, based on two different types of photodetectors (planar and avalanche photodiode) were tested in a small group of volunteers, and the main hemodynamic parameters were measured, such as pulse wave velocity and indexes of pulse waveform analysis: the Augmentation Index, Subendocardial Viability Ratio and Ejection Time Index. The probes under study proved to be able to measure the pulse pressure wave in a reliable manner at the carotid site, and demonstrated the consistency of the parameters determined using dedicated algorithms. This study represents a preliminary evaluation of an optical system devoted to the clinical evaluation environment. Further development to take this system to a higher level of clinical significance, by incorporating it in a multicenter study, is currently underway. © 2013 Biomedical Engineering Society.

Abstract
Novelty detection has been presented in the literature as one-class problem. In this case, new examples are classified as either belonging to the target class or not. The examples not explained by the model are detected as belonging to a class named novelty. However, novelty detection is much more general, especially in data streams scenarios, where the number of classes might be unknown before learning and new classes can appear any time. In this case, the novelty concept is composed by different classes. This work presents a new algorithm to address novelty detection in data streams multi-class problems, the MINAS algorithm. Moreover, we also present a new experimental methodology to evaluate novelty detection methods in multi-class problems. The data used in the experiments include artificial and real data sets. Experimental results show that MINAS is able to discover novelties in multi-class problems. Copyright 2013 ACM.

Abstract
These are the results (datasets) of a study reported in the paper ``A panoramic view on Metadata Application Profiles of the last decade``.

Abstract
In many manufacturing systems human resources are essential in some cognitive intensive tasks while the more repetitive ones are assigned to automatic systems. If on the one hand, automation has a deterministic pace; humans are known by a flexible and variable work manner. Therefore, a reliable description of both hardware and human components is required for designing such manufacturing systems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the variable throughput of a manual process in a production flow that contains automatic processes upstream and downstream. With regard to the description of human behavior, two sources of variability were considered: natural and abnormal variability. Natural variability refers to the differences in terms of processing times that can be found among individuals. Organizational aspects such delays in shift changing and breaks along the shift, are referred as abnormal variability, and were also investigated by means of an analytical and simulation models.

Abstract
Topic-based publish/subscribe is at the core of many distributed systems, ranging from application integration middleware to news dissemination. Therefore, much research was dedicated to publish/subscribe architectures and protocols, and in particular to the design of overlay networks for decentralized topic-based routing and efficient message dissemination. Nonetheless, existing systems fail to take full advantage of shared interests when disseminating information, hence suffering from high maintenance and traffic costs, or construct overlays that cope poorly with the scale and dynamism of large networks. In this paper, we present StaN, a decentralized protocol that optimizes the properties of gossip-based overlay networks for topic-based publish/subscribe by sharing a large number of physical connections without disrupting its logical properties. StaN relies only on local knowledge and operates by leveraging common interests among participants to improve global resource usage and promote topic and event scalability. The experimental evaluation under two real workloads, both via a real deployment and through simulation, shows that StaN provides an attractive infrastructure for scalable topic-based publish/subscribe.

Abstract
In re-regulated markets, the maximization of profits creates the tendency to postpone investments in the network infrastructure, with negative effects on losses. In order to oppose this tendency, several countries adopt regulation directives that reward the distributors if losses are reduced and penalize them if losses increase. This is the case of Portugal which adopted loss penalty/reward scheme may be found in [1]. Given the current framework, EDP Distribuição (EDP Group), Portugal, a Distribution System Operator (DSO), has established a loss reduction program, which includes line reinforcement investments, among other actions. The main idea is to make the best investments in HV and MV network lines, considering the trade-off between benefits and costs. The ideal scenario would be, of course, to analyse all HV and MV networks and simulate possible reinforcement alternatives. However, the large number of MV feeders (about 4,000) makes this alternative unworkable. Thus, the first phase consists of developing a procedure to rank MV networks according to their potential to reduce losses. The highest scored networks are then analysed using a power system simulator. This analysis takes into account the different reinforcement alternatives and evaluates the investments costs and the saved energy over a period of 30 years - The economic time span usually considered by EDP Distribuição for this kind of operation. For the HV case, all networks were analysed. This paper synthetizes the main results obtained in these studies.