Abstract
Nowadays, the Portuguese population is aging at a fast pace. The situation is more severe in the interior regions of the country, where the rural areas have few people and have been constantly losing population; these are mostly elderly who, in some cases, live socially isolated. They are also often deprived of some types of social, health and technological services. One of the current challenges with respect to the elderly is that of improving the quality of life for those who still have some autonomy and live in their own residences so that they may continue living autonomously, while receiving the assistance of some exterior monitoring and supporting services. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm demonstrates great potential for creating technological solutions in this area as it aims to seamlessly integrate information technology with the daily lives of people. In this context, it is necessary to develop services that monitor the activity and health of the elderly in real time and alert caregivers or other family members in the case of an unusual event or behaviour. It is crucial that the technological system is able to collect data in a nonintrusive manner and without requiring much interaction with the elderly. Smartband devices are very good candidates for this purpose and, therefore, this work proposes assessing the level of acceptance of the usage of a smartbands by senior users in their daily activities. By using the definition of an architecture and the development of a prototype, it was possible to test the level of acceptance of smartbands by a sample of the elderly population-with surprising results from both the elderly and the caregivers-which constitutes an important contribution to the research field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The evaluation showed that most users did not feel that the smartband was intrusive to their daily tasks and even considered using it in the future, while caregivers considered that the platform was very intuitive.

Abstract
The Portuguese population is aging at an increasing rate, which introduces new problems, particularly in rural areas, where the population is small and widely spread throughout the territory. These people, mostly elderly, have low income and are often isolated and socially excluded. This work researches and proposes an affordable Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)-based solution to monitor the activities of elderly individuals, inside their homes, in a pervasive and non-intrusive way, while preserving their privacy. The solution uses a set of low-cost IoT sensor devices, computer vision algorithms and reasoning rules, to acquire data and recognize the activities performed by a subject inside a home. A conceptual architecture and a functional prototype were developed, the prototype being successfully tested in an environment similar to a real case scenario. The system and the underlying concept can be used as a building block for remote and distributed elderly care services, in which the elderly live autonomously in their homes, but have the attention of a caregiver when needed.

Abstract
In Portugal, the dropout rate of university courses is around 29%. Understanding the reasons behind such a high desertion rate can drastically improve the success of students and universities. This work applies existing data mining techniques to predict the academic dropout mainly using the academic grades. Four different machine learning techniques are presented and analyzed. The dataset consists of 331 students who were previously enrolled in the Computer Engineering degree at the Universidade de Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD). The study aims to detect students who may prematurely drop out using existing methods. The most relevant data features were identified using the Permutation Feature Importance technique. In the second phase, several methods to predict the dropouts were applied. Then, each machine learning technique's results were displayed and compared to select the best approach to predict academic dropout. The methods used achieved good results, reaching an Fl-Score of 81% in the final test set, concluding that students' marks somehow incorporate their living conditions.

Abstract
Today digital labor increasingly advocates for the inclusion of people who are excluded from society in someway. The proliferation of crowdsourcing as a new form of digital labor consisting mainly of microtasks that are characterized by a low level of complexity and short time periods in terms of accomplishment has allowed a wide spectrum of people to access the digital job market. However, there is a long-recognized mismatch between the expectations of employers and the capabilities of workers in microwork crowdsourcing marketplaces. Cognitive personalization has the potential to tailor microtasks to crowd workers, thus ensuring increased accessibility by providing the necessary coverage for individuals with disabilities and special needs. In this paper an architecture for a crowdsourcing system intended to support cognitive personalization in the design of microtasks is introduced. The architecture includes an ontology built for the representation of knowledge on the basis of the concepts of microtasks, cognitive abilities, and types of adaptation in order to personalize the interface to the crowd worker. The envisioned system contains a backend and a frontend that serve as an intermediary layer between the crowdsourcing platform and the workers. Finally, some results obtained to evaluate the proposed system are presented.

Abstract
The accelerated changes on our planet have led to a growing interest in climate change and its consequences: natural hazards and adverse socio-economic impacts. However, the development of climate research and the proliferation of datasets require an integrated and efficient approach to the analysis, investigation, and visualization of atmospheric meteorological data. Thus, we propose a literature review of existing systems viewing meteorological phenomena in four and three dimensions. Moreover, we evaluate meteorological occurrences to better understand the dynamics associated with a meteorological phenomenon and visualize different weather data. Based on the investigation of tools and methods, we consider the existence of different ways of representing meteorological data and methodologies. However, it was imperative to obtain knowledge and create our way of visualizing weather data. This article found eleven existing solutions for 4D meteorological visualization and meteorological phenomena.

Abstract
The advance of industrialization regarding the optimization of production to obtain greater productivity and consequently generate more profits has led to the emergence of Industry 4.0, which aims to create an environment called smart manufacturing. On the other hand, the Internet of Things is a global network of interrelated physical devices, such as sensors, actuators, intelligent applications, computers, mechanical machines, objects, and people, becoming an essential part of the Internet. These devices are data sources that provide abundant information on manufacturing processes in an industrial environment. A concern of this type of system is processing large sets of data and generating knowledge. These challenges often raise concerns about security, more specifically cybersecurity. Good cybersecurity practices make it possible to avoid damage to production lines and information. With the growing increase in threats in terms of security, this paper aims to carry out a review of existing technologies about cybersecurity in intelligent manufacturing and an introduction to the architecture of the IoT and smart manufacturing.