Abstract
Sustainability plays a key role in EPS@ISEP programme - the European Project Semester programme at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnics of Porto. Not just the environmental, but also economical (marketing) and social (ethics) perspectives are explored by multicultural teams during this one semester capstone/internship programme. In 2015, a team of EPS@ISEP students choose to design and develop an insectarium to grow insects for reptile feeding. The team, after exploiting the topic, contemplated growing insects not only for animal feed, but also for human food. Their motivation resulted from the fact that insects, when compared with traditional sources of protein, are more sustainable, i.e., require considerably less resources per kg of protein. This approach, in the current Earth’s population growth scenario, contributes to minimise the resources required for meeting food needs. The main goal of the proposal was to raise the awareness of the participants regarding sustainable development while creating a functional, cost-effective, eco-friendly and attractive prototype. The team, driven by this multidisciplinary problem, performed: (i) a survey of competing products; (ii) a selection of the insect species to grow based on the study and comparison of the life cycle and habitat requirements of different species of insects; (iii) a marketing plan; (iv) a sustainability and an ethic and deontological analysis of the proposed solution; and (v) the design, assembling and testing of the prototype. Furthermore, the students also developed cross-cultural understanding, teamwork and communication skills. The project provided an excellent opportunity to foster the concept of sustainable development amongst the students.

Abstract
Hippocampal sclerosis (HS) is the most common cause of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and can be identified in magnetic resonance imaging as hippocampal atrophy and subsequent volume loss. Detecting this kind of abnormalities through simple radiological assessment could be difficult, even for experienced radiologists. For that reason, hippocampal volumetry is generally used to support this kind of diagnosis. Manual volumetry is the traditional approach but it is time consuming and requires the physician to be familiar with neuroimaging software tools. In this paper, we propose an automated method, written as a script that uses FSL-FIRST, to perform hippocampal segmentation and compute an index to quantify hippocampi asymmetry (HAI). We compared the automated detection of HS (left or right) based on the HAI with the agreement of two experts in a group of 19 patients and 15 controls, achieving 84.2% sensitivity, 86.7% specificity and a Cohen's kappa coefficient of 0.704. The proposed method is integrated in the "Advanced Brain Imaging Lab" (ABrIL) cloud neurocomputing platform. The automated procedure is 77% (on average) faster to compute vs. the manual volumetry segmentation performed by an experienced physician.

Abstract

Abstract
Satellite altimetry allows the study of sea-level long-term variability on a global and spatially uniform basis. Here quantile regression is applied to derive robust median regression trends of mean sea level as well as trends in extreme quantiles from radar altimetry time series. In contrast with ordinary least squares regression, which only provides an estimate on the rate of change of the mean of data distribution, quantile regression allows the estimation of trends at different quantiles of the data distribution, yielding a more complete picture of long-term variability. Trends derived from basin-wide averaged regional mean sea level time series are robust and similar for all quantiles, indicating that all parts of the data distribution are changing at the same rate. In contrast, trends are not robust and diverge across quantiles in the case of local time series. Trends are under- (over-)estimated in the western (eastern) equatorial Pacific. Furthermore, trends in the lowermost quantile (0.05) are larger than the median trend in the western Pacific, while trends in the uppermost quantile (0.95) are lower than the median trend in the eastern Pacific. These differences in trends in extreme mean sea level quantiles are explained by the exceptional effect of the strong 1997-1998 El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event.

Abstract
The classification ofmultivariate time series in terms of their corresponding temporal dependence patterns is a common problem in geosciences, particularly for large datasets resulting from environmental monitoring networks. Here a wavelet-based clustering approach is applied to sea level and atmospheric pressure time series at tide gauge locations in the Baltic Sea. The resulting dendrogram discriminates three spatially-coherent groups of stations separating the southernmost tide gauges, reflecting mainly high-frequency variability driven by zonal wind, from the middle-basin stations and the northernmost stations dominated by lower-frequency variability and the response to atmospheric pressure.

Abstract
The seasonal cycle accounts for about 40 % of the total sea level variability in the Baltic Sea. In a climate change context, changes are expected to occur, not only in mean levels but also in the seasonal characteristics of sea level. The present study addresses the quantification of changes in the seasonal cycle of sea level from a set of century-long tide gauge records in the Baltic Sea. In order to obtain robust estimates of the changes in amplitude and phase of the seasonal cycle, we apply different methods, including continuous wavelet filtering, multi-resolution decomposition based on the maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform, auto-regressive-based decomposition, singular spectrum analysis and empirical mode decomposition. The results show that all methods generally trace a similar long-term variability of the annual cycle amplitudes, and we focus on discrete wavelet analysis as the natural counterpart of classical moving Fourier analysis. In contrast to previous studies suggesting the existence of long-term changes in the seasonal cycle, in particular an increase of the annual amplitude, we find alternating periods of high and low amplitudes without any clear indication of systematic long-term trends. The derived seasonal patterns are spatially coherent, discriminating the stations in the Baltic entrance from the remaining stations in the Baltic basin, for which zonal wind accounts for typically more than 40 % of the variations in amplitude.