The needs to bridge the academic skills of students involved in higher education and improve their readiness for employment in industry are being widely addressed. Most academic curricula cover the natural, technical and scientific topics of engineering in depth but lack practical engineering experience and soft skill development crucial for a successful engineering career. A novel national tender-based programme has been launched to provide students with industrial-grade experience during studies through direct cooperation between students, university staff and the industry. This paper presents results of a specific engineering project case supervised by the authors. Within the project, students got an opportunity to practice engineering skills without sacrificing the time needed for a company-based internship. During a 6-month project, a group of interdisciplinary students designed an instrument as specified by the industrial project partner. Participation in the project was optional and organised as a student’s side activity. The project was stimulating development of a range of engineering competences and soft skills among the participants. The participating students showed an above-average commitment and responsibility, fulfilling the specified project goals. The indirect measures demonstrate the positive influence of participating in the project on the career futures of the students.

This paper presents a novel approach to fully automatic satellite image registration to a local earth coordinate system based on the digital map of the road network. Automatic satellite image co-registration methods typically establish correspondences between points on the target and registered image using local image features such as SIFT, however they are not effective for multi-temporal and multi-sensor registration. As the road network is a prominent feature on the satellite images and is visible in most circumstances, we propose to map it directly to the digital road network topographic map, which is readily available in GIS databases. Our approach starts by detection of road segments in a satellite image, producing a road mask image. Small road mask patches are matched against rasterized road network map to find a set of probable patch locations. Following optimization of translation parameters, each satellite image tile is coarsely located on a road map. In a second fine optimization step, smaller road patches locations are further optimized. The algorithm produces a set of tie points, which include coordinates of satellite image pixels within local metric coordinate system. Experiments were performed on a set of 5 RapidEye images of Slovenia from different periods of the year. The results show that the average error of the points is below 1 pixel for all images, and that the reliability in terms of outlier pixels is very high.

This study investigated the use of affect and physiological signals of heart rate, electrodermal activity, pupil dilation, and skin temperature to classify advertising engagement. The ground truth for the affective and behavioral aspects of ad engagement was collected from 53 young adults using the User Engagement Scale. Three gradient-boosting classifiers, LightGBM (LGBM), HistGradientBoostingClassifier (HGBC), and XGBoost (XGB), were used along with signal fusion to evaluate the performance of different signal combinations as predictors of engagement. The classifiers trained on the fusion of skin temperature, valence, and tiredness (features n = 5) performed better than those trained on all signals (features n = 30). The average AUC ROC scores for the fusion set were XGB = 0.68 (0.10), LGBM = 0.69 (0.07), and HGBC = 0.70 (0.11), compared to the lower scores for the set of all signals (XGB = 0.65 (0.11), LGBM = 0.66 (0.11), HGBC = 0.64 (0.10)). The results also show that the signal fusion set based on skin temperature outperforms the fusion sets of the other three signals. The main finding of this study is the role of specific physiological signals and how their fusion aids in more effective modeling of ad engagement while reducing the number of features.