Business intelligence in banking: A literature analysis from 2002 to 2013 using Text Mining and latent Dirichlet allocation

telligence applications for the banking industry. Searches were performed in relevant journals resulting in 219 articles published between 2002 and 2013. To analyze such a large number of manuscripts, text mining techniques were used in pursuit for relevant terms on both business intelligence and banking domains. Moreover, the latent Dirichlet allocation modeling was used in or- der to group articles in several relevant topics. The analysis was conducted using a dictionary of terms belonging to both banking and business intelli- gence domains. Such procedure allowed for the identification of relationships between terms and topics grouping articles, enabling to emerge hypotheses regarding research directions. To confirm such hypotheses, relevant articles were collected and scrutinized, allowing to validate the text mining proce- dure. The results show that credit in banking is clearly the main application trend, particularly predicting risk and thus supporting credit approval or de- nial. There is also a relevant interest in bankruptcy and fraud prediction. Customer retention seems to be associated, although weakly, with targeting, justifying bank offers to reduce churn. In addition, a large number of ar- ticles focused more on business intelligence techniques and its applications, using the banking industry just for evaluation, thus, not clearly acclaiming for benefits in the banking business. By identifying these current research topics, this study also highlights opportunities for future research.

Os contratos de crédito ao consumo e o sobreendividamento dos consumidores

Dissertação de mestrado em Direito dos Contratos e da Empresa

The importance of risk assessment in the context of investment project management: a case study

Risk management is an important component of project management. Nevertheless, such process begins with risk assessment and evaluation. In this research project, a detailed analysis of the methodologies used to treat risks in investment projects adopted by the Banco da Amazonia S.A. was made. Investment projects submitted to the FNO (Constitutional Fund for Financing the North) during 2011 and 2012 were considered for that purpose. It was found that the evaluators of this credit institution use multiple indicators for risk assessment which assume a central role in terms of decision-making and contribute for the approval or the rejection of the submitted projects; namely, the proven ability to pay, the financial records of project promotors, several financial restrictions, level of equity, level of financial indebtedness, evidence of the existence of a consumer market, the proven experience of the partners/owners in the business, environmental aspects, etc. Furthermore, the bank has technological systems to support the risk assessment process, an internal communication system and a unique system for the management of operational risk.

Análise do sistema bancário da União Europeia

Dissertação de mestrado em Economia Monetária, Bancária e Financeira

Cohesion policy in the European Union: a brief critical review

Over the past four decades the EU cohesion policy’s focus, objectives and content have experienced significant changes as a result of successive reforms aiming at adapting it to a Union in constant evolution. In the early stages, cohesion policy had eminently redistributive goals and it assumed an explicit spatial dimension. In the late nineties, the possibility of an extension towards Eastern European countries and the limited willingness of net contributors to increase funding led to a turning point in cohesion policy. The increased importance of economic growth and job creation in the 2000’s, within the cohesion policy’s context, has led to a misrepresentation of its essence and motivations. Cohesion was losing importance towards competitiveness and regional equity towards national efficiency. Today, cohesion policy is for many EU countries the main mean for mobilising investment in a context of budgetary constraints and credit rationing. In light of the available evidence, it is likely that the overall design and priorities of the current cohesion policy have a limited impact in terms of convergence in many EU regions, especially in the less developed regions. This paper’s main objectives are to analyse the evolution of European cohesion policy throughout its history, to present a picture of cohesion policy in the 2014-2020 programming period and to discuss the main problems associated with its design, priorities and programming model.

A cadeia produtiva de alimentos orgânicos no vale do rio Cuiabá

Dissertação de mestrado em Estudos de Gestão

Facilitadores e obstáculos do empreendedorismo: o caso das muambeiras de Lubango

Dissertação de mestrado em Estudos de Gestão

The influence of the Palestinian sociocultural values in shaping the vernacular architecture of Nablus city

Recently, environmental architecture and sustainable construction has been ranked on top of the worldâ s interests. Making use of natural resources helps in reducing energy consumption and costs associated with the operation of buildings. The current architectural approaches and designs in Palestine are far away from environmental concepts, copying and simulating abroad approaches, without taking into account the culture, climate, and inhabitant's needs. On the contrast, vernacular architecture has achieved environmental concepts and has given suitable approaches and samples - without any need to simulate or copy - which come from people and land. This paper discusses how the Palestinian socio-cultural context shaped the residential vernacular architecture in Palestine, taking the old city of Nablus as a case-study. The research concept depends on analysing and trying to understand the effect of the socio-cultural context on vernacular architecture and trying to reach some rules or understandings of how it works in order to reach a modern environmental dwelling that is suitable to this concept. The research method goes through analysing study cases from the traditional architecture models and the Nablus city is selected as a case study. This analytical and qualitative method can lead to deep understanding for how to benefit from vernacular architecture in Palestine in finding the future environmental residential construction. One of the main findings of this research is to set general and special rules for building sustainable buildings in Palestine from the socio-cultural point view, in order to be a reference for designers, stakeholders, ministry of planning, and municipalities.

On the verification of architectural reconfigurations

In a reconfigurable system, the response to contextual or internal change may trigger reconfiguration events which, on their turn, activate scripts that change the system׳s architecture at runtime. To be safe, however, such reconfigurations are expected to obey the fundamental principles originally specified by its architect. This paper introduces an approach to ensure that such principles are observed along reconfigurations by verifying them against concrete specifications in a suitable logic. Architectures, reconfiguration scripts, and principles are specified in Archery, an architectural description language with formal semantics. Principles are encoded as constraints, which become formulas of a two-layer graded hybrid logic, where the upper layer restricts reconfigurations, and the lower layer constrains the resulting configurations. Constraints are verified by translating them into logic formulas, which are interpreted over models derived from Archery specifications of architectures and reconfigurations. Suitable notions of bisimulation and refinement, to which the architect may resort to compare configurations, are given, and their relationship with modal validity is discussed.

A invalidade na coligação de contratos de crédito e venda para consumo

Dissertação de mestrado em Direito dos Contratos e da Empresa

Contributo para o estudo da tutela do promitente - comprador

Dissertação de mestrado em Direito Judiciário

Relatório de atividade profissional

Relatório de atividade profissional de mestrado em Ciências – Formação Contínua de Professores (área de especialização em Biologia e Geologia)

In-line rheo-optical microstructural characterization of complex polymer systems

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciência e Engenharia de Polímeros e Compósitos.