Financing innovative start-ups in Portuguese context: what is the role of business angels networks?

Business angels provide both financing and managerial experience, which increase the likelihood of the survival of innovative start-ups. Over the last years, European countries with developing informal venture capital markets have seen governments support the creation of business angels networks (BANs) to increase and consolidate these markets. Using the Portuguese context to carry out the empirical work, this paper provides an assessment of value added provided by angels’ networks. A total of 88 useable responses were received and analysed using non-parametric statistical techniques. This paper demonstrates that is evidence of positive contribution of BANs in terms of bringing together investors and linking them with entrepreneur’s seeking finance. BANs played an important role in financing innovative start-ups also in peripheral regions. Results lead us to conclude that government support BANs would appear to be an effective mechanism to stimulate the angel market in developing informal venture capital markets. The conclusions of this paper are likely to have relevance for countries where there is growing interest in the potential of business angels as a means of financing innovative start-ups.

Influência de situações não conformes devidas à colocação do betãode base em lajes com aplicação de endurecedores de superfície

Segundo estudos anteriores, por vezes verificam-se problemas de delaminação e fissuração em pavimentos com a aplicação de endurecedores de superfície, principalmente em condições de vento e/ou calor. Estes fenómenos muitas vezes provêm de outros fatores que não só as condições climatéricas, ou seja, os problemas podem começar no betão de base, associados algumas vezes a situações menos corretas na sua elaboração e aplicação. Por este motivo, nesta dissertação ir-se-á analisar qual a influência do betão de base quando se produz um conjunto de não­conformidades em obra, nomeadamente ao nível da colocação do betão de base. A partir dos resultados obtidos foi possível verificar que nem todas as situações de não­conformidade obtiveram maus resultados na ligação endurecedor/betão. /ABSTRATC: According to previous studies, problems with delamination and cracking in pavements with surface hardener have been found, especially in windy conditions and/or heat. But these phenomenons often come from other factors, problems can start at the concrete base, sometimes associated to situations where there is an incorrect design and implementation and for this reason this thesis will analyze the influence of the concrete base when it produces a set of non-conformities in work, particularly in terms of placement of the concrete base. Based on what has been reported by several companies a set of tests has established. From the obtained results it was verified that not all situations of non-compliance showed poor results in the connection of the surface hardener I concrete.

Screening a Case Base for Stroke Disease Detection

Stroke stands for one of the most frequent causes of death, without distinguishing age or genders. Despite representing an expressive mortality fig-ure, the disease also causes long-term disabilities with a huge recovery time, which goes in parallel with costs. However, stroke and health diseases may also be prevented considering illness evidence. Therefore, the present work will start with the development of a decision support system to assess stroke risk, centered on a formal framework based on Logic Programming for knowledge rep-resentation and reasoning, complemented with a Case Based Reasoning (CBR) approach to computing. Indeed, and in order to target practically the CBR cycle, a normalization and an optimization phases were introduced, and clustering methods were used, then reducing the search space and enhancing the cases re-trieval one. On the other hand, and aiming at an improvement of the CBR theo-retical basis, the predicates` attributes were normalized to the interval 0…1, and the extensions of the predicates that match the universe of discourse were re-written, and set not only in terms of an evaluation of its Quality-of-Information (QoI), but also in terms of an assessment of a Degree-of-Confidence (DoC), a measure of one`s confidence that they fit into a given interval, taking into account their domains, i.e., each predicate attribute will be given in terms of a pair (QoI, DoC), a simple and elegant way to represent data or knowledge of the type incomplete, self-contradictory, or even unknown.