A technology market transfer for the Zonadvanced video technology

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

The consultancy field in Europe: A comparative approach

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

The launch of integrative fixed video phone in Spain: Technology-market transfer plan

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

ARTiVIS Arts, real-time video and interactivity for sustainability

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Media Digitais

The role of management accounting in the process of innovation: A field work perspective

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Finance from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Children consumer behaviour field lab: The Nestum consumer

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

O uso do video nos sites dos jornais impressos

DISSERTAÇÃO APRESENTADA PARA CUMPRIMENTO DOS REQUISITOS NECESSÁRIOS À OBTENÇÃO DO GRAU DE MESTRE EM (CIÊNCIAS DA COMUNICAÇÃO, VERTENTE DE CINEMA E TELEVISÃO),

Introducing Mobile Money in Rural Mozambique: Evidence from a Field Experiment*

The limitations of access to finance in Africa, together with the recent boom in cell phone use in that continent, created high expectations regarding the introduction of mobile money in many African countries. The success story of M-PESA in Kenya raised the bar further. We designed and conducted a field experiment to assess the impact of randomized mobile money dissemination in rural Mozambique. For this purpose we benefit from the fact that mobile money was only recently launched in the country, allowing for the identification of a pure control group. This paper reports on the first results of this ongoing project after the first wave of dissemination efforts in rural locations, which included the recruitment and training of mobile money agents, community meetings and theaters, as well as individual rural campaigning. Administrative and behavioral data both show clear adherence to the services in the treatment group. Financial literacy and trust outcomes are also positively affected by the treatment. We present behavioral evidence that the marginal willingness to remit was increased by the availability of mobile money. Finally, we observe a tendency for mobile money to substitute traditional alternatives for both savings and remittances.

Vitamin A Deficiency and Training to Farmers: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Mozambique

Vitamin A deficiency is a widespread public health problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper analyzes the impact of a food-based intervention to fight vitamin A deficiency using orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP). We conducted a randomized evaluation of OFSP-related training to female farmers in Mozambique, in which the treatment group was taught basic concepts of nutrition, and OFSP-planting and cooking skills. We found encouraging evidence of changes in behavior and attitudes towards OFSP consumption and planting, and considerable increases in nutrition-related knowledge, as well as knowledge on cooking and planting OFSP.

Migrant Remittances and Information Flows: Evidence from a Field Experiment*

Do information flows matter for remittance behavior? We design and implement a randomized control trial to quantitatively assess the role of communication between migrants and their contacts abroad on the extent and value of remittance flows. In the experiment, a random sample of 1,500 migrants residing in Ireland was offered the possibility of contacting their networks outside the host country for free over a varying number of months. We find a sizable, positive impact of our intervention on the value of migrant remittances sent. Our results exclude that the remittance effect we identify is a simple substitution effect. Instead, our analysis points to this effect being a likely result of improved information via factors such as better migrant control over remittance use, enhanced trust in remittance channels due to experience sharing, or increased remittance recipients’ social pressure on migrants.

Video interaction using pen-based technology

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática

Vitamin A deficiency and training to farmers: Evidence from a field experiment in Mozambique

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Forecasts of relative performance in tournaments: Evidence from the field

This paper uses a field experiment to investigate the quality of individuals’ forecasts of relative performance in tournaments. We ask players in luck-based (poker) and skill-based (chess) tournaments to make point forecasts of rank. The main finding of the paper is that players’ forecasts in both types of tournaments are biased towards overestimation of relative performance. However, the size of the biases found is not as large as the ones often reported in the psychology literature. We also find support for the “unskilled and unaware hypothesis” in chess: high skilled chess players make better forecasts than low skilled chess players. Finally, we find that chess players’ forecasts of relative performance are not efficient.

Representar Fantasmas: Identidade nos Chats de Video Aleatório

Este texto falará de como é percepcionado o “outro” e como nos percepcionámos a nós mesmos através da comunicação em plataformas virtuais de tecnologias que utilizam sistemas de chats de video conhecidos como anónimos ou aleatórios, nomeadamente leituras sobre a vigilância existente, grafismo, design, capacidade de imersão, co-presença e de comunicação. Repararemos que este tipo de sites traz uma certa novidade aos mundos virtuais e reais. Por um lado, uma possibilidade de sermos anónimos (dada a liberdade que estes sites dão ao utilizador, sem uma autoridade hierárquica, cada um pode fazer o que lhe apetece até ser «rejeitado» pelo outro utilizador, através de um clique no botão "next"). Também pelo facto de ser um entre milhares de outros idênticos, todos enquadrados pela mesma janela (espaço homogéneo = população homogénea). A quase impossibilidade de voltarmos a ver o mesmo utilizador, online ou na vida real, dá-nos também a liberdade de agirmos como queremos. Por outro lado, os níveis de realismo no site são elevados porque a comunicação é baseada em webcams e microfones que dão uma representação muito aproximada da realidade, de modo que o utilizador se mostra mais ou menos tal como é. Neste sentido, neste antagonismo destas duas forças surge uma sensação paradoxal. Os utilizadores sentem-se como que a representar para fantasmas, mas são pessoas que estão ali também, corpos reais por trás de uma imagem. O próprio utilizador é como um fantasma que pode desaparecer ou esconder-se a qualquer momento, optar por estar ou não presente. É na fronteira entre estes dois mundos que a fantasia, jogos de papéis e personalidades e construção de identidades tomam lugar.

Automatic delimitation of the clinical region of interest in ultra-wide field of view images of the retina

Retinal ultra-wide field of view images (fundus images) provides the visu-alization of a large part of the retina though, artifacts may appear in those images. Eyelashes and eyelids often cover the clinical region of interest and worse, eye-lashes can be mistaken with arteries and/or veins when those images are put through automatic diagnosis or segmentation software creating, in those cases, the appearance of false positives results. Correcting this problem, the first step in the development of qualified auto-matic diseases diagnosis programs can be done and in that way the development of an objective tool to assess diseases eradicating the human error from those processes can also be achieved. In this work the development of a tool that automatically delimitates the clinical region of interest is proposed by retrieving features from the images that will be analyzed by an automatic classifier. This automatic classifier will evaluate the information and will decide which part of the image is of interest and which part contains artifacts. The results were validated by implementing a software in C# language and validated through a statistical analysis. From those results it was confirmed that the methodology presented is capable of detecting artifacts and selecting the clin-ical region of interest in fundus images of the retina.