The African studies course of the Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares. An analysis of the correlations and conflictive character inside the triangle - Development, environment and security - in Africa’s Nigeria

Relatório de Estágio de Mestrado em Ciência Política e Relações Internacionais Globalização e Ambiente

Credit risk stress testing: The Portuguese environment, macroeconomic scenarios and the estimation of losses for corporate sectors

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

Brain-computer interface (BCI): a methodological proposal to assess the impacts of medical applications in 2022

Based on the report for “Project IV” unit of the PhD programme on Technology Assessment (Doctoral Conference) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (December 2011). This thesis research has the supervision of António Moniz (FCT-UNL and ITAS-KIT) and Armin Grunwald (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology-ITAS, Germany). Other members of the thesis committee are Mário Forjaz Secca (FCT-UNL) and Femke Nijboer (University of Twente, Netherlands).

Sensitivity correction of images obtained with the prototype Clear-PEM in pre-clinical environment

Dissertation presented at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia Universidade Nova de Lisboa to obtain a Master Degree in Biomedical Engineering

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura Integrada

Monitoring antibiotics in the environment. Study of Quinoxaline derivatives bioactivity

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Química Sustentável

Market orientation in Italian wineries

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

Documenting InStory – Mobile Storytelling in a Cultural Heritage Environment

This paper describes the process and problems that had to be faced during the elaboration of a digital interactive narrative for the Instory project (http://img.di.fct.unl.pt/InStory/) implanted in «Quinta da Regaleira», Sintra, Portugal, and classified as World Heritage by Unesco. It also explores some of the practical and theoretical issues in what regards the literary terminology and strategies involved.

Durability to marine environment of innovative products for consolidation and chromatic reintegration of historical renders

9th International Masonry Conference 2014, 7-9 July, Universidade do Minho, Guimarães

Haptic robot-environment interaction for self-supervised learning in ground mobility

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Eletrotécnica e de Computadores

A framework for efficient model transformations

The reported productivity gains while using models and model transformations to develop entire systems, after almost a decade of experience applying model-driven approaches for system development, are already undeniable benefits of this approach. However, the slowness of higher-level, rule based model transformation languages hinders the applicability of this approach to industrial scales. Lower-level, and efficient, languages can be used but productivity and easy maintenance seize to exist. The abstraction penalty problem is not new, it also exists for high-level, object oriented languages but everyone is using them now. Why is not everyone using rule based model transformation languages then? In this thesis, we propose a framework, comprised of a language and its respective environment, designed to tackle the most performance critical operation of high-level model transformation languages: the pattern matching. This framework shows that it is possible to mitigate the performance penalty while still using high-level model transformation languages.

ClearPhoto - augmented photography

The widespread use of mobile devices has made known to the general public new areas that were hitherto confined to specialized devices. In general, the smartphone came to give all users the ability to execute multiple tasks, and among them, take photographs using the integrated cameras. Although these devices are continuously receiving improved cameras, their manufacturers do not take advantage of their full potential, since the operating systems normally offer simple APIs and applications for shooting. Therefore, taking advantage of this environment for mobile devices, we find ourselves in the best scenario to develop applications that help the user obtaining a good result when shooting. In an attempt to provide a set of techniques and tools more applied to the task, this dissertation presents, as a contribution, a set of tools for mobile devices that provides information in real-time on the composition of the scene before capturing an image. Thus, the proposed solution gives support to a user while capturing a scene with a mobile device. The user will be able to receive multiple suggestions on the composition of the scene, which will be based on rules of photography or other useful tools for photographers. The tools include horizon detection and graphical visualization of the color palette presented on the scenario being photographed. These tools were evaluated regarding the mobile device implementation and how users assess their usefulness.

Grau de dependência e grau de ajuda em idosos em serviço de apoio domiciliário: perspectivas do idoso, do ajudante familiar e do fisioterapeuta

RESUMO:O envelhecimento e a preocupação com a dependência da população idosa é uma prioridade social. A permanência em casa onde se encontram todas as referências é importante em diversos aspectos, nomeadamente para uma maior independência. Quando a dependência surge, o Serviço de Apoio Domiciliário (SAD) é um dos serviços sociais a que se pode recorrer. Numa análise dos serviços de SAD nas vertentes de legislação, instituições, cuidadores e utentes, não são relacionados o grau de dependência e a atribuição da ajuda, o que parece pertinente para equacionar as necessidades das pessoas idosas em SAD. Nesse sentido, este estudo teve como objectivo verificar a percepção dos utentes de SAD do grau de dependência e do grau de ajuda na realização de taferas de auto-cuidado e mobilidade, avaliados pelo próprio idoso, pelo ajudante familiar e pelo fisioterapeuta. O presente estudo, transversal (Agosto 2013 – Abril 2014), de natureza quantitativa e qualitativa, e abordagem descritiva, observacional e correlacional, avaliou uma amostra de 51 idosos do SAD da Amadora, dos quais 80,4% eram mulheres, com média de idade de 82,4 anos (dp 6,81), principalmente viúvas, com escolaridade primária incompleta ou completa, orientada no tempo e no espaço, e com estado emocional por si considerado razoável. A investigadora, fisioterapeuta de formação, inquiriu idosos e ajudantes familiares que cuidavam dos mesmos, para recolher as suas opiniões sobre o grau de dependência e o respectivo grau de ajuda, observou o meio envolvente dos idosos, e recolheu comentários dos participantes. Os resultados obtidos apontam para um grau de dependência relacionado com a necessidade de meios e um grau de ajuda que indica ajuda de conveniência. Para a sua análise foram avaliadas tarefas de auto-cuidado e mobilidade, cuja relação foi comprovada estatisticamente. As opiniões dos intervenientes sobre a realização das tarefas e sobre o grau de dependência são parcialmente diferentes, sendo mais sobreponíveis em relação ao grau de ajuda necessária. A analise da correlação entre o grau de dependência e o grau de ajuda indica-nos que quanto maior o grau de dependência maior é o grau de ajuda. Ou seja, que a ajuda prestada nas situações de maior dependência era realmente necessária, mas também, que a ajuda prestada nas situações de menor dependência não era realmente necessária, sendo neste trabalho designada de ajuda de conveniência.------------ABSTRACT: Aging and concern about the dependence of the elderly population is a social priority. The ability to stay at home where all the references are, is important in several aspects, in particular for a greater independence. When the dependency arises, the Home Support Service (SAD in short for the portuguese "Serviço de Apoio Domiciliário") is a social service that can be appealed to. In an analysis of the SAD services in the areas of legislation, institutions, caregivers and users, the degree of dependence and aid allocation are not related, which seems relevant to equate the needs of older people in SAD. Thus, this study aimed to verify the perception of users of SAD towards the degree of dependency and the degree of help in the realization of self-care and mobility, valued by the user, the home support workers and the physiotherapist. This cross-sectional study (August 2013 - April 2014), of quantitative and qualitative nature, taking a descriptive approach, observational and correlational, assessed a sample of 51 elderly of SAD from Amadora, of which 80.4% were women, with an age average of 82.4 years (SD 6.81), mainly widows with incomplete or complete primary schooling, oriented in time and space, and emotional state by itself considered reasonable. The researcher, physiotherapist by training, inquired elderly and the home support workers who cared for them, to gather their opinions on the degree of dependency and the degree of the help provided, while observing the surrounding environment of the elderly. The results point to a degree related to the need for resources and a degree of help pointing towards a high level of convenience. For its analysis tasks of self-care and mobility were evaluated, whose relationship was confirmed statistically. The views of stakeholders on the realization of the tasks and on the degree of dependence are partly different, being more overlapping in the degree of help needed. The analysis of the correlation between the degree of dependency and the degree of help tells us that the greater the degree of dependence is, the greatest degree of help becomes. Which, that the help provided in situations of increased dependence was really needed, but also that the help provided in situations of reduced dependence was not really necessary, being designated in this work help of convenience.

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.

Benefits & drawbacks of different means of interaction for placing objects above a video footage

Public Display Systems (PDS) increasingly have a greater presence in our cities. These systems provide information and advertising specifically tailored to audiences in spaces such as airports, train stations, and shopping centers. A large number of public displays are also being deployed for entertainment reasons. Sometimes designing and prototyping PDS come to be a laborious, complex and a costly task. This dissertation focuses on the design and evaluation of PDS at early development phases with the aim of facilitating low-effort, rapid design and the evaluation of interactive PDS. This study focuses on the IPED Toolkit. This tool proposes the design, prototype, and evaluation of public display systems, replicating real-world scenes in the lab. This research aims at identifying benefits and drawbacks on the use of different means to place overlays/virtual displays above a panoramic video footage, recorded at real-world locations. The means of interaction studied in this work are on the one hand the keyboard and mouse, and on the other hand the tablet with two different techniques of use. To carry out this study, an android application has been developed whose function is to allow users to interact with the IPED Toolkit using the tablet. Additionally, the toolkit has been modified and adapted to tablets by using different web technologies. Finally the users study makes a comparison about the different means of interaction.