Context-based identification of energy consumption in industrial plants

Nowadays, reducing energy consumption is one of the highest priorities and biggest challenges faced worldwide and in particular in the industrial sector. Given the increasing trend of consumption and the current economical crisis, identifying cost reductions on the most energy-intensive sectors has become one of the main concerns among companies and researchers. Particularly in industrial environments, energy consumption is affected by several factors, namely production factors(e.g. equipments), human (e.g. operators experience), environmental (e.g. temperature), among others, which influence the way of how energy is used across the plant. Therefore, several approaches for identifying consumption causes have been suggested and discussed. However, the existing methods only provide guidelines for energy consumption and have shown difficulties in explaining certain energy consumption patterns due to the lack of structure to incorporate context influence, hence are not able to track down the causes of consumption to a process level, where optimization measures can actually take place. This dissertation proposes a new approach to tackle this issue, by on-line estimation of context-based energy consumption models, which are able to map operating context to consumption patterns. Context identification is performed by regression tree algorithms. Energy consumption estimation is achieved by means of a multi-model architecture using multiple RLS algorithms, locally estimated for each operating context. Lastly, the proposed approach is applied to a real cement plant grinding circuit. Experimental results prove the viability of the overall system, regarding both automatic context identification and energy consumption estimation.

Botnet cluster identification

Botnets are a group of computers infected with a specific sub-set of a malware family and controlled by one individual, called botmaster. This kind of networks are used not only, but also for virtual extorsion, spam campaigns and identity theft. They implement different types of evasion techniques that make it harder for one to group and detect botnet traffic. This thesis introduces one methodology, called CONDENSER, that outputs clusters through a self-organizing map and that identify domain names generated by an unknown pseudo-random seed that is known by the botnet herder(s). Aditionally DNS Crawler is proposed, this system saves historic DNS data for fast-flux and double fastflux detection, and is used to identify live C&Cs IPs used by real botnets. A program, called CHEWER, was developed to automate the calculation of the SVM parameters and features that better perform against the available domain names associated with DGAs. CONDENSER and DNS Crawler were developed with scalability in mind so the detection of fast-flux and double fast-flux networks become faster. We used a SVM for the DGA classififer, selecting a total of 11 attributes and achieving a Precision of 77,9% and a F-Measure of 83,2%. The feature selection method identified the 3 most significant attributes of the total set of attributes. For clustering, a Self-Organizing Map was used on a total of 81 attributes. The conclusions of this thesis were accepted in Botconf through a submited article. Botconf is known conferênce for research, mitigation and discovery of botnets tailled for the industry, where is presented current work and research. This conference is known for having security and anti-virus companies, law enforcement agencies and researchers.

The Visual and Virtual in Contemporary European Learning Contexts

Special issue of Anthropology in Action originated from the Working Images Conference, a joint meeting of TAN and VAN EASA networks

Biblioteca de Arte Inclusiva: Informação e Conhecimento Acessíveis aos Leitores com Deficiência Visual

O presente relatório descreve a atividade realizada na Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, no âmbito do Mestrado em Ciências da Informação e da Documentação, tendo por tema o acesso à informação pelos leitores com deficiência visual. Nele procura-se abordar que medidas têm sido tomadas para assegurar a integração destes leitores, tendo em vista alcançar a sua autonomia a nível de utilização dos serviços disponíveis. Nesse sentido, explicitam-se os conceitos inerentes a esta temática (biblioteca inclusiva e acessibilidade), destaca-se a importância da interação com outros utilizadores como forma de integração, refere-se a importância da cooperação interinstitucional, salienta-se o papel do bibliotecário e das tecnologias de informação e da comunicação, como meio de permitir ao deficiente visual aceder a um conjunto diversificado de serviços, através da utilização de equipamentos e software específicos. Através da aplicação de uma metodologia de pesquisa bibliográfica, observação direta e entrevista, efetua-se um estudo de caso com uma análise detalhada ao nível da acessibilidade física e dos recursos materiais assim como da atitude e preparação dos profissionais para lidar com a deficiência. Conclui-se que a Biblioteca de Arte deve continuar a investir na exploração de novos recursos e potencialidades, de modo a disponibilizar todo o tipo de meios humanos e tecnológicos para apoiar os leitores com deficiência visual, promovendo a sua inclusão e participação na sociedade da informação e do conhecimento.

Incremental compilation and deployment for OutSystems Platform

OutSystems Platform is used to develop, deploy, and maintain enterprise web an mobile web applications. Applications are developed through a visual domain specific language, in an integrated development environment, and compiled to a standard stack of web technologies. In the platform’s core, there is a compiler and a deployment service that transform the visual model into a running web application. As applications grow, compilation and deployment times increase as well, impacting the developer’s productivity. In the previous model, a full application was the only compilation and deployment unit. When the developer published an application, even if he only changed a very small aspect of it, the application would be fully compiled and deployed. Our goal is to reduce compilation and deployment times for the most common use case, in which the developer performs small changes to an application before compiling and deploying it. We modified the OutSystems Platform to support a new incremental compilation and deployment model that reuses previous computations as much as possible in order to improve performance. In our approach, the full application is broken down into smaller compilation and deployment units, increasing what can be cached and reused. We also observed that this finer model would benefit from a parallel execution model. Hereby, we created a task driven Scheduler that executes compilation and deployment tasks in parallel. Our benchmarks show a substantial improvement of the compilation and deployment process times for the aforementioned development scenario.

(Un)ethical leadership, organizational identification and sensemaking: the BES case and its impact on employees

This paper provides an ongoing analysis to one of the biggest ethical and financial scandals in Portugal – Banco Espírito Santo (BES). BES was considered one of the three best banks but it went bankrupted and its employees were transferred to a new entity – Novo Banco. This study was conducted in order to provide an understanding of the employees’ side, which has been forgotten so far. An ethical scandal (sensebreaking) creates ambiguity and uncertainty which triggers new sensemaking processes in order to understand and derive meaning from the new reality. The methodology followed was semi-structured interviews to employees both from the branches and the central services. We found evidence that in organizations with strong identification, unethical behavior has a significant impact on followers’ – the new process of sensemaking is particularly important in this situation because employees suffer more from the disruption of their reality.

Visual and verbal processing effects on human memory

In this study in the field of Consumer Behavior, brand name memory of consumers with regard to verbal and visual incongruent and congruent information such as memory structure of brands was tested. Hence, four experimental groups with different constellations of verbal and visual congruity and incongruity were created to compare their brand name memory performance. The experiment was conducted in several classes with 128 students, each group with 32 participants. It was found that brands, which are presented in a congruent or moderately incongruent relation to their brand schema, result in a better brand recall than their incongruent counterparts. A difference between visual congruity and moderately incongruity could not be confirmed. In contrast to visual incongruent information, verbal incongruent information does not result in a worse brand recall performance.

Evolutionary dynamics of Chlamydia trachomatis genome and identification of molecular patterns of hypothetical protein coding genes

The obligate intracellular bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis is a human pathogen of major public health significance. Strains can be classified into 15 main serovars (A to L3) that preferentially cause ocular infections (A-C), genital infections (D-K) or lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) (L1-L3), but the molecular basis behind their distinct tropism, ecological success and pathogenicity is not welldefined. Most chlamydial research demands culture in eukaryotic cell lines, but it is not known if stains become laboratory adapted. By essentially using genomics and transcriptomics, we aimed to investigate the evolutionary patterns underlying the adaptation of C. trachomatis to the different human tissues, given emphasis to the identification of molecular patterns of genes encoding hypothetical proteins, and to understand the adaptive process behind the C. trachomatis in vivo to in vitro transition. Our results highlight a positive selection-driven evolution of C. trachomatis towards nichespecific adaptation, essentially targeting host-interacting proteins, namely effectors and inclusion membrane proteins, where some of them also displayed niche-specific expression patterns. We also identified potential "ocular-specific" pseudogenes, and pointed out the major gene targets of adaptive mutations associated with LGV infections. We further observed that the in vivo-derived genetic makeup of C. trachomatis is not significantly compromised by its long-term laboratory propagation. In opposition, its introduction in vitro has the potential to affect the phenotype, likely yielding virulence attenuation. In fact, we observed a "genital-specific" rampant inactivation of the virulence gene CT135, which may impact the interpretation of data derived from studies requiring culture. Globally, the findings presented in this Ph.D. thesis contribute for the understanding of C.trachomatis adaptive evolution and provides new insights into the biological role of C. trachomatishypothetical proteins. They also launch research questions for future functional studies aiming toclarify the determinants of tissue tropism, virulence or pathogenic dissimilarities among C. trachomatisstrains.

Video metadata extraction in a videoMail system

Currently the world swiftly adapts to visual communication. Online services like YouTube and Vine show that video is no longer the domain of broadcast television only. Video is used for different purposes like entertainment, information, education or communication. The rapid growth of today’s video archives with sparsely available editorial data creates a big problem of its retrieval. The humans see a video like a complex interplay of cognitive concepts. As a result there is a need to build a bridge between numeric values and semantic concepts. This establishes a connection that will facilitate videos’ retrieval by humans. The critical aspect of this bridge is video annotation. The process could be done manually or automatically. Manual annotation is very tedious, subjective and expensive. Therefore automatic annotation is being actively studied. In this thesis we focus on the multimedia content automatic annotation. Namely the use of analysis techniques for information retrieval allowing to automatically extract metadata from video in a videomail system. Furthermore the identification of text, people, actions, spaces, objects, including animals and plants. Hence it will be possible to align multimedia content with the text presented in the email message and the creation of applications for semantic video database indexing and retrieving.

Effects of corporate social responsibility on brand reputation and brand identification with children

This study aims to understand children‟s perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives and its effect on the brand, namely Reputation and Identification. Moreover, it analyzes if the use of Cartoons helps to increase these effects. Differences among gender, age and social class, will also be considered. 292 children from the 3rd and 6th grades from 5 schools with different social backgrounds participated in this study. The research made use of a real brand targeting children. Drawings and questionnaires were used as the main research tools. Results suggest that CSR actions have a positive effect on Reputation and Identification and that Cartoons do not lead to greater positive effects.

A cenografia oitocentista como fonte de cultura visual e de ideologia

A argumentação centra-se na história da produção cenográfica da segunda metade do século XIX em Portugal, propondo um tratamento teórico mais abrangente, que desloque o enfoque analítico da peça de arte em si ou do carácter efémero e global da espectacularidade que tem merecido alguma atenção da historiografia contemporânea, para uma escala de cultura visual ou mesmo de visualidade, no sentido mais dilatado destas expressões. Discutindo essencialmente a problemática em torno da imagem teatral como produto do mundo oitocentista analisa-se o potencial cognitivo da série cenográfica na sua capacidade de representação e apropriações ideológicas. Para esta dialéctica concorrem as repercussões epocais do espectáculo, designadamente na regulação da vida social, na mediação de processos económicos, no combate político, e sobretudo, em modelos de percepção artística fundados nos convencionalismos cenográficos como acontece, por exemplo, na produção decorativa e arquitectónica integradas num particular campo visual ou na teatralidade actuante dos edifícios, cuja essência, em todos os casos, é devedora de uma cultura paradoxalmente centrada nos limites da caixa cénica e na infinitude emotiva do espectacular.

Visual politics of the estado novo realized on the Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques in Lisbon – the construction of ideal citizenship?

The stylistic categorization of the Estado Novo has been intensely discussed by Portuguese art historians. The square Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques in Lisbon (Alameda) can be seen as paradigmatic for the architecture of power of the Estado Novo. The Alameda forms a gardened valley between two hills. There you find two prominent and highly propagandist buildings: The Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and the Fonte Luminosa are dedicated to modern sciences and respectively to the harmonious contribution of nature to the city. The iconography of the Alameda as well as its incorporation into the propagandist use of urban planning in the 1930s and 1940s exemplify the visual politics during Salazarism. Urban planning programs intended to create cities that would preserve the character of a traditional catholic society and at the same time answer to the need to modernize the country and evoke the image of a progressive state. Thus, public buildings and urban squares such as the Alameda contributed to design a corporate image and to the ‘spirit’ of the regime.

Uncertainty in olfactory decision-making

Relationships between accuracy and speed of decision-making, or speed-accuracy tradeoffs (SAT), have been extensively studied. However, the range of SAT observed varies widely across studies for reasons that are unclear. Several explanations have been proposed, including motivation or incentive for speed vs. accuracy, species and modality but none of these hypotheses has been directly tested. An alternative explanation is that the different degrees of SAT are related to the nature of the task being performed. Here, we addressed this problem by comparing SAT in two odor-guided decision tasks that were identical except for the nature of the task uncertainty: an odor mixture categorization task, where the distinguishing information is reduced by making the stimuli more similar to each other; and an odor identification task in which the information is reduced by lowering the intensity over a range of three log steps. (...)