The role of objects in creative collaborations

Objects matter when professionals collaborate to create new products. Chapter 1 explains the intention of this work, to apply theories on objects in the empirical context of fashion design. Chapter 2 addresses the question of how creative professionals learn about and use strategy tools to turn their artistic fame into a commercial success. For Chapter 3 I collected ethnographic data on the development of a seasonal collection from the idea to the presentation at Fashion Week. The result is a deep insight into the collaborative processes and material objects used when a stable team of designers works with several outside experts. Chapter 4 applies the knowledge of the role of objects in fashion design gained during the ethnography in the context of online co-creation and crowd sourced fashion items. The synthesis of the empirical studies allows me to present the conceptual leap in Chapter 5. In the theoretical essay I review the findings on the role of objects in collaborations in relation to practice theory, present the new concept of the comprehensive object and conclude by stating the possibilities for future research.

Owner portraits and heraldry in the "Lamoignon Hours"

Because of the distance in time and the lack of testifying documents, one should be extremely careful when labelling portraits in medieval books of hours as donor portraits or owner portraits. There are, however, manuscripts that reveal their first owner within their decorative programme, and the Lamoignon Hours (Lisbon, Gulbenkian, ms LA 237) is one of these. This article aims to discuss the iconography of the three portraits found on f.165v, f.202v and f.286v, as well as the relevance of portraiture and heraldic insignia in books of hours and the significance of such content to the original owner and to those who possessed the book afterwards.

Recensão: Peter Goldie e Elisabeth Schellekens, Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?

Recensão de: Peter Goldie e Elisabeth Schellekens, Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?, Londres e Nova Iorque: Routledge, 2010

Risk management of new product development process

Dissertation submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa for the achievement of Integrated Master´s degree in Industrial Management Engineering

Time-domain optimization of amplifiers based on distributed genetic algorithms

Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Multiple sequence alignment correction using constraints

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do European Master in Computational Logics, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Computational Logics

Sentiment analysis on twitter for the portuguese language

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Automatic extraction of concepts from texts and applications

The extraction of relevant terms from texts is an extensively researched task in Text- Mining. Relevant terms have been applied in areas such as Information Retrieval or document clustering and classification. However, relevance has a rather fuzzy nature since the classification of some terms as relevant or not relevant is not consensual. For instance, while words such as "president" and "republic" are generally considered relevant by human evaluators, and words like "the" and "or" are not, terms such as "read" and "finish" gather no consensus about their semantic and informativeness. Concepts, on the other hand, have a less fuzzy nature. Therefore, instead of deciding on the relevance of a term during the extraction phase, as most extractors do, I propose to first extract, from texts, what I have called generic concepts (all concepts) and postpone the decision about relevance for downstream applications, accordingly to their needs. For instance, a keyword extractor may assume that the most relevant keywords are the most frequent concepts on the documents. Moreover, most statistical extractors are incapable of extracting single-word and multi-word expressions using the same methodology. These factors led to the development of the ConceptExtractor, a statistical and language-independent methodology which is explained in Part I of this thesis. In Part II, I will show that the automatic extraction of concepts has great applicability. For instance, for the extraction of keywords from documents, using the Tf-Idf metric only on concepts yields better results than using Tf-Idf without concepts, specially for multi-words. In addition, since concepts can be semantically related to other concepts, this allows us to build implicit document descriptors. These applications led to published work. Finally, I will present some work that, although not published yet, is briefly discussed in this document.

Texto(s) e competência textual

A investigação de que resulta o presente trabalho foi desenvolvida em Teoria do texto - área de especialização em Linguística criada na FCSH - UNL pela Professora Luísa Opitz. Os contornos teóricos e epistemológicos da configuração disciplinar assim designada merecem naturalmente uma atenção particular. Pode dizer-se que os primeiros contributos, no sentido de uma abordagem linguística do texto, se devem aos vários trabalhos que, sobretudo na Holanda e na Alemanha, desde o início dos anos setenta, preconizavam o alargamento do quadro generativista para além do domínio da frase. A estes projectos de gramática de texto convém também associar. como se pode compreender, a noção de competência textual - enquanto sistema de regras susceptíveis de derivarem qualquer texto, numa determinada lingua natural. Veja-se o paralelismo da definição proposta por Petôfi (um dos autores em destaque, nesta perspectiva): Its direct aim [of the grammatical theory of verbal texts] is to describe the knowledge of the 'ideal native speaker/listener' concernmg the grammatical structuredness of verbal texts (i.e. his verbal grammatical competence). PETÔFI 1973:206 Quase em simultâneo com a convicção generativista, ou decorrendo de alguma insatisfacão que se ia instalando, outras tendências menos formalizantes se faziam também sentir. Pode destacar-se, em particular, o ponto de vista de P. Hartmann, no prefácio que assina para Studies in Text Grammar, editado por J.S. Petôfi e H. Rieser em 1973. Assinalando a mudança, em termos de interesses epistemológicos, associada ao facto de se tratar de objectos cuja descrição requer mais dimensões do que as contempladas por uma gramática de frase, Hartmann afirma: Se a nogão de texto aparece associada å de fungão (ou funções), uma e outra são fundamentalmente determinadas pela decisão relativa aos objectos sujeitos a observação - isto é, pelo facto de se tomarem em consideração os textos efectivamente produzidos em situações de comunicação, não sujeitos, portanto, a reduções metodológicas.

Responsible research and innovation: a global perspective

Based on the paper presented at the Doctorate Conference on Technologogy Assessment in July 2013 at the University Nova Lisboa, Caparica campus

Responsible research and innovation: a global perspective

Based on the paper presented at the Doctorate Conference on Technologogy Assessment in July 2013 at the University Nova Lisboa, Caparica campus

Finding the hidden influencers

This thesis is a first step in the search for the characteristics of funders, and the underlying motivation that drives them to participate in crowdfunding. The purpose of the study is to identify demographics and psychographics that influence a funder’s willingness to financially support a crowdfunding project (WFS). Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and donation literature are combined to create a conceptual model in which age, gender, altruism and income, together with several control variables, are expected to have an influence on a funder’s WFS. Primary data collection was conducted using a survey, and a dataset of 175 potential crowdfunders was created. The data is analysed using a multiple regression and provided several interesting results. First of all, age and gender have a significant effect on WFS, males and young adults until the age of 30 have a higher intention to give money to crowdfunding projects. Second, altruism is significantly positively related to WFS, meaning that the funders do not just care about the potential rewards they could receive, but also about the benefits that they create for the entrepreneur and the people affected by the crowdfunding project. Third, the moderation effect of income was found to be insignificant in this model. It shows that income does not affect the strength of the relationship between the age, gender and altruism, and WFS. This study provides important theoretical contributions by, to the best of my knowledge, being the first study to quantitatively investigate the characteristics of funders and using the funder as the unit of analysis. Moreover, the study provides important insights for entrepreneurs who wish to target the crowd better in order to attract and retain more funders, thereby increasing the chance of success of their project.