Location-Based services - A crescente importância da localização

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Estatística e Gestão de Informação

Recuperação de informação multimédia em memórias pessoais

Dissertação apresentada para a obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

Georeferencing Road Accidents with Google Earth: Transforming Information into Knowledge for Decision Support

Over the last fifty years mobility practices have changed dramatically, improving the way travel takes place, the time it takes but also on matters like road safety and prevention. High mortality caused by high accident levels has reached untenable levels. But the research into road mortality stayed limited to comparative statistical exercises which go no further than defining accident types. In terms of sharing information and mapping accidents, little progress has been mad, aside from the normal publication of figures, either through simplistic tables or web pages. With considerable technological advances on geographical information technologies, research and development stayed rather static with only a few good examples on dynamic mapping. The use of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices as normal equipments on automobile industry resulted in a more dynamic mobility patterns but also with higher degrees of uncertainty on road traffic. This paper describes a road accident georeferencing project for the Lisbon District involving fatalities and serious injuries during 2007. In the initial phase, individual information summaries were compiled giving information on accidents and its majour characteristics, collected by the security forces: the Public Safety Police Force (Polícia de Segurança Pública - PSP) and the National Guard (Guarda Nacional Republicana - GNR). The Google Earth platform was used to georeference the information in order to inform the public and the authorities of the accident locations, the nature of the location, and the causes and consequences of the accidents. This paper also gives future insights about augmented reality technologies, considered crucial to advances to road safety and prevention studies. At the end, this exercise could be considered a success because of numerous consequences, as for stakeholders who decide what to do but also for the public awareness to the problem of road mortality.

Geo-localização de viaturas na gestão de frotas

Relatório de Estágio apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Gestão do Território especialização em Detecção Remota e Sistemas de Informação Geográfica

Environmental data management in the Sado Estuary

Estuaries are perhaps the most threatened environments in the coastal fringe; the coincidence of high natural value and attractiveness for human use has led to conflicts between conservation and development. These conflicts occur in the Sado Estuary since its location is near the industrialised zone of Peninsula of Setúbal and at the same time, a great part of the Estuary is classified as a Natural Reserve due to its high biodiversity. These facts led us to the need of implementing a model of environmental management and quality assessment, based on methodologies that enable the assessment of the Sado Estuary quality and evaluation of the human pressures in the estuary. These methodologies are based on indicators that can better depict the state of the environment and not necessarily all that could be measured or analysed. Sediments have always been considered as an important temporary source of some compounds or a sink for other type of materials or an interface where a great diversity of biogeochemical transformations occur. For all this they are of great importance in the formulation of coastal management system. Many authors have been using sediments to monitor aquatic contamination, showing great advantages when compared to the sampling of the traditional water column. The main objective of this thesis was to develop an estuary environmental management framework applied to Sado Estuary using the DPSIR Model (EMMSado), including data collection, data processing and data analysis. The support infrastructure of EMMSado were a set of spatially contiguous and homogeneous regions of sediment structure (management units). The environmental quality of the estuary was assessed through the sediment quality assessment and integrated in a preliminary stage with the human pressure for development. Besides the earlier explained advantages, studying the quality of the estuary mainly based on the indicators and indexes of the sediment compartment also turns this methodology easier, faster and human and financial resource saving. These are essential factors to an efficient environmental management of coastal areas. Data management, visualization, processing and analysis was obtained through the combined use of indicators and indices, sampling optimization techniques, Geographical Information Systems, remote sensing, statistics for spatial data, Global Positioning Systems and best expert judgments. As a global conclusion, from the nineteen management units delineated and analyzed three showed no ecological risk (18.5 % of the study area). The areas of more concern (5.6 % of the study area) are located in the North Channel and are under strong human pressure mainly due to industrial activities. These areas have also low hydrodynamics and are, thus associated with high levels of deposition. In particular the areas near Lisnave and Eurominas industries can also accumulate the contamination coming from Águas de Moura Channel, since particles coming from that channel can settle down in that area due to residual flow. In these areas the contaminants of concern, from those analyzed, are the heavy metals and metalloids (Cd, Cu, Zn and As exceeded the PEL guidelines) and the pesticides BHC isomers, heptachlor, isodrin, DDT and metabolits, endosulfan and endrin. In the remain management units (76 % of the study area) there is a moderate impact potential of occurrence of adverse ecological effects and in some of these areas no stress agents could be identified. This emphasizes the need for further research, since unmeasured chemicals may be causing or contributing to these adverse effects. Special attention must be taken to the units with moderate impact potential of occurrence of adverse ecological effects, located inside the natural reserve. Non-point source pollution coming from agriculture and aquaculture activities also seem to contribute with important pollution load into the estuary entering from Águas de Moura Channel. This pressure is expressed in a moderate impact potential for ecological risk existent in the areas near the entrance of this Channel. Pressures may also came from Alcácer Channel although they were not quantified in this study. The management framework presented here, including all the methodological tools may be applied and tested in other estuarine ecosystems, which will also allow a comparison between estuarine ecosystems in other parts of the globe.

WIFI indoor positioning for mobile devices, an application for the UJI Smart Campus

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Development of a global IT charging model for BASF Group

With ‘GS Strategy 2025’ BASF Business Services GmbH was formed to centrally steer all IT related topics of BASF group. Thus, a global charging system has to be designed, which complies to international transfer price regulations and the strategy of BASF SE. This work project develops a charging system with a following evaluation. The direct charging system benefits from its cost transparency upsides but comes with a higher administrative effort due to volume-based charging. In contrast, the indirect charging system convinces because of easy handling, which is the result of the application of suitable allocation keys. Regarding the complex group structure of BASF SE with more than 300 legal entities in 80 countries, the lower administrative effort of the indirect charging system outweighs the benefits of the direct charging model and should be used by BASF group.

Indoor location-based analytics systems: Portuguese market compettive assessment and entry procing strategy of BIPs' technology in Sonae Sierra Shopping malls stores

This project attempts to provide an in-depth competitive assessment of the Portuguese indoor location-based analytics market, and to elaborate an entry-pricing strategy for Business Intelligence Positioning System (BIPS) implementation in Portuguese shopping centre stores. The role of industry forces and company’s organizational resources platform to sustain company’s competitive advantage was explored. A customer value-based pricing approach was adopted to assess BIPS value to retailers and maximize Sonae Sierra profitability. The exploratory quantitative research found that there is a market opportunity to explore every store area types with tailored proposals, and to set higher-than-tested membership fees to allow a rapid ROI, concluding there are propitious conditions for Sierra to succeed in BIPS store’s business model in Portugal.

Design and implementation of a behaviorally typed programming system for web services

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.

An agent-based evolutionary approach for manufacturing system layout design

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

The International Multilateral System: Imperatives of Change, Potential Scenarios and Suggestions for the Future

Thesis presented to satisfy the necessary requirements for obtaining a PhD degree in International Relation with specialization in Globalization and the Environment,

A flexible navigation system for autonomous robots operating in heterogeneous environments

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

The tight grip of a debt based global economy: A study on banking regulation and the implementation of the Basel II Accord in Portugal

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 optimization of the complaints management system

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

2D position system for a mobile robot in unstructured environments

Nowadays, several sensors and mechanisms are available to estimate a mobile robot trajectory and location with respect to its surroundings. Usually absolute positioning mechanisms are the most accurate, but they also are the most expensive ones, and require pre installed equipment in the environment. Therefore, a system capable of measuring its motion and location within the environment (relative positioning) has been a research goal since the beginning of autonomous vehicles. With the increasing of the computational performance, computer vision has become faster and, therefore, became possible to incorporate it in a mobile robot. In visual odometry feature based approaches, the model estimation requires absence of feature association outliers for an accurate motion. Outliers rejection is a delicate process considering there is always a trade-off between speed and reliability of the system. This dissertation proposes an indoor 2D position system using Visual Odometry. The mobile robot has a camera pointed to the ceiling, for image analysis. As requirements, the ceiling and the oor (where the robot moves) must be planes. In the literature, RANSAC is a widely used method for outlier rejection. However, it might be slow in critical circumstances. Therefore, it is proposed a new algorithm that accelerates RANSAC, maintaining its reliability. The algorithm, called FMBF, consists on comparing image texture patterns between pictures, preserving the most similar ones. There are several types of comparisons, with different computational cost and reliability. FMBF manages those comparisons in order to optimize the trade-off between speed and reliability.