Market selection and market entry recommendations for a non-profit organization's first international venture

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

Optimization of investment promotion tools for Portugal: Specific recommendations to attract investments from Germany

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

Social-media monitoring for cold-start recommendations

Generating personalized movie recommendations to users is a problem that most commonly relies on user-movie ratings. These ratings are generally used either to understand the user preferences or to recommend movies that users with similar rating patterns have rated highly. However, movie recommenders are often subject to the Cold-Start problem: new movies have not been rated by anyone, so, they will not be recommended to anyone; likewise, the preferences of new users who have not rated any movie cannot be learned. In parallel, Social-Media platforms, such as Twitter, collect great amounts of user feedback on movies, as these are very popular nowadays. This thesis proposes to explore feedback shared on Twitter to predict the popularity of new movies and show how it can be used to tackle the Cold-Start problem. It also proposes, at a finer grain, to explore the reputation of directors and actors on IMDb to tackle the Cold-Start problem. To assess these aspects, a Reputation-enhanced Recommendation Algorithm is implemented and evaluated on a crawled IMDb dataset with previous user ratings of old movies,together with Twitter data crawled from January 2014 to March 2014, to recommend 60 movies affected by the Cold-Start problem. Twitter revealed to be a strong reputation predictor, and the Reputation-enhanced Recommendation Algorithm improved over several baseline methods. Additionally, the algorithm also proved to be useful when recommending movies in an extreme Cold-Start scenario, where both new movies and users are affected by the Cold-Start problem.

Recommendations for Nova School of Business and Economics to target yhe Colombian market

The growing connotation Internationalization has worldwide, alongside the economic, political and socio-environmental changes, is empowering a progressively global education economy. Therefore, this Work Project aims to help Nova SBE to understand the decision making process of the Colombian tertiary education students, as this market constitutes an enriching opportunity to meet both business and educative objectives. In order to do so, a qualitative research was conducted to comprehend the rationale behind Colombian students to study abroad. The study points out that the reputation of a HE institution and the Portuguese culture are the key attributes to pursue a degree in Portugal.

Nutritional plasticity and evolutionary divergence in the Drosophila ovary

The environment can modify developmental trajectories and generate a range of distinct phenotypes without altering an organism’s genome, a widespread phenomenon called developmental plasticity. The past decades have seen a resurgent interest in understanding how developmental plasticity contributes to evolutionary processes, as it can produce phenotypic variation among individuals and facilitate diversification among populations that inhabit distinct ecological niches. To better understand the importance of plastic responses for evolutionary change, we need to explore how the environment alters development to produce phenotypic variation and then compare this to how genetic variation influences these same developmental processes.(...)