Avatar modeling: a telepresence study with natural user interface

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

Wind Power in the Portuguese Landscape: Global Concerns and Local Costs

Wind turbines and solar panels are becoming second nature in Portugal, as its occurrence in the country becomes ubiquitous. Somehow, one could argue that renewable energy in Portugal is in the process of ‘naturalisation’ as part of a new – mechanised, but environmentally benign – landscape. Portuguese Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Biodiversity (ICNB) has shown an ambiguous stance on this issue, defending global concerns towards renewable energy, while at the same time attempting to engage locals in the preservation of extensive ‘classified areas’. In the course of this research, we tried to focus on these incongruities and to analyse how they are impacting local communities during the process of wind power installation.

Modellus: Learning Physics with Mathematical Modelling

Tese de doutoramento em Ciências da Educação, área de Teoria Curricular e Ensino das Ciências

Development of an interface for ontology‐based transformation between features of different types

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

The operation of autonomous mobile robot assistants in the environment of care facilities adopting a user-centered development design

The participation of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA (Stuttgart, Germany) and the companies User Interface Design GmbH (Ludwigsburg, Germany) plus MLR System GmbH (Ludwigsburg, Germany) enabled the research and findings presented in this paper; we would like to namely mention Birgit Graf and Theo Jacobs (Fraunhofer IPA) furthermore Peter Klein and Christiane Hartmann (User Interface Design GmbH).

A multiagent based shop floor transportation system simulator

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

Automated illustration of multimedia stories

Submitted in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science

Database repairs with answer set programming

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

gvSIG An Open Source GIS solution for the Android Platform

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

UJI's Smart Campus: Place Finder App

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

WebGIS applied to Improve Spatial Knowledge of High School Students

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

Kinect-sign

A nova era da informação que se está a assistir tem possibilitado a criação de novas e vastas coleções de intelecto virtual, como por exemplo o Wikipedia, Corsera, entre outros. Estas ferramentas vieram possibilitar a procura por cultura, resoluções de problemas do quotidiano, novos métodos de aprendizagem, por parte da sociedade em geral. Porém, como é habitual, tem-se vindo a verificar uma certa dificuldade inerente por parte de certas minorias sociais, que não possuem as mesmas capacidades de um indivíduo “normal“. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo a criação de uma ferramenta, em formato de jogo sério, para apoiar o ensino de Língua Gestual Portuguesa a um público ouvinte o -“Kinect Sign”. Com este estudo pretende-se explorar as mais recentes ferramentas de desenvolvimento de jogos, mais conhecidas como Authoring Tools e a sua integração com Natural User interfaces, concretamente o sensor Kinect. A solução apresentada neste documento propõe a utilização desta ferramenta a todos os indivíduos iniciantes que necessitem de uma introdução a esta forma de comunicação, para tornar um pouco menos agressiva a entrada no complexo mundo da linguagem gestual. A validação deste trabalho consistiu no desenvolvimento de um jogo protótipo que incentive os jogadores a aprenderem enquanto jogam. Analisaram-se problemas e tecnologias atuais para se chegar a uma estruturação semelhante a um jogo comum disponível em qualquer superfície comercial e websites dedicados ao género. Posterior apresentação a uma população selecionada a fim de analisar a sua opinião e utilidade do modelo desenvolvido, seguindo-se a resposta a um pequeno questionário.

Control system for actuation and sensing in digital microfluidics devices

Digital Microfluidics (DMF) is a second generation technique, derived from the conventional microfluidics that instead of using continuous liquid fluxes, it uses only individual droplets driven by external electric signals. In this thesis a new DMF control/sensing system for visualization, droplet control (movement, dispensing, merging and splitting) and real time impedance measurement have been developed. The software for the proposed system was implemented in MATLAB with a graphical user interface. An Arduino was used as control board and dedicated circuits for voltage switching and contacts were designed and implemented in printed circuit boards. A high resolution camera was integrated for visualization. In our new approach, the DMF chips are driven by a dual-tone signal where the sum of two independent ac signals (one for droplet operations and the other for impedance sensing) is applied to the electrodes, and afterwards independently evaluated by a lock-in amplifier. With this new approach we were able to choose the appropriated amplitudes and frequencies for the different proposes (actuation and sensing). The measurements made were used to evaluate the real time droplet impedance enabling the knowledge of its position and velocity. This new approach opens new possibilities for impedance sensing and feedback control in DMF devices.

About using serious games to teach (Portuguese) sign language

Sign language is the form of communication used by Deaf people, which, in most cases have been learned since childhood. The problem arises when a non-Deaf tries to contact with a Deaf. For example, when non-Deaf parents try to communicate with their Deaf child. In most cases, this situation tends to happen when the parents did not have time to properly learn sign language. This dissertation proposes the teaching of sign language through the usage of serious games. Currently, similar solutions to this proposal do exist, however, those solutions are scarce and limited. For this reason, the proposed solution is composed of a natural user interface that is intended to create a new concept on this field. The validation of this work, consisted on the implementation of a serious game prototype, which can be used as a source for learning (Portuguese) sign language. On this validation, it was first implemented a module responsible for recognizing sign language. This first stage, allowed the increase of interaction and the construction of an algorithm capable of accurately recognizing sign language. On a second stage of the validation, the proposal was studied so that the pros and cons can be determined and considered on future works.

m-SportGIS

Information technologies (ITs), and sports resources and services aid the potential to transform governmental organizations, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities development, respectively. Spatial data is a crucial source to support sports planning and management. Low-cost mobile geospatial tools bring productive and accurate data collection, and their use combining a handy and customized graphical user interface (GUI) (forms, mapping, media support) is still in an early stage. Recognizing the benefits — efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens — that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve with information resulted from the employment of a low-cost data collection platform, this project presents the development of a mobile mapping application (app) — m-SportGIS — under Open Source (OS) technologies and a customized evolutionary software methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova, OpenLayers) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Android operating system) product, taking advantage of device’s capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to an integrated Web Map Service (WMS), was created a local and customized Tile Map Service (TMS) to serve up cached data, regarding the IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican regions. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sports facilities, which resulted and stored data feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sports resources.