Cozinha da Madeira website: the online touchpoint for a sustainability oriented service of Madeira Island

Over the past several years technology has been evolving in a way that it has become crucial for most businesses and companies to have interactive technology enabled touchpoints available online. Such interactive touchpoints can be developed as mobile application, webpages, or even through social networks. In the end such touchpoints will most surely represent the most easily reachable and marketable side of the business. Today selling a product alone is no longer enough to make consumers satisfied and complete, businesses and business models are changing. Increasingly, companies are choosing to not just sell products but to combine both sale and service. These service-based approaches will provide the client with a unique and personalized experience of what the company is selling. By selling a service the company transmits values that are more complex than the simple selling of a product. A service is something immaterial, happens over time and exists in the moment of the delivery. When conceiving and designing services, the use of the new technologies becomes a crucial step in order to craft touchpoints that facilitate the whole experience cycle of the service, from attracting, orienting, interacting and retaining the client, as well as providing later support to the consumer to advocate for the service itself. This thesis reports on the design and implementation of the online touchpoint of Cozinha da Madeira, which is a service designed to support tourism, specifically promoting the discovery of tradition and landscapes in the island of Madeira. Such touchpoint developed in the form of a website, embodies completely or partially various stages of the Service Experience cycle, from attracting and connecting, orienting, interacting as well as retaining and advocating. Through this thesis we will describe the design and implementation of such touchpoint as well as the evaluation and possible future implications.

Touch ‘n’ sketch: pen and fingers on a multi-touch sketch application for tablet PC’s

In many creative and technical areas, professionals make use of paper sketches for developing and expressing concepts and models. Paper offers an almost constraint free environment where they have as much freedom to express themselves as they need. However, paper does have some disadvantages, such as size and not being able to manipulate the content (other than remove it or scratch it), which can be overcome by creating systems that can offer the same freedom people have from paper but none of the disadvantages and limitations. Only in recent years has the technology become massively available that allows doing precisely that, with the development in touch‐sensitive screens that also have the ability to interact with a stylus. In this project a prototype was created with the objective of finding a set of the most useful and usable interactions, which are composed of combinations of multi‐touch and pen. The project selected Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools as its application domain, because it addresses a solid and well‐defined discipline with still sufficient room for new developments. This was the result from the area research conducted to find an application domain, which involved analyzing sketching tools from several possible areas and domains. User studies were conducted using Model Driven Inquiry (MDI) to have a better understanding of the human sketch creation activities and concepts devised. Then the prototype was implemented, through which it was possible to execute user evaluations of the interaction concepts created. Results validated most interactions, in the face of limited testing only being possible at the time. Users had more problems using the pen, however handwriting and ink recognition were very effective, and users quickly learned the manipulations and gestures from the Natural User Interface (NUI).

Design of boundary-scan testing in CMOS image sensors for industrial applications: internship repor

Tests on printed circuit boards and integrated circuits are widely used in industry,resulting in reduced design time and cost of a project. The functional and connectivity tests in this type of circuits soon began to be a concern for the manufacturers, leading to research for solutions that would allow a reliable, quick, cheap and universal solution. Initially, using test schemes were based on a set of needles that was connected to inputs and outputs of the integrated circuit board (bed-of-nails), to which signals were applied, in order to verify whether the circuit was according to the specifications and could be assembled in the production line. With the development of projects, circuit miniaturization, improvement of the production processes, improvement of the materials used, as well as the increase in the number of circuits, it was necessary to search for another solution. Thus Boundary-Scan Testing was developed which operates on the border of integrated circuits and allows testing the connectivity of the input and the output ports of a circuit. The Boundary-Scan Testing method was converted into a standard, in 1990, by the IEEE organization, being known as the IEEE 1149.1 Standard. Since then a large number of manufacturers have adopted this standard in their products. This master thesis has, as main objective: the design of Boundary-Scan Testing in an image sensor in CMOS technology, analyzing the standard requirements, the process used in the prototype production, developing the design and layout of Boundary-Scan and analyzing obtained results after production. Chapter 1 presents briefly the evolution of testing procedures used in industry, developments and applications of image sensors and the motivation for the use of architecture Boundary-Scan Testing. Chapter 2 explores the fundamentals of Boundary-Scan Testing and image sensors, starting with the Boundary-Scan architecture defined in the Standard, where functional blocks are analyzed. This understanding is necessary to implement the design on an image sensor. It also explains the architecture of image sensors currently used, focusing on sensors with a large number of inputs and outputs.Chapter 3 describes the design of the Boundary-Scan implemented and starts to analyse the design and functions of the prototype, the used software, the designs and simulations of the functional blocks of the Boundary-Scan implemented. Chapter 4 presents the layout process used based on the design developed on chapter 3, describing the software used for this purpose, the planning of the layout location (floorplan) and its dimensions, the layout of individual blocks, checks in terms of layout rules, the comparison with the final design and finally the simulation. Chapter 5 describes how the functional tests were performed to verify the design compliancy with the specifications of Standard IEEE 1149.1. These tests were focused on the application of signals to input and output ports of the produced prototype. Chapter 6 presents the conclusions that were taken throughout the execution of the work.

Breadcrumbs: location and context aware mobile platform for story sharing

With the current proliferation of sensor equipped mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, location aware services are expanding beyond the mere efficiency and work related needs of users, evolving in order to incorporate fun, culture and the social life of users. Today people on the move have more and more connectivity and are expected to be able to communicate with their usual and familiar social networks. That means communications not only with their peers and colleagues, friends and family but also with unknown people that might share their interests, curiosities or happen to use the same social network. Through social networks, location aware blogging, cultural mobile applications relevant information is now available at specific geographical locations and open to feedback and conversations among friends as well as strangers. In fact, nowadays smartphone technologies aloud users to post and retrieve content while on the move, often relating to specific physical landmarks or locations, engaging and being engaged in conversations with strangers as much as their own social network. The use of such technologies and applications while on the move can often lead people to serendipitous discoveries and interactions. Throughout our thesis we are engaging on a two folded investigation: how can we foster and support serendipitous discoveries and what are the best interfaces for it? In fact, to read and write content while on the move is a cognitively intensive task. While the map serves the function of orienting the user, it also absorbs most of the user’s concentration. In order to address this kind of cognitive overload issue with Breadcrumbs we propose a 360 degrees interface that enables the user to find content around them by means of scanning the surrounding space with the mobile device. By using a loose metaphor of a periscope, harnessing the power of the smartphone sensors we designed an interactive interface capable of detecting content around the users and display it in the form of 2 dimensional bubbles which diameter depends on their distance from the users. Users will navigate the space in relation to the content that they are curious about, rather than in relation to the traditional geographical map. Through this model we envisage alleviating a certain cognitive overload generated by having to continuously confront a two dimensional map with the real three dimensional space surrounding the user, but also use the content as a navigational filter. Furthermore this alternative mean of navigating space might bring serendipitous discovery about places that user where not aware of or intending to reach. We hence conclude our thesis with the evaluation of the Breadcrumbs application and the comparison of the 360 degrees interface with a traditional 2 dimensional map displayed on the devise screen. Results from the evaluation are compiled in findings and insights for future use in designing and developing context aware mobile applications.