Stochastic modelling of the reservoir lithological and petrophysical attributes. A case study of the Middle East carbonate reservoir

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Geológica (Georrecursos)

Societal embedding in high-speed train technology development: dominant perspective from a case study

The present article is based on the report for the Doctoral Conference of the PhD programme in Technology Assessment, held at FCT-UNL Campus, Monte de Caparica, June 9th, 2011. The PhD thesis has the supervision of Prof. António Moniz (FCT-UNL and ITAS-KIT), and co-supervision of Prof. Manuel Seabra Pereira and Prof. Rosário Macário (both from IST-UTL).

Visitor behaviours and visitor effects: a case study on the white-crowned mangabey (cercocebus atys lunulatus) of ZSL London Zoo

Tese de mestrado em Antropologia, especialização natureza e conservação

Safe reuse of treated urban wastewater in Praia, Cape Verde: a case study

Dissertação para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão da Água

Policies to improve the lives of Slum Dwellers – from international agreements to local contexts. The Brazilian case-study

Last decades economic development induced massive international and regional migration flows directed to the urban spaces. The magnitude and swiftness of these processes determined that several cities’ authorities would fail to respond to the increasing demands of many social services. The right to an “adequate housing” emerged as a political concern, leading governments and institutions to develop housing programmes directed to improve the lives of slum dwellers. This paper presents a diachronic evolution of these specific housing policies in the paradigmatic case-study of Brazil, critically analysing the evolving roles played by the multiple levels of decision (from international institutions to local communities) in the development and implementation of such measures.

Local Development Initiatives in Metropolitan Areas' Suburban Municipalities: a comparative case-study between Amadora (Lisbon-PT) and Diadema (São Paulo-BR)

MARQUES, B.P. e CARVALHO, R. (2010) "Local Development Initiatives in Metropolitan Areas' Suburban Municipalities: a comparative case-study between Amadora (Lisbon-PT) and Diadema (São Paulo-BR)", in Actas do 16.º Congresso da APDR, Funchal, pp. 1053-1083, ISBN 978-989-96353-1-9.

Quality of process modeling using BPMN: a model-driven approach

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Informática

Development of an integrative approach for the characterization of ecological risk on marine transition ecosystems: the Sado Estuary as a case study

Estuaries and other transitional waters are complex ecosystems critically important as nursery and shelter areas for organisms. Also, humans depend on estuaries for multiple socio-economical activities such as urbanism, tourism, heavy industry, (taking advantage of shipping), fisheries and aquaculture, the development of which led to strong historical pressures, with emphasis on pollution. The degradation of estuarine environmental quality implies ecologic, economic and social prejudice, hence the importance of evaluating environmental quality through the identification of stressors and impacts. The Sado Estuary (SW Portugal) holds the characteristics of industrialized estuaries, which results in multiple adverse impacts. Still, it has recently been considered moderately contaminated. In fact, many studies were conducted in the past few years, albeit scattered due to the absence of true biomonitoring programmes. As such, there is a need to integrate the information, in order to obtain a holistic perspective of the area able to assist management and decision-making. As such, a geographical information system (GIS) was created based on sediment contamination and biomarker data collected from a decade-long time-series of publications. Four impacted and a reference areas were identified, characterized by distinct sediment contamination patterns related to different hot spots and diffuse sources of toxicants. The potential risk of sediment-bound toxicants was determined by contrasting the levels of pollutants with available sediment quality guidelines, followed by their integration through the Sediment Quality guideline Quotient (SQG-Q). The SQG-Q estimates per toxicant or class was then subjected to georreferencing and statistical analyses between the five distinct areas and seasons. Biomarker responses were integrated through the Biomarkers Consistency Indice and georreferenced as well through GIS. Overall, in spite of the multiple biological traits surveyed, the biomarker data (from several organisms) are accordant with sediment contamination. The most impacted areas were the shipyard area and adjacent industrial belt, followed by urban and agricultural grounds. It is evident that the estuary, although globally moderately impacted, is very heterogeneous and affected by a cocktail of contaminants, especially metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon. Although elements (like copper, zinc and even arsenic) may originate from the geology of the hydrographic basin of the Sado River, the majority of the remaining contaminants results from human activities. The present work revealed that the estuary should be divided into distinct biogeographic units, in order to implement effective measures to safeguard environmental quality.

Exporting a model of integrated disease management: A cross-case study analysis and application to Associação Protectora dos Diabéticos de Portugal

Although literature is lacking in the topic of internationalization of services, we manage to apply both the Uppsala model and the Eclectic Theory to the healthcare service. A cross-case study analysis with three international hospitals is done in order to define an internationalization pattern and conditions for a successful process. This is then applied to Associação Protectora dos Diabéticos de Portugal with the purpose of defining an internationalization strategy to the Association.

Towards an integrated technology management across the rail supply chain extended to society: building the case study on high-speed trains

The present paper was prepared for the course “Project III”, with the supervision of Prof. António Moniz, reporting on the author speaking notes at the Winter School on Technology Assessment, 6-7 December 2010, as part of the Doctoral Programme on Technology Assessment at FCT-UNL.

Learning domain-specific sentiment lexicons with applications to recommender systems

Search is now going beyond looking for factual information, and people wish to search for the opinions of others to help them in their own decision-making. Sentiment expressions or opinion expressions are used by users to express their opinion and embody important pieces of information, particularly in online commerce. The main problem that the present dissertation addresses is how to model text to find meaningful words that express a sentiment. In this context, I investigate the viability of automatically generating a sentiment lexicon for opinion retrieval and sentiment classification applications. For this research objective we propose to capture sentiment words that are derived from online users’ reviews. In this approach, we tackle a major challenge in sentiment analysis which is the detection of words that express subjective preference and domain-specific sentiment words such as jargon. To this aim we present a fully generative method that automatically learns a domain-specific lexicon and is fully independent of external sources. Sentiment lexicons can be applied in a broad set of applications, however popular recommendation algorithms have somehow been disconnected from sentiment analysis. Therefore, we present a study that explores the viability of applying sentiment analysis techniques to infer ratings in a recommendation algorithm. Furthermore, entities’ reputation is intrinsically associated with sentiment words that have a positive or negative relation with those entities. Hence, is provided a study that observes the viability of using a domain-specific lexicon to compute entities reputation. Finally, a recommendation system algorithm is improved with the use of sentiment-based ratings and entities reputation.

Sustainability education in PBL education: the case study of IEM-UMINHO

Sustainability-related skills are becoming more and more relevant for a proficient and professional engineering practice. Industrial engineers in particular, given their broad field of intervention and being at the heart of industrial activity, hold a great deal of potential and responsibility in providing and delivering best industrial practices, that support enhanced industrial systems and products. Therefore making a real contribution in generating wealth and income for all the companies’ stakeholders, including local communities, as well as adding up to more sustainable ecosystems. Previous work by the authors focused on studying the inclusion of this subject on the education of industrial engineers, especially through active-learning methodologies, as well as presenting results on the use of one such approach. The study conducted tried to identify the impacts on sustainability learning using a given specific activity, i.e. a workshop on industrial ecology, held in the 2014/2015 academic year on the Integrated MSc degree on Industrial Engineering and Management at the University of Minho, Portugal. The study uses content analysis of student teams’ reports for two consecutive academic years. The former did not include one such workshop, while the latter did. The Fink taxonomy was used in the discussion of results and reflection. The study outcomes aimed at supporting decision making on worthiness of investment on similar education instruments for sustainability competency development. Some results of the study highlight that: (1) the workshop seem to globally have a positive contribution on the sustainability learning; (2) a number of dimensions of the Life cycle design strategy wheel was developed, but the approach was not broadly used, (3) There was a mismatch on the workshop schedule; (4) students enjoy the workshop; (5) a clearer endorsement on relevance of this aspect is required. Suggestions for future work are also issued.

Embedding, evolution, and validation of model-driven spreadsheets

This paper proposes and validates a model-driven software engineering technique for spreadsheets. The technique that we envision builds on the embedding of spreadsheet models under a widely used spreadsheet system. This means that we enable the creation and evolution of spreadsheet models under a spreadsheet system. More precisely, we embed ClassSheets, a visual language with a syntax similar to the one offered by common spreadsheets, that was created with the aim of specifying spreadsheets. Our embedding allows models and their conforming instances to be developed under the same environment. In practice, this convenient environment enhances evolution steps at the model level while the corresponding instance is automatically co-evolved.Finally,wehave designed and conducted an empirical study with human users in order to assess our technique in production environments. The results of this study are promising and suggest that productivity gains are realizable under our model-driven spreadsheet development setting.

Development-oriented refugee assistance : sustainable, efficient and gender-sensitive? ; theoretical and practical analyses based on a case study of the Rhino camp in Uganda

Magdeburg, Univ., Fak. für Humanwiss., Diss., 2012

Species delimitation: A case study in a problematic ant taxon

Species delimitation has been invigorated as a discipline in systematics by an influx of new character sets, analytical methods, and conceptual advances. We use genetic data from 68 markers, combined with distributional, bioclimatic, and coloration information, to hypothesize boundaries of evolutionarily independent lineages (species) within the widespread and highly variable nominal fire ant species Solenopsis saevissima, a member of a species group containing invasive pests as well as species that are models for ecological and evolutionary research. Our integrated approach uses diverse methods of analysis to sequentially test whether populations meet specific operational criteria (contingent properties) for candidacy as morphologically cryptic species, including genetic clustering, monophyly, reproductive isolation, and occupation of distinctive niche space. We hypothesize that nominal S. saevissima comprises at least 4-6 previously unrecognized species, including several pairs whose parapatric distributions implicate the development of intrinsic premating or postmating barriers to gene flow. Our genetic data further suggest that regional genetic differentiation in S. saevissima has been influenced by hybridization with other nominal species occurring in sympatry or parapatry, including the quite distantly related Solenopsis geminata. The results of this study illustrate the importance of employing different classes of genetic data (coding and noncoding regions and nuclear and mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA] markers), different methods of genetic data analysis (tree-based and non-tree based methods), and different sources of data (genetic, morphological, and ecological data) to explicitly test various operational criteria for species boundaries in clades of recently diverged lineages, while warning against over reliance on any single data type (e.g., mtDNA sequence variation) when drawing inferences.