Desenvolvimento do padrão de crescimento urbano: modelação da dinâmica do solo urbano em Andaluzia

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciência e Sistemas de Informação Geográfica

Increase in cases of malaria in Mozambique, 2014: epidemic or new endemic pattern?

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE To describe the increase in cases of malaria in Mozambique. METHODS Cross-sectional study conducted in 2014, in Mozambique with national weekly epidemiological bulletin data. I analyzed the number of recorded cases in the 2009-2013 period, which led to the creation of an endemic channel using the quartile and C-Sum methods. Monthly incidence rates were calculated for the first half of 2014, making it possible to determine the pattern of endemicity. Months in which the incidence rates exceeded the third quartile or line C-sum were declared as epidemic months. RESULTS The provinces of Nampula, Zambezia, Sofala, and Inhambane accounted for 52.7% of all cases in the first half of 2014. Also during this period, the provinces of Nampula, Sofala and Tete were responsible for 54.9% of the deaths from malaria. The incidence rates of malaria in children, and in all ages, have showed patterns in the epidemic zone. For all ages, the incidence rate has peaked in April (2,573 cases/100,000 inhabitants). CONCLUSIONS The results suggest the occurrence of an epidemic pattern of malaria in the first half of 2014 in Mozambique. It is strategic to have a more accurate surveillance at all levels (central, provincial and district) to target prevention and control interventions in a timely manner.

Bertrand model under incomplete information

We consider a Bertrand duopoly model with unknown costs. The firms' aim is to choose the price of its product according to the well-known concept of Bayesian Nash equilibrium. The chooses are made simultaneously by both firms. In this paper, we suppose that each firm has two different technologies, and uses one of them according to a certain probability distribution. The use of either one or the other technology affects the unitary production cost. We show that this game has exactly one Bayesian Nash equilibrium. We analyse the advantages, for firms and for consumers, of using the technology with highest production cost versus the one with cheapest production cost. We prove that the expected profit of each firm increases with the variance of its production costs. We also show that the expected price of each good increases with both expected production costs, being the effect of the expected production costs of the rival dominated by the effect of the own expected production costs.

An unsupervised approach to feature discretization and selection

Many learning problems require handling high dimensional datasets with a relatively small number of instances. Learning algorithms are thus confronted with the curse of dimensionality, and need to address it in order to be effective. Examples of these types of data include the bag-of-words representation in text classification problems and gene expression data for tumor detection/classification. Usually, among the high number of features characterizing the instances, many may be irrelevant (or even detrimental) for the learning tasks. It is thus clear that there is a need for adequate techniques for feature representation, reduction, and selection, to improve both the classification accuracy and the memory requirements. In this paper, we propose combined unsupervised feature discretization and feature selection techniques, suitable for medium and high-dimensional datasets. The experimental results on several standard datasets, with both sparse and dense features, show the efficiency of the proposed techniques as well as improvements over previous related techniques.

Enhancing information retrieval in folksonomies using ontology of place constructed from Gazetteer information

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

Clustering de dados biomédicos com algoritmos baseados em critérios entrópicos

A procura de padrões nos dados de modo a formar grupos é conhecida como aglomeração de dados ou clustering, sendo uma das tarefas mais realizadas em mineração de dados e reconhecimento de padrões. Nesta dissertação é abordado o conceito de entropia e são usados algoritmos com critérios entrópicos para fazer clustering em dados biomédicos. O uso da entropia para efetuar clustering é relativamente recente e surge numa tentativa da utilização da capacidade que a entropia possui de extrair da distribuição dos dados informação de ordem superior, para usá-la como o critério na formação de grupos (clusters) ou então para complementar/melhorar algoritmos existentes, numa busca de obtenção de melhores resultados. Alguns trabalhos envolvendo o uso de algoritmos baseados em critérios entrópicos demonstraram resultados positivos na análise de dados reais. Neste trabalho, exploraram-se alguns algoritmos baseados em critérios entrópicos e a sua aplicabilidade a dados biomédicos, numa tentativa de avaliar a adequação destes algoritmos a este tipo de dados. Os resultados dos algoritmos testados são comparados com os obtidos por outros algoritmos mais “convencionais" como o k-médias, os algoritmos de spectral clustering e um algoritmo baseado em densidade.

Web GIS to support irrigation management: a prototype for SAGRA network, Alentejo Portugal

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

Urban change monitoring using GIS and remote sensing tools in Kathmandu valley (Nepal)

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

The contribution of multitemporal information from multispectral satellite images for automatic land cover classification at the national scale

Thesis submitted to the Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação da Universidade Nova de Lisboa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management – Geographic Information Systems

Integrating protein structural information

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção de Grau de Doutor em Bioquímica,Bioquímica Estrutural, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

CardioML: integrating personal cardiac information for ubiquous diagnosis and analysis

The latest medical diagnosis devices enable the performance of e-diagnosis making the access to these services easier, faster and available in remote areas. However this imposes new communications and data interchange challenges. In this paper a new XML based format for storing cardiac signals and related information is presented. The proposed structure encompasses data acquisition devices, patient information, data description, pathological diagnosis and waveform annotation. When compared with similar purpose formats several advantages arise. Besides the full integrated data model it may also be noted the available geographical references for e-diagnosis, the multi stream data description, the ability to handle several simultaneous devices, the possibility of independent waveform annotation and a HL7 compliant structure for common contents. These features represent an enhanced integration with existent systems and an improved flexibility for cardiac data representation.

A pattern language for parallelizing irregular algorithms

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

Télédetection en milieu périurbain. Détection et localisation du changement de l'occupation du sol par intégration des donnés-satellite SPOT HRV dans un système d'information géographique

Thèse pour obtenir le grade de DOCTEUR DE L' UNIVERSITÉ PARIS XII, Discipline: Urbanisme Aménagement

Personalized public transportation information

Thesis to obtain the Master of Science Degree in Computer Science and Engineering

Natural Trypanosoma cruzi infection in dogs of endemic areas of the Argentine Republic

The population dynamics and the prevalence of chagasic infection of 352 dogs living in 108 rural houses infested by triatomines were studied. The region was divided into three sections according to increasing distances to an urban area. Each animal was identified by means of its particular characteristics and built, and its owners gave information about its habits. By means of xenodiagnosis, serology and ECG studies, prevalences of infection, parasitological-serological correlation, percentage of altered electrocardiographic outlines and percentage of houses with parasitemic dogs, were determined. The rural area showed a characteristic T. cruzi infection pattern and differences in the canine population parameters with respect to the other areas were observed: a higher proportion of puppies than adult dogs, a more sedentary population, higher prevalences of infection, as measured by xenodiagnosis, in dogs, and the highest proportion of bedroom insects infected with T. cruzi. It is assumed that the sedentary characteristics of the human population in that rural area impinge in the blood offer to the triatomine population, and the high percentage of parasitemic dogs of the area, contribute to the rise of "kissing ougs" infected with T. cruzi found in bedrooms.