Extended immersive learning environment: a hybrid remote/virtual laboratory

This paper presents a collaborative virtual learning environment, which includes technologies such as 3D virtual representations, learning and content management systems, remote experiments, and collaborative learning spaces, among others. It intends to facilitate the construction, management and sharing of knowledge among teachers and students, in a global perspective. The environment proposes the use of 3D social representations for accessing learning materials in a dynamic and interactive form, which is regarded to be closer to the physical reality experienced by teachers and students in a learning context. A first implementation of the proposed extended immersive learning environment, in the area of solid mechanics, is also described, including the access to theoretical contents and a remote experiment to determine the elastic modulus of a given object.These instructions give you basic guidelines for preparing camera-ready papers for conference proceedings. Use this document as a template if you are using Microsoft Word 6.0 or later. Otherwise, use this document as an instruction set. The electronic file of your paper will be formatted further. Define all symbols used in the abstract. Do not cite references in the abstract.

Collaborative environment to support a professional community

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

Assessment of exposure to airborne ultrafine particles in the urban environment of Lisbon, Porugal

The aim of this study was the assessment of exposure to ultrafine in the urban environment of Lisbon, Portugal, due to automobile traffic, and consisted of the determination of deposited alveolar surface area in an avenue leading to the town center during late spring. This study revealed differentiated patterns for weekdays and weekends, which could be related with the fluxes of automobile traffic. During a typical week, ultrafine particles alveolar deposited surface area varied between 35.0 and 89.2 mu m(2)/cm(3), which is comparable with levels reported for other towns such in Germany and the United States. These measurements were also complemented by measuring the electrical mobility diameter (varying from 18.3 to 128.3 nm) and number of particles that showed higher values than those previously reported for Madrid and Brisbane. Also, electron microscopy showed that the collected particles were composed of carbonaceous agglomerates, typical of particles emitted by the exhaustion of diesel vehicles. Implications: The approach of this study considers the measurement of surface deposited alveolar area of particles in the outdoor urban environment of Lisbon, Portugal. This type of measurements has not been done so far. Only particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters <2.5 (PM2.5) and >10 (PM10) mu m have been measured in outdoor environments and the levels found cannot be found responsible for all the observed health effects. Therefore, the exposure to nano- and ultrafine particles has not been assessed systematically, and several authors consider this as a real knowledge gap and claim for data such as these that will allow for deriving better and more comprehensive epidemiologic studies. Nanoparticle surface area monitor (NSAM) equipments are recent ones and their use has been limited to indoor atmospheres. However, as this study shows, NSAM is a very powerful tool for outdoor environments also. As most lung diseases are, in fact, related to deposition of the alveolar region of the lung, the metric used in this study is the ideal one.

Diagnóstico ambiental de duas empresas

Mestrado em Engenharia Química - Ramo Tecnologias de Protecção Ambiental

Towards e-learning 2.0: case study of an e-learning environment

In these days the learning experience is no longer confined within the four walls of a classroom. Computers and primarily the internet have broadened this horizon by creating a way of delivering education that is known as e-learning. In the meantime, the internet, or more precisely, the Web is heading towards a new paradigm where the user is no longer just a consumer of information and becomes an active part in the communication. This two-way channel where the user takes the role of the producer of content triggered the appearance of new types of services such as Social Networks, Blogs and Wikis. To seize this second generation of communities and services, educational vendors are willing to develop e-learning systems focused on the new and emergent users needs. This paper describes the analysis and specification of an e-learning environment at our School (ESEIG) towards this new Web generation, called PEACE – Project for ESEIG Academic Environment. This new model relies on the integration of several services controlled by teachers and students such as social networks, repositories libraries, e-portfolios and e-conference sytems, intelligent tutors, recommendation systems, automatic evaluators, virtual classrooms and 3D avatars.

Modelling an e-learning environment for learning programming languages

It is widely accepted that solving programming exercises is fundamental to learn how to program. Nevertheless, solving exercises is only effective if students receive an assessment on their work. An exercise solved wrong will consolidate a false belief, and without feedback many students will not be able to overcome their difficulties. However, creating, managing and accessing a large number of exercises, covering all the points in the curricula of a programming course, in classes with large number of students, can be a daunting task without the appropriated tools working in unison. This involves a diversity of tools, from the environments where programs are coded, to automatic program evaluators providing feedback on the attempts of students, passing through the authoring, management and sequencing of programming exercises as learning objects. We believe that the integration of these tools will have a great impact in acquiring programming skills. Our research objective is to manage and coordinate a network of eLearning systems where students can solve computer programming exercises. Networks of this kind include systems such as learning management systems (LMS), evaluation engines (EE), learning objects repositories (LOR) and exercise resolution environments (ERE). Our strategy to achieve the interoperability among these tools is based on a shared definition of programming exercise as a Learning Object (LO).

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).

Análise energética, otimização e modernização dos sistemas de um grande edifício de serviços na ótica da melhoria da eficiência energética

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Mecânica Perfil Energia, Refrigeração e Climatização

Reinfection after treatment of schistosomiasis: environment or "predisposition"?

Although very efficient for the control of morbidity due to S. mansoni in individual patients, chemotherapy has not proven successful in the management of transmission within hyperendemic areas when used alone, even if repeated at short intervals. Consequently, a great deal of effort has been expended toward immunologic investigation and development of a specific vaccine. Based upon a study of a group of children (5-14 years) from the state of Alagoas, the author demonstrates that the outcome one year after chemotherapy depends essentially on the "risk rating" of the area of domicile. A regression analysis did not reveal significant correlation to neither age, sex or initial egg counts. Although the study was not designed to reveal individual variations in the immune status, it is postulated that putative differences in genetic make-up are irrelevant in terms of large-scale intervention. Since morbidity due to S. mansoni has substantially declined during the last two or three decades, a control policy based on vaccination can only be justified if high levels of protective immunity can be attained. At any rate, such a vaccine will have to be administered in early childhood (preferably below the age of three). It can also be demonstrated that immunization in adolescence or adulthood serves no purpose whatsoever. The author is convinced that environmental intervention, usually dismissed as unrealistic in terms of the developing countries, is not only feasible, if done on a selective basis, but prioritary.

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

A introdução de mecanismos de competição e o quadro legal básico do Sistema Nacional de Saúde português : a perspectiva hospitalar

RESUMO - O presente trabalho de projecto visa analisar a introdução de mecanismos de competição do ponto de vista do quadro legal básico – Constituição e Lei de Bases da Saúde – que enforma o sistema de saúde português e principalmente, o seu impacte ao nível do meio hospitalar. Pretende-se aferir se a implementação de ferramentas de mercado no meio em apreço encontra previsão naqueles diplomas legais, sendo por isso, permissivos quanto ao seu desenvolvimento ou se, por outro lado, o nosso enquadramento legal se revela hostil ao seu desenvolvimento. O estudo foi desenvolvido com recurso, essencialmente, à pesquisa e revisão bibliográficas que serão transversais aos capítulos que compõem o enquadramento conceptual, à hermenêutica para efeitos de aplicação à temática da descrição do quadro legal básico e à análise das hipóteses de trabalho apresentadas. Os resultados obtidos permitem concluir que, via de regra, o quadro legal básico do sistema de saúde português é permissivo à introdução de mecanismos de competição, encontrando mesmo, alguns deles, eco legal em disposições datadas de final da década de ’60. Este grau de permissividade tanto é comprovável através de estatuições que directamente prevêem determinada ferramenta, como através da ausência de previsão que no nosso ordenamento jurídico, não é sinónimo de proibição. ----------------------------------ABSTRACT - This essay analyses the existing relation between the introduction of competition tools in the Portuguese health care system and its basic legal framework – the Constitution and the Health Bases Law – particularly from the hospital’s point of view. We aim to assess if the use and implementation of those tools are permissible by law or if, on the other hand, our legal system is hostile towards that introduction. Preferably we used bibliographical research in almost every chapter and hermeneutics allowed us to perform a detailed analysis of the basic legal framework. We conclude that, most of the times, the Portuguese basic legal framework is permissible to the use of such tools and some of the legislative acts date from the late sixties. That can be encompassed by existing or non-existing statutes – since in our legal system what is not specifically foreseen is not, necessarily forbidden.

Evaluation of the Electric Vehicle Impact in the Power Demand Curve in a Smart Grid Environment

Smart grids with an intensive penetration of distributed energy resources will play an important role in future power system scenarios. The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources brings new challenges, requiring an efficient management of those sources. Additional storage resources can be beneficially used to address this problem; the massive use of electric vehicles, particularly of vehicle-to-grid (usually referred as gridable vehicles or V2G), becomes a very relevant issue. This paper addresses the impact of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in system operation costs and in power demand curve for a distribution network with large penetration of Distributed Generation (DG) units. An efficient management methodology for EVs charging and discharging is proposed, considering a multi-objective optimization problem. The main goals of the proposed methodology are: to minimize the system operation costs and to minimize the difference between the minimum and maximum system demand (leveling the power demand curve). The proposed methodology perform the day-ahead scheduling of distributed energy resources in a distribution network with high penetration of DG and a large number of electric vehicles. It is used a 32-bus distribution network in the case study section considering different scenarios of EVs penetration to analyze their impact in the network and in the other energy resources management.

A low cost method to produce a gaseous environment for the isolation of Helicobacter pylori

A low cost method (LCM) to produce a gaseous environment for the isolation of Helicobacter pylori, was compared with the standard Gas Park system. The LCM uses a carbonated antacid tablet, a plastic bag with tap water, a candle, and a wide-mouthed glass jar provided with a tight-fitting metalic screw cap and a rubber gasket. Antral gastric biopsies from 153 cases were incubated by duplicate on blood agar plates and treated with the two methods. In 95 cases the agent was isolated from both, and only from the standard method in 10 cases; the opposite condition was found in five cases, and 43 were negative. That difference is not significant (Pearson's X²= 93.25 p > 0,05)

Geoambiente e indústria das rochas ornamentais

The essential aspects of the conflict between the traditional extractive industry, particularly that related to ornamental stones, and the recent priorities of environmental protection required by the contemporary society are described. Within the legal framework of the problem, various criteria for evaluating environmental impacts in the ornamental rock sector are analyzed, as well as the landscape rehabilitations required to quarry owners,thus leading to a conclusion that harmonization of those tendencies with the Portuguese reality is an essential necessity.

Estudo do impacte da institucionalização em lares na satisfação das necessidades humanas fundamentais : perspectiva dos idosos residentes

RESUMO O envelhecimento populacional, nos países ditos “desenvolvidos”, tem sido largamente discutido a nível internacional pelas suas implicações económicas, sociais e de saúde. Uma das prioridades de intervenção face a este fenómeno é promover o aumento de pessoas idosas autónomas inseridas no seu contexto social e familiar habitual. No entanto, nem sempre esse objectivo é atingido e a muitas pessoas idosas restam os lares, ou preferem-nos, como opção de alojamento e de satisfação das necessidades humanas fundamentais. O principal objectivo deste estudo foi procurar saber se a institucionalização no lar teve impacte na satisfação habitual das necessidades humanas fundamentais das pessoas idosas. Como objectivos secundários pretendeu-se complementar esta informação com alguns aspectos relacionados com o processo de institucionalização e perceber se existem diferenças significativas no que respeita ao sexo, grupo etário ou tempo de internamento. Foram incluídas no estudo 125 pessoas com 65 ou mais anos, residentes em 15 lares com alvará de iniciativa privada, pertencentes à Região de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo, no distrito de Setúbal. Os dados foram obtidos através de um questionário construído para o efeito pela autora. As principais conclusões do estudo apontaram para um impacte negativo da institucionalização na satisfação habitual de algumas necessidades que se enquadram no plano social, nomeadamente ocupar-se para se sentir útil, recrear-se e comunicar com os semelhantes. Nas diferentes necessidades, de uma forma geral, a institucionalização teve um impacte negativo no que respeita às dimensões relacionadas com privacidade e preferência individual. Por outro lado, a institucionalização parece ter tido um impacte positivo nas dimensões relacionadas com a segurança e a acessibilidade. Não foram encontradas diferenças significativas no que respeita ao número médio de respostas favoráveis ao lar ou à casa entre os grupos etários ou quanto ao tempo de internamento. Apesar disso, encontraram-se diferenças no que respeita ao grau de satisfação em residir num lar, sendo que o nível de satisfação com a institucionalização foi maior nas pessoas que residiam no lar há mais de um ano, comparativamente às que residiam no lar há um ano ou menos.-------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT: The ageing of the population of the more developed countries has been largely discussed internationally because of its economic, social and health implications. One of the priorities of intervention facing the ageing phenomenon is to promote the increase of autonomous elderly, within their usual social and familiar environment. Not always this goal is achieved and many elderly have nursing homes as option, or voluntary choose them, for lodgement and fundamental human needs satisfaction. The main goal of this study was to search whether the nursing home institutionalization had impact in the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. As secondary goals it was established to complement this information with some aspects of the institutionalization process, as well as to analyse if there were significant differences as far as sex, age groups or institutionalization time. The study sample included 125 individuals aged 65 years or more, living in 15 private nursing homes with approved legal certification, belonging to the Lisboa and Tagus Valley Region, in the district of Setúbal. Data were collected through a questionnaire designed for this study by the author. The main conclusions of this study pointed at a negative impact of institutionalization on the usual satisfaction of some human needs included at the social field, namely occupation, recreation and communication. At another level of needs, in a general way, institutionalization had negative impact concerning privacy and individual preferences dimensions. On the other hand, institutionalization appeared to have a positive impact in safety and accessibility dimensions. It was not found significant differences between age groups or institutionalization time as far as the average positive answers in favour to nursing home or house. Notwithstanding, there were differences relating to satisfaction in living at the nursing home being the satisfaction higher in residents who lived at the nursing home for more than a year, comparatively to those that lived at the nursing home for a year or less.