A improvisação como ferramenta pedagógica no ensino vocacional de piano

Resumo I - A frequência do Estágio do Ensino Especializado proporcionou uma oportunidade de observar o ensino de piano numa das escolas mais importantes do ensino da música em Portugal, acompanhando alunos do Curso Básico e do Curso Secundário, que frequentaram a Escola de Música do Conservatório Nacional no regime integrado. O processo de observação de aulas que decorreu deste estágio possibilitou-nos assistir às aulas de piano de uma professora experiente, permitindo a observação de metodologias consolidadas e assistir de perto à forma como estas são postas em prática. Por outro lado, através da leccionação de aulas observadas, foi dada a oportunidade de testar e reflectir sobre o próprio desempenho docente, procurando estratégias e ferramentas pedagógicas que possam vir a acrescentar qualidade à prática pedagógica. O ensino especializado da música em Portugal tem experimentado mudanças importantes, o que leva a que haja uma adaptação das escolas às mudanças, continuando a leccionar um ensino de qualidade, que se quer cada vez mais eficaz, inovador, e com professores cada vez melhor fundamentados e preparados.

The European Project Semester at ISEP: Learning to Learn Engineering

The European Project Semester at ISEP (EPS@ISEP) is a one semester project-based learning programme addressed to engineering students from diverse scientific backgrounds and nationalities. The students, organized in multicultural teams, are challenged to solve real world multidisciplinary problems, accounting for 30 ECTU. The EPS package, although focused on project development (20 ECTU), includes a series of complementary seminars aimed at fostering soft, project-related and engineering transversal skills (10 ECTU). This paper presents the study plan, resources, operation and results of the EPS@ISEP that was created in 2011 to apply the best engineering education practices and promote the internationalization of ISEP. The results show that the EPS@ISEP students acquire during one semester the scientific, technical and soft competences necessary to propose, design and implement a solution for a multidisciplinary problem.

Environmental Decision Support: a Multi-Agent Approach

The environmental management domain is vast and encompasses many identifiable activities: impact assessment, planning, project evaluation, etc. In particular, this paper focusses on the modelling of the project evaluation activity. The environmental decision support system under development aims to provide assistance to project developers in the selection of adequate locations, guaranteeing the compliance with the applicable regulations and the existing development plans as well as satisfying the specified project requirements. The inherent multidisciplinarity features of this activity lead to the adoption of the Multi-Agent paradigm, and, in particular, to the modelling of the involved agencies as a community of cooperative autonomous agents, where each agency contributes with its share of problem solving to the final system’s recommendation. To achieve this behaviour the many conclusions of the individual agencies have to be justifiably accommodated: not only they may differ, but can be interdependent, complementary, irreconcilable, or simply, independent. We propose different solutions (involving both local and global consistency) to support the adequate merge of the distinct perspectives that inevitably arise during this type of decision making.

An Intelligent Distributed System for Environmental Management

Environmental management is a complex task. The amount and heterogeneity of the data needed for an environmental decision making tool is overwhelming without adequate database systems and innovative methodologies. As far as data management, data interaction and data processing is concerned we here propose the use of a Geographical Information System (GIS) whilst for the decision making we suggest a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture. With the adoption of a GIS we hope to provide a complementary coexistence between heterogeneous data sets, a correct data structure, a good storage capacity and a friendly user’s interface. By choosing a distributed architecture such as a Multi-Agent System, where each agent is a semi-autonomous Expert System with the necessary skills to cooperate with the others in order to solve a given task, we hope to ensure a dynamic problem decomposition and to achieve a better performance compared with standard monolithical architectures. Finally, and in view of the partial, imprecise, and ever changing character of information available for decision making, Belief Revision capabilities are added to the system. Our aim is to present and discuss an intelligent environmental management system capable of suggesting the more appropriate land-use actions based on the existing spatial and non-spatial constraints.

Environmental Decision Support: a Distributed Artificial Intelligence Approach

Decision making in any environmental domain is a complex and demanding activity, justifying the development of dedicated decision support systems. Every decision is confronted with a large variety and amount of constraints to satisfy as well as contradictory interests that must be sensibly accommodated. The first stage of a project evaluation is its submission to the relevant group of public (and private) agencies. The individual role of each agency is to verify, within its domain of competence, the fulfilment of the set of applicable regulations. The scope of the involved agencies is wide and ranges from evaluation abilities on the technical or economical domains to evaluation competences on the environmental or social areas. The second project evaluation stage involves the gathering of the recommendations of the individual agencies and their justified merge to produce the final conclusion. The incorporation and accommodation of the consulted agencies opinions is of extreme importance: opinions may not only differ, but can be interdependent, complementary, irreconcilable or, simply, independent. The definition of adequate methodologies to sensibly merge, whenever possible, the existing perspectives while preserving the overall legality of the system, will lead to the making of sound justified decisions. The proposed Environmental Decision Support System models the project evaluation activity and aims to assist developers in the selection of adequate locations for their projects, guaranteeing their compliance with the applicable regulations.

Tech-based Innovations in pedagogical practices: the case of ISCAP

TICEduca. III Congresso Internacional TIC e Educação. 14 a 16 Novembro, Lisboa

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.

LSP communication in a digital age: the outcomes of teaching and learning in tertiary education

This paper discusses the changes brought by the communication revolution in teaching and learning in the scope of LSP. Its aim is to provide an insight on how teaching which was bi-dimensional, turned into a multidimensional system, gathering other complementary resources that have transformed, in a incredibly short time, the ways we receive share and store information, for instance as professionals, and keep in touch with our peers. The increasing rise of electronic publications, the incredible boom of social and professional networks, search engines, blogs, list servs, forums, e-mail blasts, Facebook pages, YouTube contents, Tweets and Apps, have twisted the way information is conveyed. Classes ceased to be predictable and have been empowered by digital platforms, innumerous and different data repositories (TILDE, IATE, LINGUEE, and so many other terminological data banks) that have definitely transformed the academic world in general and tertiary education in particular. There is a bulk of information to be digested by students, who are no longer passive but instead responsible and active for their academic outcomes. The question is whether they possess the tools to select only what is accurate and important for a certain subject or assignment, due to that overflow? Due to the reduction of the number of course years in most degrees, after the implementation of Bologna and the shrinking of the curricula contents, have students the possibility of developing critical thinking? Both teaching and learning rely on digital resources to improve the speed of the spreading of knowledge. But have those changes been effective to promote really communication? Furthermore, with the increasing Apps that have already been developed and will continue to appear for learning foreign languages, for translation among others, will the students feel the need of learning them once they have those Apps. These are some the questions we would like to discuss in our paper.

The European Project Semester at ISEP: the challenge of educating global engineers

Current engineering education challenges require approaches that promote scientific, technical, design and complementary skills while fostering autonomy, innovation and responsibility. The European Project Semester (EPS) at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) (EPS@ISEP) is a one semester project-based learning programme (30 European Credit Transfer Units (ECTU)) for engineering students from diverse scientific backgrounds and nationalities that intends to address these goals. The students, organised in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, are challenged to solve real multidisciplinary problems during one semester. The EPS package, although on project development (20 ECTU), includes a series of complementary seminars aimed at fostering soft, project-related and engineering transversal skills (10 ECTU). Hence, the students enrolled in this programme improve their transversal skills and learn, together and with the team of supervisors, subjects distinct from their core training. This paper presents the structure, implementation and results of the EPS@ISEP that was created in 2011 to apply the best engineering practices and promote internationalisation and engineering education innovation at ISEP.

Use of quantitative structure-property relationships to study the solvation process of 18-crown-6

Solution enthalpies of 18-crown-6 have been obtained for a set of 14 protic and aprotic solvents at 298.15 K. The complementary use of Solomonov's methodology and a QSPR-based approach allowed the identification of the most significant solvent descriptors that model the interaction enthalpy contribution of the solution process (Delta H-int(A/S)). Results were compared with data previously obtained for 1,4-dioxane. Although the interaction enthalpies of 18-crown-6 correlate well with those of 1,4-dioxane, the magnitude of the most relevant parameters, pi* and beta, is almost three times higher for 18-crown-6. This is rationalized in terms of the impact of the solute's volume in the solution processes of both compounds. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Design of a Mobile Application for Eye Signs Screening

Mestrado em Engenharia Computação e Instrumentação Médica

Difficulties in diagnosing atypical primary HIV-1 infection

Several cases of primary HIV-1 infection are not identified, either because the diagnosis is not suspected or because they test negative for HIV-1 antibody. This work presents an uncommon case of primary HIV-1 infection in an young parenteral drug abuser man, who presented symptoms of acute hepatitis. During the initial acute phase the serum sample of the patient tested negative for the presence of antibodies against several viruses, including HIV-1. Nevertheless, the diagnosis of primary HIV-1 infection was suspected by using an alternative method for"in vitro" induced antibody production (IVIAP), and confirmed by p24 antigen serum positivity and seroconversion in serial plasma samples of the patient. The authors suggest the use of the IVIAP and others complementary assays to help the diagnosis of acute HIV-1 infection in persons at high risk conditions.

Hox genes control the specification of global vertebral domains

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do grau de doutor em Biologia pelo Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica da Universidade Nova de Lisboa

A Veterinária, os Medicamentos e a Formação dos Profissionais de Farmácia

É cada vez mais proeminente abordarmos a temática da medicina veterinária devido à necessidade de formação dos profissionais e dos cuidados requeridos nas vertentes homem/animal/ambiente. Com o principal objetivo de conhecer se a base de formação dos profissionais de farmácia é suficiente e tem resultados na satisfação das necessidades de todos os utentes com animais, foi levantado um estudo de artigos já publicados sobre o tema e posteriormente um questionário online para possível comparação dos resultados com a realidade. Abordam-se temas como: intoxicações em animais, regulamentação sobre este tipo de medicamentos, aconselhamento e consumo de medicamentos veterinários, saúde pública, algumas terapias complementares e finalmente a formação dos profissionais de farmácia. Os resultados obtidos a nível da formação destes profissionais não foram os mais satisfatórios, embora este resultado no futuro possa ser melhorado visto que há interesse por parte dos inquiridos em obter formação sobre a área. Aplicou-se um estudo observacional, do tipo transversal e analítico. A população alvo são os profissionais de farmácia portugueses. Para a recolha destas informações foi utilizado um questionário online, anónimo, confidencial e voluntário a 400profissionais. A amostra é constituída maioritariamente por indivíduos do género feminino (75%), sendo a faixa etária mais frequente dos 23 aos 25 anos (41%). Verificou-se que mais de 70% dos profissionais trabalham num local onde se vendem medicamentos veterinários e embora apenas 21% tenha tido uma formação na área. É de notar que 69% sentiu dificuldades no preenchimento do questionário e 94% considera importante obter uma formação extra nesta área, principalmente em temáticas como medicação, prevenção de doenças e alimentação.

DNA nanoprobes for molecular detection

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Biológica – especialidade Engenharia Genética, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia