A Implementação de um sistema de gestão da qualidadena Junta de Freguesia de Gandra

Trabalho de Projeto apresentado ao Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Auditoria Orientado por: Doutora Alcina Augusta de Sena Portugal Dias

Diferenciação curricular para a inclusão de alunos com necessidade educativas especiais no 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico

Um dos grandes desafios da atualidade reside em construir uma escola inclusiva para todos, respeitando as diferenças entre os alunos e procurando dar resposta a todas as suas necessidades educativas, através do acesso igualitário a uma educação de qualidade, no sentido de uma preparação para a vida social e profissional ao longo da vida. Desta forma, é necessária uma mudança não só na maneira de pensar como também nas práticas dos agentes educativos, no sentido de adequarem o currículo às necessidades educativas especiais dos alunos. O presente estudo constitui, pois, uma tentativa de conhecer não apenas as conceções dos professores do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico sobre a inclusão e as adaptações curriculares para alunos com NEE, mas também as práticas curriculares que desenvolvem quando têm estes alunos nas suas turmas. O trabalho desenvolveu-se através de um estudo de caso, incidindo sobre 6 professores do 1º CEB e respetivas turmas com alunos com NEE incluídos. Como metodologia de recolha de dados utilizámos as técnicas da entrevista, da análise documental e da observação naturalista em contexto de sala de aula. Articulando os resultados das entrevistas com os das observações em sala de aula, podemos concluir que, para que a escola seja efetivamente inclusiva, não basta que os professores adotem este conceito. Algumas das maiores dificuldades que se colocaram aos professores foram a gestão do tempo e a adequação de estratégias no atendimento a todos os alunos, o que decorre da forma de organização do ensino, uma vez que os professores continuam a percecionar o seu papel como transmissores de conteúdos e executores de programas, apostando num ensino unilateral e homogéneo. No entanto, foi possível também verificar algumas formas de diferenciação pedagógica, sobretudo através da adequação da estrutura dos trabalhos individuais, do apoio individualizado do professor aos alunos com mais dificuldades ou da tutoria interpares e da realização de diferentes atividades consoante as necessidades específicas de cada aluno.- ABSTRACT One of today´s main challenges lies on building an inclusive school for everyone, respecting students’ differences, giving an answer to their educational needs through equal access to qualified education, preparing them to their professional future and social life. Consequently, a change is necessary, not only in the way of thinking but also in the practices of the educational agents, to adequate the curriculum to the special educational students’ needs. The present study is an attempt to understand not only the conceptions of the elementary school teachers about the inclusion and the curricular adjustments for students with special educational needs, but also the curricular practices they develop when those students are included in their classes. This work was developed through a study case focused on six elementary school teachers and their respective classes with students with special educational needs included. The data collection methods used were interview techniques, documental analysis and context observation in classroom. Articulating the interview results with the classroom observations we can conclude that for a school to be effectively inclusive, the adoption of those conceptions are not enough. Some of the major difficulties that appear to the teachers were time management and adequate strategies on attending all students, which follows from their teaching organization, since teachers are still carrying their role as pure contents transmitters and programs implementers, investing in a unilateral and homogeneous education. However, it was also possible to ascertain some pedagogical differentiation strategies, mainly through individual work adaptation, direct and individualized teacher’s support to students with more difficulties or by peer tutoring as well as carrying out different activities depending on the specific needs of each student.

Learning business strategies for competitive electronic marketplaces

This paper presents a Multi-Agent Market simulator designed for developing new agent market strategies based on a complete understanding of buyer and seller behaviors, preference models and pricing algorithms, considering user risk preferences and game theory for scenario analysis. This tool studies negotiations based on different market mechanisms and, time and behavior dependent strategies. The results of the negotiations between agents are analyzed by data mining algorithms in order to extract rules that give agents feedback to improve their strategies. The system also includes agents that are capable of improving their performance with their own experience, by adapting to the market conditions, and capable of considering other agent reactions.

Smart Electric Vehicle Charging System

In this work is proposed the design of a system to create and handle Electric Vehicles (EV) charging procedures, based on intelligent process. Due to the electrical power distribution network limitation and absence of smart meter devices, Electric Vehicles charging should be performed in a balanced way, taking into account past experience, weather information based on data mining, and simulation approaches. In order to allow information exchange and to help user mobility, it was also created a mobile application to assist the EV driver on these processes. This proposed Smart ElectricVehicle Charging System uses Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology, in order to connect Electric Vehicles and also renewable energy sources to Smart Grids (SG). This system also explores the new paradigm of Electrical Markets (EM), with deregulation of electricity production and use, in order to obtain the best conditions for commercializing electrical energy.

Knowledge extraction from medium voltage load diagrams to support the definition of electrical tariffs

With the electricity market liberalization, distribution and retail companies are looking for better market strategies based on adequate information upon the consumption patterns of its electricity customers. In this environment all consumers are free to choose their electricity supplier. A fair insight on the customer´s behaviour will permit the definition of specific contract aspects based on the different consumption patterns. In this paper Data Mining (DM) techniques are applied to electricity consumption data from a utility client’s database. To form the different customer´s classes, and find a set of representative consumption patterns, we have used the Two-Step algorithm which is a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Each consumer class will be represented by its load profile resulting from the clustering operation. Next, to characterize each consumer class a classification model will be constructed with the C5.0 classification algorithm.

Histogram-based DNA analysis for the visualization of chromosome, genome and species information

We describe a novel approach to explore DNA nucleotide sequence data, aiming to produce high-level categorical and structural information about the underlying chromosomes, genomes and species. The article starts by analyzing chromosomal data through histograms using fixed length DNA sequences. After creating the DNA-related histograms, a correlation between pairs of histograms is computed, producing a global correlation matrix. These data are then used as input to several data processing methods for information extraction and tabular/graphical output generation. A set of 18 species is processed and the extensive results reveal that the proposed method is able to generate significant and diversified outputs, in good accordance with current scientific knowledge in domains such as genomics and phylogenetics.

Demand response programs definition supported by clustering and classification techniques

The growing importance and influence of new resources connected to the power systems has caused many changes in their operation. Environmental policies and several well know advantages have been made renewable based energy resources largely disseminated. These resources, including Distributed Generation (DG), are being connected to lower voltage levels where Demand Response (DR) must be considered too. These changes increase the complexity of the system operation due to both new operational constraints and amounts of data to be processed. Virtual Power Players (VPP) are entities able to manage these resources. Addressing these issues, this paper proposes a methodology to support VPP actions when these act as a Curtailment Service Provider (CSP) that provides DR capacity to a DR program declared by the Independent System Operator (ISO) or by the VPP itself. The amount of DR capacity that the CSP can assure is determined using data mining techniques applied to a database which is obtained for a large set of operation scenarios. The paper includes a case study based on 27,000 scenarios considering a diversity of distributed resources in a 33 bus distribution network.

MV producers and consumers agents characterization with DSM techniques

This paper consist in the establishment of a Virtual Producer/Consumer Agent (VPCA) in order to optimize the integrated management of distributed energy resources and to improve and control Demand Side Management DSM) and its aggregated loads. The paper presents the VPCA architecture and the proposed function-based organization to be used in order to coordinate the several generation technologies, the different load types and storage systems. This VPCA organization uses a frame work based on data mining techniques to characterize the costumers. The paper includes results of several experimental tests cases, using real data and taking into account electricity generation resources as well as consumption data.

An integrated system to support electricity tariff contract definition

This paper presents an integrated system that helps both retail companies and electricity consumers on the definition of the best retail contracts and tariffs. This integrated system is composed by a Decision Support System (DSS) based on a Consumer Characterization Framework (CCF). The CCF is based on data mining techniques, applied to obtain useful knowledge about electricity consumers from large amounts of consumption data. This knowledge is acquired following an innovative and systematic approach able to identify different consumers’ classes, represented by a load profile, and its characterization using decision trees. The framework generates inputs to use in the knowledge base and in the database of the DSS. The rule sets derived from the decision trees are integrated in the knowledge base of the DSS. The load profiles together with the information about contracts and electricity prices form the database of the DSS. This DSS is able to perform the classification of different consumers, present its load profile and test different electricity tariffs and contracts. The final outputs of the DSS are a comparative economic analysis between different contracts and advice about the most economic contract to each consumer class. The presentation of the DSS is completed with an application example using a real data base of consumers from the Portuguese distribution company.

Descoberta de conhecimento em Logs de tentativas de intrusão. Um estudo de caso em Instituições de Ensino Superior

Perante a evolução constante da Internet, a sua utilização é quase obrigatória. Através da web, é possível conferir extractos bancários, fazer compras em países longínquos, pagar serviços sem sair de casa, entre muitos outros. Há inúmeras alternativas de utilização desta rede. Ao se tornar tão útil e próxima das pessoas, estas começaram também a ganhar mais conhecimentos informáticos. Na Internet, estão também publicados vários guias para intrusão ilícita em sistemas, assim como manuais para outras práticas criminosas. Este tipo de informação, aliado à crescente capacidade informática do utilizador, teve como resultado uma alteração nos paradigmas de segurança informática actual. Actualmente, em segurança informática a preocupação com o hardware é menor, sendo o principal objectivo a salvaguarda dos dados e continuidade dos serviços. Isto deve-se fundamentalmente à dependência das organizações nos seus dados digitais e, cada vez mais, dos serviços que disponibilizam online. Dada a mudança dos perigos e do que se pretende proteger, também os mecanismos de segurança devem ser alterados. Torna-se necessário conhecer o atacante, podendo prever o que o motiva e o que pretende atacar. Neste contexto, propôs-se a implementação de sistemas de registo de tentativas de acesso ilícitas em cinco instituições de ensino superior e posterior análise da informação recolhida com auxílio de técnicas de data mining (mineração de dados). Esta solução é pouco utilizada com este intuito em investigação, pelo que foi necessário procurar analogias com outras áreas de aplicação para recolher documentação relevante para a sua implementação. A solução resultante revelou-se eficaz, tendo levado ao desenvolvimento de uma aplicação de fusão de logs das aplicações Honeyd e Snort (responsável também pelo seu tratamento, preparação e disponibilização num ficheiro Comma Separated Values (CSV), acrescentando conhecimento sobre o que se pode obter estatisticamente e revelando características úteis e previamente desconhecidas dos atacantes. Este conhecimento pode ser utilizado por um administrador de sistemas para melhorar o desempenho dos seus mecanismos de segurança, tais como firewalls e Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS).

Extracção de regras de associação com itens raros e frequentes

Ao longo dos últimos anos, as regras de associação têm assumido um papel relevante na extracção de informação e de conhecimento em base de dados e vêm com isso auxiliar o processo de tomada de decisão. A maioria dos trabalhos de investigação desenvolvidos sobre regras de associação têm por base o modelo de suporte e confiança. Este modelo permite obter regras de associação que envolvem particularmente conjuntos de itens frequentes. Contudo, nos últimos anos, tem-se explorado conjuntos de itens que surgem com menor frequência, designados de regras de associação raras ou infrequentes. Muitas das regras com base nestes itens têm particular interesse para o utilizador. Actualmente a investigação sobre regras de associação procuram incidir na geração do maior número possível de regras com interesse aglomerando itens raros e frequentes. Assim, este estudo foca, inicialmente, uma pesquisa sobre os principais algoritmos de data mining que abordam as regras de associação. A finalidade deste trabalho é examinar as técnicas e algoritmos de extracção de regras de associação já existentes, verificar as principais vantagens e desvantagens dos algoritmos na extracção de regras de associação e, por fim, desenvolver um algoritmo cujo objectivo é gerar regras de associação que envolvem itens raros e frequentes.

Unveiling the Biometric Potential of Finger-Based ECG Signals

The ECG signal has been shown to contain relevant information for human identification. Even though results validate the potential of these signals, data acquisition methods and apparatus explored so far compromise user acceptability, requiring the acquisition of ECG at the chest. In this paper, we propose a finger-based ECG biometric system, that uses signals collected at the fingers, through a minimally intrusive 1-lead ECG setup recurring to Ag/AgCl electrodes without gel as interface with the skin. The collected signal is significantly more noisy than the ECG acquired at the chest, motivating the application of feature extraction and signal processing techniques to the problem. Time domain ECG signal processing is performed, which comprises the usual steps of filtering, peak detection, heartbeat waveform segmentation, and amplitude normalization, plus an additional step of time normalization. Through a simple minimum distance criterion between the test patterns and the enrollment database, results have revealed this to be a promising technique for biometric applications.

Lendo e explorando histórias: a emergência do pensamento algébrico em crianças de 4 anos

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de mestre em Educação Matemática na Educação Pré-escolar e nos 1º e 2º Ciclos do Ensino Básico

Generalizing repeating patterns: a study with children aged four

This paper presents part of a study that aimed to understand how the emergence of algebraic thinking takes place in a group of four-year-old children, as well as its relationship to the exploration of children‘s literature. To further deepen and guide this study the following research questions were formulated: (1) How can children's literature help preschoolers identify patterns?; (2) What strategies and thinking processes do children use to create, analyze and generalize repeating and growing patterns?; (3) What strategies do children use to identify the unit of repeat of a pattern? and (4) What factors influence the identification of patterns? The paper focuses only on the strategies and thinking processes that children use to create, analyze and generalize repeating patterns. The present study was developed with a group of 14 preschoolers in a private school in Lisbon, and it was carried out with all children. In order to develop the research, a qualitative research methodology under the interpretive paradigm was chosen, emphasizing meanings and processes. The researcher took the dual role of teacher-researcher, conducting the study with her own group and in her own natural environment. Participant observation and document analysis (audio and video recordings, photos and children productions) were used as data collection methods. Data collection took place from October 2013 to April 2014. The results of the study indicate that children master the concept of repeating patterns, and they are able to identify the unit of repeat, create and analyze various repeating patterns, evolving from simpler to more complex forms.

Sistemas de informação para executivos (EIS). Uma experiência de aplicação

Tese submetida à Universidade Portucalense para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Informática, elaborada sob a orientação de Prof. Doutor Reis Lima e Eng. Jorge S. Coelho.