A influência da posição postural no ciclo percepção - acção durante estimulação visual dinâmica

A influência da posição postural no ciclo percepção – acção foi investigada com base no potencial evocado visual relacionado com o movimento (M-VEP). Para tal, sinais EEG multicanal de 25 indivíduos saudáveis foram adquiridos durante as posições posturais ortostática (O) e sentada (S), sob estimulação visual dinâmica (ED) de afastamento (AF) e aproximação (AP) de um cenário virtual. Para gerar ED, os móveis e utensílios do cenário virtual foram expandidos (ou reduzidos) enquanto o piso, as paredes e o teto deslocam-se linearmente no sentido anterior (ou posterior) com uma velocidade de 1,2 m/s durante 1 s. O M-VEP foi estimado para cada posição e estimulação pelo cálculo da média coerente dos sinais EEG sincronizados com o início do movimento da ED, a qual evidenciou as componentes P1, N2 e P3 (dominânica N2 em relação a P1). Embora o M-VEP não dependa do sentido da estimulação (Wilcoxon, p > 0,20), o running t-test indicou que no intervalo 470 a 900 ms, após o início da ED, o grand-averaged do M-VEP para posição O difere (p < 0,10) daquele da posição S nas derivações parietais, frontais e centrais. Além disso, a distribuição da latência da componente P3 para O também difere daquela de S (Wilcoxon: p < 0,06), para as mesmas derivações, independentemente do sentido da ED. A correlação cruzada indicou atraso da componente P3 de S em relação à de O, em particular (p < 0,10) nas derivações frontais e centrais durante AP (50 ms) e somente centrais durante AF (30 ms). Estes resultados reflectem a antecipação do processamento cortical hierárquico relacionado com a cognição, o planeamento e a acção motora, associados às maiores exigências da posição ortostática para manter o equilíbrio evidenciando, portanto, a potencialidade deste protocolo para investigar o ciclo percepção – acção durante posições posturais distintas.

Dissuasão Visual: Arte, Cinema, Cronopolítica e Guerra em Directo

A percepção é essencial na cultura militar e as tecnologias da informação deram-lhe uma nova consistência. As funções perceptivas do ser humano estão agora plasmadas nas máquinas de guerra, replicando comportamentos e características fisiológicas próprias aos seres vivos. As máquinas de guerra são já sensíveis à luz, a variações térmicas ou acústicas. A essência humana, assim cristalizada sobre toda a aparelhagem de guerra, coloca em tensão os limites da diferenciação entre os campos da Arte, Cinema, Política e Guerra. Contudo, e antes ainda da era da máquina, o mundo estaria já repleto de motores naturais e poéticos. É Gilbert Simondon quem o diz, lembrando que por antecipação científica há muito que a mecanologia existe, antevendo a relação entre a indústria mais perfeita, a ciência mais bem equipada, e uma natureza no seu estado mais natural. Este será um ponto de partida verdadeiramente essencial – é que sempre tivemos a ilusão de que a técnica seria uma invenção humana quando, no fundo, foi a técnica militar e a guerra aquilo que permitiu a «fabricação do humano». Esta tese procura desvelar como o surgimento de novas tecnologias e de novos espaços para a guerra, forçaram a sua reproblematização em novas vias epistemológicas. Recuando até ao originário movimento geo-político, entroncamos numa interdefinição entre a ordem espacial e a individuação dos objectos técnicos, e procuraremos, a partir daí, saber como se concretizou a expansão da guerra moderna a todo os domínios e a todo o mundo.

Human activity recognition with accelerometry: novel time and frequency features

Human Activity Recognition systems require objective and reliable methods that can be used in the daily routine and must offer consistent results according with the performed activities. These systems are under development and offer objective and personalized support for several applications such as the healthcare area. This thesis aims to create a framework for human activities recognition based on accelerometry signals. Some new features and techniques inspired in the audio recognition methodology are introduced in this work, namely Log Scale Power Bandwidth and the Markov Models application. The Forward Feature Selection was adopted as the feature selection algorithm in order to improve the clustering performances and limit the computational demands. This method selects the most suitable set of features for activities recognition in accelerometry from a 423th dimensional feature vector. Several Machine Learning algorithms were applied to the used accelerometry databases – FCHA and PAMAP databases - and these showed promising results in activities recognition. The developed algorithm set constitutes a mighty contribution for the development of reliable evaluation methods of movement disorders for diagnosis and treatment applications.

The Visual and Virtual in Contemporary European Learning Contexts

Special issue of Anthropology in Action originated from the Working Images Conference, a joint meeting of TAN and VAN EASA networks

Biblioteca de Arte Inclusiva: Informação e Conhecimento Acessíveis aos Leitores com Deficiência Visual

O presente relatório descreve a atividade realizada na Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, no âmbito do Mestrado em Ciências da Informação e da Documentação, tendo por tema o acesso à informação pelos leitores com deficiência visual. Nele procura-se abordar que medidas têm sido tomadas para assegurar a integração destes leitores, tendo em vista alcançar a sua autonomia a nível de utilização dos serviços disponíveis. Nesse sentido, explicitam-se os conceitos inerentes a esta temática (biblioteca inclusiva e acessibilidade), destaca-se a importância da interação com outros utilizadores como forma de integração, refere-se a importância da cooperação interinstitucional, salienta-se o papel do bibliotecário e das tecnologias de informação e da comunicação, como meio de permitir ao deficiente visual aceder a um conjunto diversificado de serviços, através da utilização de equipamentos e software específicos. Através da aplicação de uma metodologia de pesquisa bibliográfica, observação direta e entrevista, efetua-se um estudo de caso com uma análise detalhada ao nível da acessibilidade física e dos recursos materiais assim como da atitude e preparação dos profissionais para lidar com a deficiência. Conclui-se que a Biblioteca de Arte deve continuar a investir na exploração de novos recursos e potencialidades, de modo a disponibilizar todo o tipo de meios humanos e tecnológicos para apoiar os leitores com deficiência visual, promovendo a sua inclusão e participação na sociedade da informação e do conhecimento.

Visual and verbal processing effects on human memory

In this study in the field of Consumer Behavior, brand name memory of consumers with regard to verbal and visual incongruent and congruent information such as memory structure of brands was tested. Hence, four experimental groups with different constellations of verbal and visual congruity and incongruity were created to compare their brand name memory performance. The experiment was conducted in several classes with 128 students, each group with 32 participants. It was found that brands, which are presented in a congruent or moderately incongruent relation to their brand schema, result in a better brand recall than their incongruent counterparts. A difference between visual congruity and moderately incongruity could not be confirmed. In contrast to visual incongruent information, verbal incongruent information does not result in a worse brand recall performance.

Video metadata extraction in a videoMail system

Currently the world swiftly adapts to visual communication. Online services like YouTube and Vine show that video is no longer the domain of broadcast television only. Video is used for different purposes like entertainment, information, education or communication. The rapid growth of today’s video archives with sparsely available editorial data creates a big problem of its retrieval. The humans see a video like a complex interplay of cognitive concepts. As a result there is a need to build a bridge between numeric values and semantic concepts. This establishes a connection that will facilitate videos’ retrieval by humans. The critical aspect of this bridge is video annotation. The process could be done manually or automatically. Manual annotation is very tedious, subjective and expensive. Therefore automatic annotation is being actively studied. In this thesis we focus on the multimedia content automatic annotation. Namely the use of analysis techniques for information retrieval allowing to automatically extract metadata from video in a videomail system. Furthermore the identification of text, people, actions, spaces, objects, including animals and plants. Hence it will be possible to align multimedia content with the text presented in the email message and the creation of applications for semantic video database indexing and retrieving.

Minimal computation structures for visual information applications based on printed electronics

In the early nineties, Mark Weiser wrote a series of seminal papers that introduced the concept of Ubiquitous Computing. According to Weiser, computers require too much attention from the user, drawing his focus from the tasks at hand. Instead of being the centre of attention, computers should be so natural that they would vanish into the human environment. Computers become not only truly pervasive but also effectively invisible and unobtrusive to the user. This requires not only for smaller, cheaper and low power consumption computers, but also for equally convenient display solutions that can be harmoniously integrated into our surroundings. With the advent of Printed Electronics, new ways to link the physical and the digital worlds became available. By combining common printing techniques such as inkjet printing with electro-optical functional inks, it is starting to be possible not only to mass-produce extremely thin, flexible and cost effective electronic circuits but also to introduce electronic functionalities into products where it was previously unavailable. Indeed, Printed Electronics is enabling the creation of novel sensing and display elements for interactive devices, free of form factor. At the same time, the rise in the availability and affordability of digital fabrication technologies, namely of 3D printers, to the average consumer is fostering a new industrial (digital) revolution and the democratisation of innovation. Nowadays, end-users are already able to custom design and manufacture on demand their own physical products, according to their own needs. In the future, they will be able to fabricate interactive digital devices with user-specific form and functionality from the comfort of their homes. This thesis explores how task-specific, low computation, interactive devices capable of presenting dynamic visual information can be created using Printed Electronics technologies, whilst following an approach based on the ideals behind Personal Fabrication. Focus is given on the use of printed electrochromic displays as a medium for delivering dynamic digital information. According to the architecture of the displays, several approaches are highlighted and categorised. Furthermore, a pictorial computation model based on extended cellular automata principles is used to programme dynamic simulation models into matrix-based electrochromic displays. Envisaged applications include the modelling of physical, chemical, biological, and environmental phenomena.

A cenografia oitocentista como fonte de cultura visual e de ideologia

A argumentação centra-se na história da produção cenográfica da segunda metade do século XIX em Portugal, propondo um tratamento teórico mais abrangente, que desloque o enfoque analítico da peça de arte em si ou do carácter efémero e global da espectacularidade que tem merecido alguma atenção da historiografia contemporânea, para uma escala de cultura visual ou mesmo de visualidade, no sentido mais dilatado destas expressões. Discutindo essencialmente a problemática em torno da imagem teatral como produto do mundo oitocentista analisa-se o potencial cognitivo da série cenográfica na sua capacidade de representação e apropriações ideológicas. Para esta dialéctica concorrem as repercussões epocais do espectáculo, designadamente na regulação da vida social, na mediação de processos económicos, no combate político, e sobretudo, em modelos de percepção artística fundados nos convencionalismos cenográficos como acontece, por exemplo, na produção decorativa e arquitectónica integradas num particular campo visual ou na teatralidade actuante dos edifícios, cuja essência, em todos os casos, é devedora de uma cultura paradoxalmente centrada nos limites da caixa cénica e na infinitude emotiva do espectacular.

Visual politics of the estado novo realized on the Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques in Lisbon – the construction of ideal citizenship?

The stylistic categorization of the Estado Novo has been intensely discussed by Portuguese art historians. The square Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques in Lisbon (Alameda) can be seen as paradigmatic for the architecture of power of the Estado Novo. The Alameda forms a gardened valley between two hills. There you find two prominent and highly propagandist buildings: The Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and the Fonte Luminosa are dedicated to modern sciences and respectively to the harmonious contribution of nature to the city. The iconography of the Alameda as well as its incorporation into the propagandist use of urban planning in the 1930s and 1940s exemplify the visual politics during Salazarism. Urban planning programs intended to create cities that would preserve the character of a traditional catholic society and at the same time answer to the need to modernize the country and evoke the image of a progressive state. Thus, public buildings and urban squares such as the Alameda contributed to design a corporate image and to the ‘spirit’ of the regime.

Revolution in Crisis: The Ruptures of Revolution and Ruptured Revolutions Through the Ruptures of Artistic Practice

This article proposes an investigation of the history and memory of the Carnation Revolution through the lens of contemporary art. Drawing upon the argument according to which history and memory are investigated by visual artists by means other, but no less relevant, than those of professional historians, this article will argue for the importance of attending to the visual, auditory, textual, object- and research-based ways in which artists from several generations and geographies have been unearthing the repressed histories and memories of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and of anticolonial struggles, decolonization and post-independence nation-building in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola. The discussion focuses on several works by Ângela Ferreira, but attention will also be paid to precursors in imaging the Revolution, such as Ana Hatherly, and to a younger generation of artists such as Filipa César, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Daniel Barroca.

‘Wooden Man’? : Masculinities in the Work of J. M. Coetzee (Boyhood, Youth and Summertime)

In seeking to advance the possibility of justice, gender and postcolonial studies have argued for the importance of the study of masculinities, through the acknowledgment that a richer understanding of such gendered formations may provide the basis for recognition of the Other and that, left uncriticised, such formations may be continuously delineated by the reproduction of systems of domination. The current study finds as its object the representations of masculinities in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009). As works of transition in terms of Coetzee’s oeuvre - post-apartheid and post-Disgrace - the trilogy provides an account of the development of a man through several stages of life. While portraying the tensions of different geographical and cultural locations, such as apartheid South Africa and the London of the Sixties, the trilogy articulates the various norms that impact in the formation of gender, particularly of masculinities, through a complex system of power relations. The adherence to such norms is never linear, as the trilogy provides imaginative accounts of the contradictions that assist in the formulation of gender, depicting both the allure and the terror that constitute hegemonic masculinity. Located in the intersection of gender and postcolonial studies, the present study is based on the works by Raewyn Connell on masculinities. Animated by such a critical framework, the main research question of the present study is whether the trilogy advances a notion of masculinity that differs from the traditional rigid model, that is, whether there is resistance to hegemonic masculinity and what the spaces inhabited by the subaltern are. It is suggested that the trilogy presents the reader with instances of resistance to normative formulations of masculinity, by contrasting domination with the possibility of justice, and advancing an understanding of the often fatal consequences of gender norms to one’s sense of being in the world.

Detection of road accident accumulation zones with a visual analytics approach

Nowadays, road accidents are a major public health problem, which increase is forecasted if road safety is not treated properly, dying about 1.2 million people every year around the globe. In 2012, Portugal recorded 573 fatalities in road accidents, on site, revealing the largest decreasing of the European Union for 2011, along with Denmark. Beyond the impact caused by fatalities, it was calculated that the economic and social costs of road accidents weighted about 1.17% of the Portuguese gross domestic product in 2010. Visual Analytics allows the combination of data analysis techniques with interactive visualizations, which facilitates the process of knowledge discovery in sets of large and complex data, while the Geovisual Analytics facilitates the exploration of space-time data through maps with different variables and parameters that are under analysis. In Portugal, the identification of road accident accumulation zones, in this work named black spots, has been restricted to annual fixed windows. In this work, it is presented a dynamic approach based on Visual Analytics techniques that is able to identify the displacement of black spots on sliding windows of 12 months. Moreover, with the use of different parameterizations in the formula usually used to detect black spots, it is possible to identify zones that are almost becoming black spots. Through the proposed visualizations, the study and identification of countermeasures to this social and economic problem can gain new grounds and thus the decision- making process is supported and improved.