A Multi-DAG Model for Real-Time Parallel Applications with Conditional Execution

The 30th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC 2015). 13 to 17, Apr, 2015, Embedded Systems. Salamanca, Spain.

Entropy Analysis of Industrial Accident Data Series

Complex industrial plants exhibit multiple interactions among smaller parts and with human operators. Failure in one part can propagate across subsystem boundaries causing a serious disaster. This paper analyzes the industrial accident data series in the perspective of dynamical systems. First, we process real world data and show that the statistics of the number of fatalities reveal features that are well described by power law (PL) distributions. For early years, the data reveal double PL behavior, while, for more recent time periods, a single PL fits better into the experimental data. Second, we analyze the entropy of the data series statistics over time. Third, we use the Kullback–Leibler divergence to compare the empirical data and multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques for data analysis and visualization. Entropy-based analysis is adopted to assess complexity, having the advantage of yielding a single parameter to express relationships between the data. The classical and the generalized (fractional) entropy and Kullback–Leibler divergence are used. The generalized measures allow a clear identification of patterns embedded in the data.

On the Scalability of Constructive Interference in Low-Power Wireless Networks

12th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2015). 9 to 11, Feb, 2015. Porto, Portugal

Estratégias defensivas em contexto nacional e comportamentos acionistas das empresas em situação de OPA

A compreensão do conceito de OPA é essencial de forma a entender o funcionamento das combinações empresariais. Esta dissertação tem dois objetivos. O primeiro objetivo tem a finalidade de perceber quais as estratégias defensivas mais eficazes em contexto de OPA. Foi através de um inquérito realizado a 192 empresas envolvidas em situação de OPA entre os anos 1991 e 2014. Através dos resultados das 14 respostas destaca-se que a Recompra de Ações é a estratégia defensiva mais utilizada, tanto em situações de defesas pré-proposta e pós-proposta. A defesa consegue evitar o sucesso, da proposta efetuada pela empresa adquirente, em mais de metade das situações em que é utilizada, tendo sido classificada como muito eficaz. 5 das operações foram de cariz hostil e 7 delas eram expectáveis pela Gestão. Em nenhuma das operações se verificou contraoperação e as áreas mais prejudicadas, pela iniciativa de OPA, foram as respeitantes ao tempo, Time-consuming, e estratégicas. O segundo objetivo tenta perceber o comportamento dos retornos médios anormais das empresas envolvidas numa OPA em face do respetivo anúncio preliminar. Seguiram-se as metodologias de Ball & Brown (1968) e Beaver (1968). Identificaram-se 100 operações compreendidas entre os anos 2000 e 2014. Através do resultado das 12 operações analisadas confirma-se que as empresas-alvo apresentam um retorno médio anormal superior ao das empresas adquirentes e que têm a tendência de acumular retornos médios anormais positivos, pelo contrário as empresas adquirentes têm a tendência de acumular retornos médios anormais negativos. Globalmente, as empresas reagem fortemente ao anúncio preliminar e apresentam uma tendência de ganho nos períodos circundantes e não-circundantes.

Comunicação Entre Pais e Pediatras: o que Informamos e como Informamos, Será Suficiente?

Introdução: Durante um internamento podem ser necessários procedimentos diagnósticos e terapêuticos, e as crianças e os pais contactam com vários profissionais de saúde. Será que as informações fornecidas pelos médicos são suficientes e claras? Objectivos: Avaliar a opinião dos pais relativamente às informações fornecidas pelos médicos e a influência que podem ter factores socioeconómicos e culturais na compreensão destas informações. Métodos: Recolheram-se dados demográficos e avaliou-se o grau de conhecimento sobre o diagnóstico, exames e tratamentos, data da alta, nome do médico assistente e opinião quanto à clareza e frequência das informações. Resultados: Considerámos 300 entrevistas. A maioria dos pais tinha uma correcta percepção sobre o diagnóstico(74,8%), tratamento (70,3%) e exames realizados (78,0%), mas apenas 18,7% sabiam a data provável da alta. Em 65,0% dos casos as informações tinham sido fornecidas pelo médico responsável e a maioria considerou a informação clara(87,0%) e suficiente (81,0%). Em serviços de Cirurgia registou-se uma melhor informação relativamente ao diagnóstico (80,4% vs 69,9%, p=0,042) e nome do médico responsável (70,6% vs 55,5%, p=0,008). Os entrevistados com maior escolaridade conheciam melhor o médico (70,4% vs 56,6%, p=0,016) e os tratamentos efectuados às crianças (79,6% vs 69,8%, p<0,001). Os pais de nacionalidade portuguesa e de meio socioeconómico mais elevado conheciam melhor o diagnóstico (79,7% vs 61,8%, p=0,004), (80,7% vs 65,7%, p=0,007) e tratamento (76,3% vs 50,0%, p<0,001), (81,3% vs 49,0%, p=<0,001). Adicionalmente, o grupo socialmente mais diferenciado conhecia melhor o médico responsável (55,9% vs 67,7%, p=0,050). Quando as informações eram transmitidas pelo médico responsável os entrevistados consideravam-nas mais claras (92,3% vs 81,1%, p=0,001) e suficientes (89,7% vs 64,2%, p<0,001).Conclusão: Este estudo identifica a importância do médico assistente na comunicação com os pais das crianças e a necessidade de adequar a informação ao nível sociocultural da família ao longo do internamento.

Adjusting to external imbalances within the EMU, the case of Portugal

From 1995 to 2010 Portugal has accumulated a negative international asset position of 110 percent of GDP. In a developed and aging economy the number is astonishing and any argument to consider it sustainable must rely on extremely favorable forecasts on growth. Portuguese policy options are reduced in number: no autonomous monetary policy, no currency to devaluate, and limited discretion in changing fiscal deficits and government debt. To start the necessary deleveraging a remaining possible policy is a budget-neutral change of the tax structure that increases private saving and net exports. An increase in the VAT and a decrease in the employer’s social security contribution tax can achieve the desired outcome in the short run if they are complemented with wage moderation. To obtain a substantial improvement in competitiveness and a large decrease in consumption, the changes in the tax rates have to be large. While a precise quantitative assessment is difficult, the initial increase in the effective VAT rate needed to allow the social security tax to decrease by 16 percentage points (pp) is approximately 10 pp. Such a large increase in the effective VAT rate could be obtained by raising most of the reduced VAT rates to the new general VAT rate of 23 percent. The empirical analysis shows that over time the suggested tax swap could generate surpluses and improve the trade balance. A temporary version of the suggested tax-swap has the attractiveness to achieve a sharper increase in the private saving rate maintaining the short run gains in competitiveness. Finally, the temporary version of the fiscal devaluation could be the basis for an automatic stabilizer to external imbalances within a monetary union.Portugal has been running large current account deficits every year since 1995. These deficits have accumulated to an astonishing 110 percent of GDP negative external asset position. The sustainability of such a large external position is questionable and must rely on fantastic productivity growth expectations. The recent global financial crisis appears to have anticipated the international investors reality check on those future expectations with the result of a large increase in the cost of external financing. Today the rebalancing of the current account through an increase in national savings and an improvement in competitiveness must be at the top of the Portuguese authorities “to do” list as the cost of a pull out from international investors is of the order of 10% of GDP. The external rebalancing is difficult as the degrees of freedom of the Portuguese authorities are limited in number: they have no autonomous monetary policy, no currency to devaluate, and little discretion in fiscal policy as deficit limits and debt targets are set by the Stability Growth Pact and the postcrisis consensus on medium-term fiscal consolidation. One possibility that remains is to change the fiscal policy mix for a given budget deficit. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of a “fiscal devaluation”1 obtained through a tax swap between employers’ social security contributions and taxes on consumption2. The paper begins by illustrating Portugal’s current account evolution during the euro period. The second section section lays out a model to offer a qualitative assessment of the dynamic outcomes of the the tax swap. I show that the suggested tax swap can in theory achieve the desired outcomes in terms of competitiveness and consumption if complemented with moderation (stickiness) in wages. I also study the effects of a temporary version of the tax swap and show that it achieves a sharper improvement in the current account that accelerate the rebalancing. The third section moves to the empirical analysis and estimates the likely effects of the tax swap for the Portuguese economy. The fourth section concludes.

An existence result for discontinuous games

We introduce a notion of upper semicontinuity, weak upper semicontinuity, and show that it, together with a weak form of payoff security, is enough to guarantee the existence of Nash equilibria in compact, quasiconcave normal form games. We show that our result generalizes the pure strategy existence theorem of Dasgupta and Maskin (1986) and that it is neither implied nor does it imply the existence theorems of Baye, Tian, and Zhou (1993) and Reny (1999). Furthermore, we show that an equilibrium may fail to exist when, while maintaining weak payoff security, weak upper semicontinuity is weakened to reciprocal upper semicontinuity.

Experimentation with accumulation

We study signal-dependent experimentation in the presence of accumulation and show that the passive-learner’s action surprisingly coincides with the experimentor’s when the unknown term is the one determining the decay rate of the stock, while they differ when the parameter being learned is the one measuring the accumulation rate. These results highlight the importance of the dynamic structure of the problem in signal-dependent experimentation. Moreover, they have important consequences for the pollution-accumulation debate currently in progress.

Diving into the depth of primary motor cortex: a high-resolution investigation of the motor system using 7Tesla fMRI

Dissertação para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Biomédica

Social-media monitoring for cold-start recommendations

Generating personalized movie recommendations to users is a problem that most commonly relies on user-movie ratings. These ratings are generally used either to understand the user preferences or to recommend movies that users with similar rating patterns have rated highly. However, movie recommenders are often subject to the Cold-Start problem: new movies have not been rated by anyone, so, they will not be recommended to anyone; likewise, the preferences of new users who have not rated any movie cannot be learned. In parallel, Social-Media platforms, such as Twitter, collect great amounts of user feedback on movies, as these are very popular nowadays. This thesis proposes to explore feedback shared on Twitter to predict the popularity of new movies and show how it can be used to tackle the Cold-Start problem. It also proposes, at a finer grain, to explore the reputation of directors and actors on IMDb to tackle the Cold-Start problem. To assess these aspects, a Reputation-enhanced Recommendation Algorithm is implemented and evaluated on a crawled IMDb dataset with previous user ratings of old movies,together with Twitter data crawled from January 2014 to March 2014, to recommend 60 movies affected by the Cold-Start problem. Twitter revealed to be a strong reputation predictor, and the Reputation-enhanced Recommendation Algorithm improved over several baseline methods. Additionally, the algorithm also proved to be useful when recommending movies in an extreme Cold-Start scenario, where both new movies and users are affected by the Cold-Start problem.

Posicionamento do Brasil face aos países mais avançados em cloud computing

This study discusses some fundamental issues so that the development and diffusion of services based in cloud computing happen positively in several countries. For exposure of this subject is discusses public initiatives by the most advanced countries in terms of cloud computing application and the brazilin position in this context. Based on presented evidences here it appears that the essential elements for the development and diffusion of cloud computing in Brazil made important steps and show evidence of maturity, as the cybercrime legislation. However, other elements still require analysis and specifically adaptations for the cloud computing case, such as the Intellectual Property Rights. Despite showing broadband services still lacking, one cannot disregard the government effort to facilitate access for all society. In contrast, the large volume of the Brazilian IT market is an interest factor for companies seeking to invest in the country.

Report of new cases of Trypanosoma caninum in Brazil

INTRODUCTION: Trypanosoma caninum is a protozoan species recently described in dogs, whose occurrence has been reported in areas of overlap with visceral leishmaniasis. METHODS: Trypanosoma sp. were isolated from nine dogs and characterized by molecular methods. RESULTS: PCR and sequencing confirmed the presence of T. caninum in all dogs, revealing two new areas of transmission: Barra Mansa and São João do Piauí. CONCLUSIONS: The nine new cases described, when added to those already published, account for 62 cases of natural infection by T. caninum and show the geographical spread of this species to new areas, where other trypanosomatids circulate.

Historical trajectories of currently shrinking Portuguese cities: A typology of urban shrinkage

Cities develop according to different patterns, undergoing population growth during some periods and decline (shrinkage) during others. Theories attempting to understand these behaviours include: 1) shrinkage is a natural process in the life cycle of a city, alternating with periods of growth, or 2) shrinkage is an extreme event that places cities into a continuous decline process with no return to population growth. We use retrospective data over a period of 130 years to study 25 Portuguese cities currently facing population decline, and show that both theories coexist in time and space. Five types of shrinking city are revealed: “Persistent Early Shrinkage” due to exodus fromthe rural periphery, “Metropolitan Shrinkage” due to the challenges of urban sprawl, “Recent Shrinkage” in de-industrialisation hotspots, “Cyclic Shrinkage” occurring in political transformation cores, and “Mild Shrinkage” due to life-style disamenity. As diversity of city population trajectories appears to be the norm in both Portugal and other Western European countries, the incorporation of this range into the management of urban transitions is recommended in order to reinforce city resilience.

Helicobacter pylori genotyping from positive clotests in patients with duodenal ulcer

Even though the seroprevalence of H. pylori may be high in the normal population, a minority develops peptic ulcer. Colonization of the gastric mucosa by more pathogenic vacA strains of H. pylori seems to be associated with enhanced gastric inflammation and duodenal ulcer. H. pylori genotyping from positive CLOtests was developed to determine the vacA genotypes and cagA status in 40 duodenal ulcer patients and for routine use. The pathogenic s1b/ m1/ cagA genotype was the most frequently occurring strain (17/42.5%); only two (5%) patients presented the s2/ m2 genotype, the less virulent strain. Multiple strains were also detected in 17 (42.5%) patients. Multiple strains of H. pylori colonizing the human stomach have been underestimated, because genotyping has been performed from cultures of H. pylori. We concluded that genotyping of H. pylori from a positive CLOtest had the advantages of reducing the number of biopsies taken during endoscopy, eliminating the step of culturing H. pylori, and assuring the presence of H. pylori in the specimen being processed.

Step towards of a homemade business intelligence solution: A case study in textile industry

Nowadays, organizations are increasingly looking to invest in business intelligence solutions, mainly private companies in order to get advantage over its competitors, however they do not know what is necessary. Business intelligence allows an analysis of consolidated information in order to obtain more specific outlets and certain indications in order to support the decision making process. You can take the right decision based on the data collected from different information systems present in the organization and outside of them. The textile sector is a sector where concept of Business Intelligence it is not many explored yet. Actually there are few textile companies that have a BI platform. Thus, the article objective is present an architecture and show all the steps by which companies need to spend to implement a successful free homemade Business Intelligence system. As result the proposed approach it was validated using real data aiming assess the steps defined.