What Fidelidade group should do to convey its human centric brand identity values to millennial insurance consumers

Companies are concerned in attracting and retaining Millennial consumers, especially if their relation with this target audience is weak. This happens in the insurance industry in Portugal and in Fidelidade group specifically. The aim of this study is to recommend a strategy for the insurance group to improve its relationship with these consumers, by conveying its human centric values. In order to address this goal, we developed a qualitative research. The main insight is that Millennials may perceive those values in the industry but do not associate them with insurance brands.

Is ambient intelligence a truly human-centric paradigm in industry? Current research and application scenario

Based on the paper presented at the International Conference “Autonomous Systems: inter-relations of technical and societal issues”, organized by IET with the support of the Portuguese-German collaboration project on “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Robotics” (DAAD/CRUP) at FCT-UNL, Biblioteca da UNL, Campus de Caparica on 5-6 November 2009.

A human-centric service approach for architecting and reengineering global system

Production of a new system in any range is expanding dramatically and new ideas are there upon introduced, the logic stands behind the matter is the growth of application of the internet and granting web-based systems. Before producing a system and distribute to the customer, various aspects should be studied which multiple the profit of the system. The process of productizing a new system from being unprocessed idea until delivers to the final user has been unambiguous. In this thesis, the systematize service in a way that benefits both the customer and provider, along with an effort to establish trust and diminish customer’s risk and increase service productivity are in detail presented. Characteristics of Servitization and Productization as two faces of one coin have been interpreted. Apart from the abovementioned issues state of art, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and New Service Development (NSD) has been included in this report for solving the problem of gradually decline in value of companies.

Trends in Human-Centric Multimedia Networking Scenarios

The evolution of wireless access technologies and mobile devices, together with the constant demand for video services, has created new Human-Centric Multimedia Networking (HCMN) scenarios. However, HCMN poses several challenges for content creators and network providers to deliver multimedia data with an acceptable quality level based on the user experience. Moreover, human experience and context, as well as network information play an important role in adapting and optimizing video dissemination. In this paper, we discuss trends to provide video dissemination with Quality of Experience (QoE) support by integrating HCMN with cloud computing approaches. We identified five trends coming from such integration, namely Participatory Sensor Networks, Mobile Cloud Computing formation, QoE assessment, QoE management, and video or network adaptation.

Developments in technologies for human-centric mobile computing and applications

With recent expansions in technology, mobile computing continues to play a vital role in all aspects of our lives. Digital technology tools such as Web browsing, media tracking, social media, and emailing have made mobile technology more than just a means of communication but has widespread use in business and social networks. Developments in Technologies for Human-Centric Mobile Computing and Applications is a comprehensive collection of knowledge and practice in the development of technologies in human –centric mobile technology. This book focuses on the developmental aspects of mobile technology; bringing together researchers, educators, and practitioners to encourage readers to think outside of the box.

Enabling Human Centric Smart Campuses via Edge Computing and Connected Objects

Early definitions of Smart Building focused almost entirely on the technology aspect and did not suggest user interaction at all. Indeed, today we would attribute it more to the concept of the automated building. In this sense, control of comfort conditions inside buildings is a problem that is being well investigated, since it has a direct effect on users’ productivity and an indirect effect on energy saving. Therefore, from the users’ perspective, a typical environment can be considered comfortable, if it’s capable of providing adequate thermal comfort, visual comfort and indoor air quality conditions and acoustic comfort. In the last years, the scientific community has dealt with many challenges, especially from a technological point of view. For instance, smart sensing devices, the internet, and communication technologies have enabled a new paradigm called Edge computing that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, to improve response times and save bandwidth. This has allowed us to improve services, sustainability and decision making. Many solutions have been implemented such as smart classrooms, controlling the thermal condition of the building, monitoring HVAC data for energy-efficient of the campus and so forth. Though these projects provide to the realization of smart campus, a framework for smart campus is yet to be determined. These new technologies have also introduced new research challenges: within this thesis work, some of the principal open challenges will be faced, proposing a new conceptual framework, technologies and tools to move forward the actual implementation of smart campuses. Keeping in mind, several problems known in the literature have been investigated: the occupancy detection, noise monitoring for acoustic comfort, context awareness inside the building, wayfinding indoor, strategic deployment for air quality and books preserving.

Applied deep learning and data science with a human-centric and data-centric approach

The term Artificial intelligence acquired a lot of baggage since its introduction and in its current incarnation is synonymous with Deep Learning. The sudden availability of data and computing resources has opened the gates to myriads of applications. Not all are created equal though, and problems might arise especially for fields not closely related to the tasks that pertain tech companies that spearheaded DL. The perspective of practitioners seems to be changing, however. Human-Centric AI emerged in the last few years as a new way of thinking DL and AI applications from the ground up, with a special attention at their relationship with humans. The goal is designing a system that can gracefully integrate in already established workflows, as in many real-world scenarios AI may not be good enough to completely replace its humans. Often this replacement may even be unneeded or undesirable. Another important perspective comes from, Andrew Ng, a DL pioneer, who recently started shifting the focus of development from “better models” towards better, and smaller, data. He defined his approach Data-Centric AI. Without downplaying the importance of pushing the state of the art in DL, we must recognize that if the goal is creating a tool for humans to use, more raw performance may not align with more utility for the final user. A Human-Centric approach is compatible with a Data-Centric one, and we find that the two overlap nicely when human expertise is used as the driving force behind data quality. This thesis documents a series of case-studies where these approaches were employed, to different extents, to guide the design and implementation of intelligent systems. We found human expertise proved crucial in improving datasets and models. The last chapter includes a slight deviation, with studies on the pandemic, still preserving the human and data centric perspective.

Vitamin B12 and hepatitis C: Molecular biology and human pathology

Cobalamins are stored in high concentrations in the human liver and thus are available to participate in the regulation of hepatotropic virus functions. We show that cyanocobalamin (vitamin B12) inhibited the H(IV internal ribosome entry site (IRES)-dependent translation of a reporter gene in vitro in a dose-dependent manner without significantly affecting the cap-dependent mechanism. Vitamin B12 failed to inhibit translation by IRES elements from encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) or classical swine fever virus (CSFV), We also demonstrate a relationship between the total cobalamin concentration in human sera and HCV viral load (a measure of viral replication in the host), The mean viral load was two orders of magnitude greater when the serum cobalamin concentration was above 200 pM (P < 0.003), suggesting that the total cobalamin concentration in an HCV-infected liver is biologically significant in HCV replication.

Knowledge management framework based on brain models and human physiology

The life of humans and most living beings depend on sensation and perception for the best assessment of the surrounding world. Sensorial organs acquire a variety of stimuli that are interpreted and integrated in our brain for immediate use or stored in memory for later recall. Among the reasoning aspects, a person has to decide what to do with available information. Emotions are classifiers of collected information, assigning a personal meaning to objects, events and individuals, making part of our own identity. Emotions play a decisive role in cognitive processes as reasoning, decision and memory by assigning relevance to collected information. The access to pervasive computing devices, empowered by the ability to sense and perceive the world, provides new forms of acquiring and integrating information. But prior to data assessment on its usefulness, systems must capture and ensure that data is properly managed for diverse possible goals. Portable and wearable devices are now able to gather and store information, from the environment and from our body, using cloud based services and Internet connections. Systems limitations in handling sensorial data, compared with our sensorial capabilities constitute an identified problem. Another problem is the lack of interoperability between humans and devices, as they do not properly understand human’s emotional states and human needs. Addressing those problems is a motivation for the present research work. The mission hereby assumed is to include sensorial and physiological data into a Framework that will be able to manage collected data towards human cognitive functions, supported by a new data model. By learning from selected human functional and behavioural models and reasoning over collected data, the Framework aims at providing evaluation on a person’s emotional state, for empowering human centric applications, along with the capability of storing episodic information on a person’s life with physiologic indicators on emotional states to be used by new generation applications.

Stable isotope evidence for 1500 years of human diet at the city of York, UK

We present here the results of a large-scale diachronic palaeodietary (carbon and nitrogen isotopic measurements of bone collagen) study of humans and animals from a single site, the city of York (U.K.) dating from the Roman period to the early 19th century The human sample comprises 313 burials from the cemeteries of Trentholme Drive and Blossom Street (Roman), Belle Vue House (Anglo-Saxon), Fishergate (High and Later Medieval), and All Saints, Pavement (Later and Post-Medieval). In addition, 145 samples of mammal, fish and bird bone from the sites of Tanner Row and Fishergate were analyzed. The isotope data suggest dietary variation between all archaeological periods, although the most significant change was the introduction of significant quantities of marine foods in the Medieval periods. These are first evident in the diet of a small group of individuals from the High Medieval cemetery at Fishergate, although they were consumed almost universally in the following periods. The human isotope values are also remarkable due to unusually elevated delta N-15 ratios that are not sufficiently explained by the comparably small enrichment in C-13 that accompanies them. We discuss the possible reasons behind this and the archaeological significance of the data set.

Biodiversity, cultural pathways, and human health: a framework

Direct contact with biodiversity is culturally important in a range of contexts. Many people even join conservation organisations to protect biodiversity that they will never encounter first-hand. Despite this, we have little idea how biodiversity affects people's well-being and health through these cultural pathways. Human health is sensitive to apparently trivial psychological stimuli, negatively affected by the risk of environmental degradation, and positively affected by contact with natural spaces. This suggests that well-being and health should be affected by biodiversity change, but few studies have begun to explore these relationships. Here, we develop a framework for linking biodiversity change with human cultural values, well-being, and health. We argue that better understanding these relations might be profoundly important for biodiversity conservation and public health.

Vitamin B12 and hepatitis C: Molecular biology and human pathology

Cobalamins are stored in high concentrations in the human liver and thus are available to participate in the regulation of hepatotropic virus functions. We show that cyanocobalamin (vitamin B12) inhibited the HCV internal ribosome entry site (IRES)-dependent translation of a reporter gene in vitro in a dose-dependent manner without significantly affecting the cap-dependent mechanism. Vitamin B12 failed to inhibit translation by IRES elements from encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) or classical swine fever virus (CSFV). We also demonstrate a relationship between the total cobalamin concentration in human sera and HCV viral load (a measure of viral replication in the host). The mean viral load was two orders of magnitude greater when the serum cobalamin concentration was above 200 pM (P < 0.003), suggesting that the total cobalamin concentration in an HCV-infected liver is biologically significant in HCV replication.

Collaborative governance of smart cities: addressing multiple relations of actors involved

This dissertation aims to contribute to the discourse on the governance of smart cities (SC) by examining the collaborative relationships between various actors involved in developing and implementing SC initiatives. Poorly organized collaboration can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings, resulting in failures in realizing such complex technological initiatives. Hence, capturing the main elements of SC collaboration becomes essential for understanding how they should be developed and managed. However, the topic has been limitedly explored in prior research, with fragmented studies on narrow aspects related to the SC governance. Using Russia as an empirical setting, the study focuses on the interplay of both government and non-governmental stakeholders in constructing collaborative relationships within SC, covering both vertical and horizontal dimensions of their interaction. The overarching goal of this research is to understand how collaborative governance unfolds in the SC context by stating two guiding research questions: 1) who are the dominant actors in SC and what are their roles? 2) what are the relationships forged among them? The dissertation investigates the SC initiatives across three different cities – Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Perm – in a format of empirical illustration as well as an in-depth case study. The dissertation provides three main contributions. First, it strengthens the link between the SC domain, public governance, and literature on cross-sectoral collaboration by highlighting ‘urban smartness’ as a source for generating multiple values. Second, the thesis offers novel view on the strategic development paths which conceptually shape the SC framework. It connects the techno-centric and human-centric perspectives of SC by showing that they are naturally linked, rather than mutually exclusive. Third, the study illustrates that SC initiatives are contextually dependent, and this dependence covers specificities of public governance, including underlying informal mechanisms, which influence the inception, development, and management of SC in the organizational realms.

On the Democratization of AI: Bridging the Gap with AutoML

Riding the wave of recent groundbreaking achievements, artificial intelligence (AI) is currently the buzzword on everybody’s lips and, allowing algorithms to learn from historical data, Machine Learning (ML) emerged as its pinnacle. The multitude of algorithms, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, highlights the absence of a universal solution and poses a challenging optimization problem. In response, automated machine learning (AutoML) navigates vast search spaces within minimal time constraints. By lowering entry barriers, AutoML emerged as promising the democratization of AI, yet facing some challenges. In data-centric AI, the discipline of systematically engineering data used to build an AI system, the challenge of configuring data pipelines is rather simple. We devise a methodology for building effective data pre-processing pipelines in supervised learning as well as a data-centric AutoML solution for unsupervised learning. In human-centric AI, many current AutoML tools were not built around the user but rather around algorithmic ideas, raising ethical and social bias concerns. We contribute by deploying AutoML tools aiming at complementing, instead of replacing, human intelligence. In particular, we provide solutions for single-objective and multi-objective optimization and showcase the challenges and potential of novel interfaces featuring large language models. Finally, there are application areas that rely on numerical simulators, often related to earth observations, they tend to be particularly high-impact and address important challenges such as climate change and crop life cycles. We commit to coupling these physical simulators with (Auto)ML solutions towards a physics-aware AI. Specifically, in precision farming, we design a smart irrigation platform that: allows real-time monitoring of soil moisture, predicts future moisture values, and estimates water demand to schedule the irrigation.