Paradoxalmente, a crescente velocidade das comunicações nesta era das inovações, não mais concede ao intelectual de nossos dias oferecer novidades, senão, talvez, as configuradas e extrapoladas por ele próprio. A instantaneidade da notícia, sob milhares de formas e por milhões de canais de comunicações, tem levado aos auditórios, muito antes que os conferencistas, quase todos os dados acerca das mais recentes inovações relativas aos assuntos a serem eventualmente versados. Mais significativamente verdadeira é essa afirmação, no que se refere à ciência e à tecnologia contemporâneas. Hoje encurtam-se as distâncias. Multiplicam-se as inovações — mas o período de existência da novidade é cada vez mais reduzido. Com o aceleramento do processo das inovações, na era da eletrônica, as consequências da ação começam a ocorrer quase simultaneamente com a própria ação.
Dissertação de mestrado em Computer Science ; This document represents the study developed under the master's thesis Analysis of Visualization of Social Networks, that overlaps two main scientific fields, sociology (more concisely social networks) and computer science, aiming at the design and implementation of a system for social network analysis. Nowadays we face an age of massive Internet usage, with Online Social Networks we practically live this parallel reality where everything we do and everyone we met is exposed and shared through these online "worlds". Today, being able to study and understand how information flows and how relationships are built within these online networks is of paramount importance for various reasons, these can be social, educational, political or economical. This master work studied sociology, social network analysis, and computer science to employ the researched material aiming at building a tool that allows users to explore their social structure in order to derive sophisticated conclusions, that wouldn't normally come up when they are browsing through their online feeds, because we provide to the end user a personalized, macroscopic and objective perspective of their social network. ; O presente documento relata o estudo desenvolvido no âmbito do trabalho de mestrado do autor sobre Análise e Visualização de Redes Sociais Dinâmicas conducente à tese que aqui se expõe e defende, trabalho esse que resulta sobretudo da intersecção de dois ramos científicos, a sociologia e as ciências da computação, com o objectivo de propor o desenho e implementação de um sistema de análise de redes sociais. Vivemos atualmente numa era de uso massivo da Internet. Com as Redes Sociais Online, acessíveis através da Internet, experienciamos uma espécie de realidade paralela onde todas as pessoas com quem convivemos e praticamente tudo o que fazemos é exposto e partilhado através destes "mundos" virtuais. Na atualidade, a capacidade de estudar e compreender de que forma a informação flui e como se ...
Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Electrónica Industrial e Computadores ; Cities are growing at an unprecedented rate and is expected that by the year 2050, 70% of the world's population will live in cities. This rapid urban growth led to increased traffic congestion, pollution, energy consumption and social inequalities in some cities. To ensure the survival of future generations, cities have to become "smarter". A possible solution to the problems previously stated is to adapt the Internet of Things (IoT) to cities, where thousands of devices are permanently monitoring critical city's parameters. Adapting this concept to implement sustainable programs, with the main goal of increasing the quality of life in cities, led to the idea of "Smart Cities". In a Smart City, new information and communication technologies are used to ensure a sustainable urban development for all citizens. To ensure that Smart City activities are implemented in the right way, a correct use of the main standards in force is crucial. Standardization can help to maximize interoperability between different stakeholders while ensuring compatibility with previous projects. This dissertation aims at presenting a Smart City Guideline, through an in-depth characterization and study of the main Smart City standards. From the study of the main standards, it is possible to draw metrics that can result in a guideline of good practices for implementing initiatives in this new challenging environment. This guideline can and should be used by governments and organizations that want to implement sustainable urban programs, regardless of the area and number of inhabitants on their cities. ; As cidades estão a crescer a um ritmo nunca antes visto, estimando-se que cerca de 70% da população mundial habite em cidades no ano 2050. Este rápido crescimento urbano levou ao aumento do trânsito, da poluição, do consumo energético e das desigualdades sociais em algumas cidades. Para garantir a sobrevivência das populações futuras, existe a ...
Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia de Comunicações ; Nanotechnology is a new and very promising area of research which will allow several new applications to be created in several fields, such as, biological, medical, environmental, military, agricultural, industrial and consumer goods. Although there are several sub-areas of research within the nanotechnology area, the main sub-areas in which the developed work was based were on target nanocommunications. The advances in this area will allow interconnected devices, at the nano-scale, to achieve collaborative tasks which will greatly change the paradigm in the fields described. In spite of this area of research being in its early stages and the various inherit challenges, there are several researches around the world that are contributing for the advances in different sub-areas, which translate in several small advances in the last years. This trend will enable nanocommunications applications to be a reality in a near future, which in turn motivates new researchers to embark on this area. Determined to learn more about this fascinating area, help the research community design and implement new concepts that can influence the path of this new research area, and the knowledge that advances in this area provides a huge impact, changing the paradigm in different fields, were the main motivations that influenced the pursue of the area of research. During the research and study phase, several new concepts were learned, namely, a completely new paradigm which establish communication through molecules, i.e., molecular communication. This new communication paradigm will open a window for several applications to be possible, thus all work performed aimed at this area specifically. After giving molecular communications a thorough research and studying all related concepts, the main challenges in this research area were targeted and solutions to solve them started to be planned. In this document a description of all the work done is presented, in which a ...
Dissertação de Mestrado em Informática ; Since the dawn of times, curiosity and necessity to improve the quality of their life, led humans to find means to understand everything surrounding them, aiming at improving it. Whereas the creating abilities of some was growing, the capacity to comprehend of others follow their steps. Disassembling physical objects to comprehend the connections between the pieces in order to understand how they work together is a common human behavior. With the computers arrival, humans felt the necessity of applying the same techniques (disassemble to comprehend) to their programs. Traditionally, these programs are written resorting to general-purpose programming languages. Hence, techniques and artifacts, used to aid on program comprehension, were built to facilitate the work of software programmers on maintaining and improving programs that were developed by others. Generally, these generic languages deal with concepts at a level that the human brain can hardly understand. So understanding programs written in this languages is an hard task, because the distance between the concepts at the program level and the concepts at the problem level is too big. Thus, as in politics, justice, medicine, etc. groups of words are regularly used facilitating the comprehension between people, also in programming, languages that address a specific domain were created. These programming languages raise the abstraction of the program domain, shortening the gap to the concepts of the problem domain. Tools and techniques for program comprehension commonly address the program domain and they took little advantage of the problem domain. In this master's thesis, the hypothesis that it is easier to comprehend a program when the underlying problem and program domains are known and a bridge between them is established, is assumed. Then, a program comprehension technique for domain specific languages, is conceived, proposed and discussed. The main objective is to take advantage from the large knowledge about ...
This dissertation addresses the timely problem of designing Integrated Personal Health Records (PHR). The goal is to provide citizens with digital user experiences, sustainable and flexible enough, for gaining control over their personal health information in a seamless way. Most importantly, so that people are able to reflect and act upon their selfknowledge, towards the accomplishment of their good health and wellbeing. Towards this end, the Integrated PHR as an emerging model in the field of Health IT, was the framework that set this research forward on exploring how communication and collaboration between patients and providers can be improved, which naturally impacts the field of HCI. Acknowledging that today patients are the ones who own all that is recorded about their health data, this new model was object of a design strategy that shaped the results presented in this dissertation. These have showed how patients can have more control of their health over time, through a patient-centered, organic system, which has the ability of combining multiple sources of data both from patient and provider side. As this new type of PHR fosters the creation of integrated networks, this milestone was achieved in this research by interacting with cross-channel user experiences that took part of nationwide healthcare ecosystems. The work presented herein, has demonstrated through the analysis and development of two use cases in cooperation with organizations connected to the Portuguese Ministry of Health, how an Integrated PHR can be a powerful personal tool, to be used by the citizen with undeniable value to the demands of an aging society. The use cases structured the thesis into two parts. The first part in collaboration with the Portuguese National Patient Portal, combines an Integrated PHR and incorporates the Portuguese Data Sharing Platform (PDS), which can be used by any Portuguese citizen. This use case study led to a proposal of the portal by also creating a foundational model for designing Integrated PHRs. The second part in collaboration with the Portuguese National Senior Telehealth Program (Saúde 24 Sénior), led to another proposal for an Integrated PHR, applying the outcomes from Part 1 and the requirements that derived from the findings explored in this second use case study. The proposed solution, has the potential to be used by the Portuguese senior community in the scope of home assistive care. Both proposals applied a user experience design methodology and included the development of two prototypes. The engagement of the stakeholders during the two case studies was accomplished with participatory design methods and followed a multidisciplinary approach to create solutions that would meet the human, politics and behavior interdependencies that were inherent to the process of working with large healthcare organizations. The provided contributions from this thesis intent to be part of a transition process that is changing the behavior of the healthcare sector, which is increasingly moving towards the improvement of the patient-provider relationship, patient engagement, collaborative care and positive computing, where digital technologies play a key role.
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.
Inspirada na abordagem relacional da Nova Sociologia Econômica, esta pesquisa mostra como diferentes constelações de atores e instituições influenciam o desenvolvimento econômico. Por meio de uma análise comparativa de duas experiências de desenvolvimento local brasileiras da indústria de equipamentos de eletrônica e informática, argumentamos que diferentes padrões de interação dos atores públicos e privados influenciam a qualidade e a sustentabilidade de processos de crescimento econômico.
There has been a widespread shift to electronic ways of conducting business that has transformed existing relationships between governments, governments and citizens, and governments and business. This move to electronic interactions is supported by new busi- ness systems that streamline and automate transactions, enable integration of information and service delivery and enhance collaboration between participants. Such changes in the way government business is carried out have significant implications for how public ad- ministrations document their activities and make that information available to both gov- ernment and citizens to aid future decision making and accountability. Because digital rec- ords are particularly vulnerable to technological obsolescence and media decay, ensuring future access to the information created by government is a challenging issue for all juris- dictions. This paper focus on the E-ARK project, a European endeavour to standardise and create tools for consistently transferring digital records between business systems and digi- tal archives. The E-ARK approach has the potential to simplify and make consistent diverse approaches to solving the issue of how to transfer information between the ICT systems in use in government, and the archives charged with the responsibility for ongoing and man- agement of the information considered to be of long-term significance. ; This work was co-funded by KEEP SOLUTIONS, ...
The main objective of the research work described in this manuscript was to develop methods (hardware/software) for three-dimensional data acquisition in order to perform morphological analysis in sandy shore environments. This system, when concluded, intends to estimate the volumetric variations in beaches being eroded at high rates, directly contributing for studies focused on the protection of the coastline. This work is particularly focused on the development of software to estimate the 3D positions using a dedicated low-cost hardware device that was also developed in the framework of this project. Several methods have been used to study these phenomena, such as classical topography by surveying discrete points with the utilization of theodolites and/or total stations that are highly time-consuming. Other methods that start recently being used, like terrestrial or airborne LiDAR, are very costly and are not suitable to be used in many locations due to governmental requirements (like permits, environment, and security issues). Similar limitations also occur with Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) with laser scanners that permit the survey when the vehicle is moving on the beach. In order to minimize the issues presented by the techniques described above, it was developed a simple, economic, ef cient and accurate system that can be used to study the erosion phenomena in coastal area. This system should allow one to acquire accurate GNSS positioning data on beaches, using a simple acquisition device in order to enable the creation of a three- -dimensional surface of the study area, which temporal variation can permit to quantify the erosion rates. This system is formed by an acquisition device, a GNSS receiver and antenna, and a Android Tablet/Smartphone that allows us to collect the antenna attitude from it's internal orientation sensors. To collect information from the angles of the sensors, an Android application was developed. With the Tablet/Smartphone attitude angles, it is possible to correct the GNSS observations in order to obtain the vertical position - a dedicated C# application was developed with this objective. This corrections allows the creation of surfaces that accurately represent the terrains where the observations were conducted. In the future, using several observations at different times, it is possible to study the variations of sand volumes of the surveyed beaches and analyse the morphological variations. Some preliminary tests were performed concerning the creation of the surfaces, in order to evaluate the internal accuracy of the entire system. For this goal, we developed several scripts, using GMT (Generic Mapping Tools), that can also be used in the future to calculate the variations of the beach volume. In this respect, the results of some tests carried out to evaluate the accuracy of the developed technology are presented. In particular, by analysing the deviations with respect to a reference surface and by evaluating the sensitivity when measuring on an irregular surface. ; O principal objetivo do trabalho de investigação descrito neste manuscrito foi, desenvolver métodos (software/hardware) para aquisição de dados em três dimensões, de forma a realizar a análise morfológica em ambientes de costa arenosa. Este sistema, quando estiver concluído, pretende estimar as variações volumétricas em praias que estão a ser erodidas a taxas elevadas, contribuindo diretamente para estudos voltados para a proteção da zona costeira. Este trabalho está focado principalmente no desenvolvimento de software para estimar as posições em 3D utilizando um dispositivo de hardware de baixo custo dedicado que também foi desenvolvido no âmbito deste projecto. Têm sido utilizados vários métodos para estudar estes fenômenos, tais como topografia clássica através do levantamento de pontos discretos, com a utilização de teodolitos e/ou estações totais que são altamente demoradas. Outros métodos que começam recentemente a ser utilizados, é o LiDAR terrestre ou aéreo, são muito caros e não são adequados para serem utilizados em muitos locais, devido a exigências governamentais (como licenças, meio ambiente e questões de segurança). Também ocorrem limitações semelhantes com o Mapeamento de Sistemas Móveis (MMS) com scanners a laser que permitem o levantamento, quando o veículo estiver em movimento na praia. Para minimizar os problemas apresentados pelas técnicas acima descritas, desenvolveu-se um sistema simples, económico, eficiente e preciso que possa ser utilizado para estudar os fenómenos da erosão da zona costeira. Este sistema deve permitir adquirir dados de posicionamento GNSS precisos nas praias, utilizando um dispositivo simples de aquisição, para permitir a criação de uma superfície tridimensional da área de estudo, o que pode permitir a variação temporal para quantificar as taxas de erosão. Este sistema é formado por um dispositivo de aquisição, um receptor GNSS e uma antena e um Tablet/Smartphone Android que nos permita recolher a atitude da antena apartir dos sensores de orientação internos. Para a recolha da informação a partir dos ângulos dos sensores, foi desenvolvida uma aplicação Android. Com os ângulos da atitude do Tablet/Smartphone, é possível corrigir as observações GNSS, para obter uma posição vertical - foi desenvolvida uma aplicação C# com este objectivo. Esta correcção permite a criação de superfícies que representam com precisão os terrenos onde foram realizadas as observações. No futuro, utilizando várias observações em momentos diferentes, é possível estudar as variações do volume da areia das praias estudadas e analisar as variações morfológicas. Foram realizados alguns testes preliminares sobre a criação de superfícies, para avaliar a precisão interna de todo o sistema. Para este objectivo, foram desenvolvidos alguns scripts, utilizando o GMT (Generic Mapping Tools), que também podem ser utilizados no futuro, para calcular as variações de volume da praia. Assim, são apresentados os resultados de alguns testes realizados para avaliar a precisão da tecnologia desenvolvida. Em particular, através da análise dos desvios em relação a uma superfície de referência e pela avaliação da sensibilidade na medição sobre uma superfície irregular.
O corporativismo tem seus dias contados; o mundo divido em especialistas segundo finalidades, com suas respectivas corporações sindicais está desaparecendo.
An e-government Interoperability Framework (IF) is a document or group of documents that specify a set of common elements such as vocabularies, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, and practices for agencies that wish to work together, towards the joint delivery of public services. IFs are seen by governments as promising instruments to boost the interoperability of their services and systems. Henceforth, many countries have created and published their IFs along the last years. To the best of our knowledge no study has been carried out so far in order to identify the comprehensive list of countries that already have an IF. We argue that the existence of such a list would be very useful and valuable for both practitioners and researchers communities. Hence, this study addresses the question which is the worldwide comprehensive list of countries that currently have an e-government Interoperability Framework? To answer this question a worldwide survey that combined a web survey and a web questionnaire was conducted. The aim of this paper is to describe the effort and procedure done in order to conduct the worldwide survey and to present the results achieved with ...
