8,988 research outputs found
Key technologies for safe and autonomous drones
Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are very difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, drones' usage brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. In this paper, we present key technologies that enable development of drone systems. The technologies are identified based on the usages of drones (driven by COMP4DRONES project use cases). These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. Also, we present the contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to improve existing technologies. These contributions aim to ease drones’ customization, and enable their safe operation.This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826610. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands. The total project budget is 28,590,748.75 EUR (excluding ESIF partners), while the requested grant is 7,983,731.61 EUR to ECSEL JU, and 8,874,523.84 EUR of National and ESIF Funding. The project has been started on 1st October 2019
Recommended from our members
Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
Kindergarten Affordances for Physical Activity and Preschoolers’ Motor and Social–Emotional Competence
This study examined the relationship between the quality of the kindergarten physical and social environment to promote physical activity (PA) and preschoolers’ motor and social–emotional competence. Two Portuguese kindergartens (Gondomar city) were selected from a pool of seventeen with an assessment of kindergarten PA best practices (one with high PA practices, the other with low). Thirty-six children (M = 4.42; SD = 1.00 years) without neuromotor disorders participated in this study. Motor and social–emotional competence were assessed with standardized motor skills tasks and parent report of child behaviors. Children from the kindergarten with higher compliance with PA best practices showed significantly better motor competence. No statistically significant differences were found for social–emotional competence scores. These findings emphasize the critical importance of kindergarten in promoting preschoolers’ motor competence by assuring a physical and social environment that enhances their PA practice. This is a particularly relevant concern for directors and teachers during the post-pandemic period, given the developmental delays and decreases in physical activity preschool children experienced across the pandemic period
Anuário cientÃfico da Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa - 2021
É com grande prazer que apresentamos a mais recente edição (a 11.ª) do Anuário CientÃfico da Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa. Como instituição de ensino superior, temos o compromisso de promover e incentivar a pesquisa cientÃfica em todas as áreas do conhecimento que contemplam a nossa missão. Esta publicação tem como objetivo divulgar toda a produção cientÃfica desenvolvida pelos Professores, Investigadores, Estudantes e Pessoal não Docente da ESTeSL durante 2021. Este Anuário é, assim, o reflexo do trabalho árduo e dedicado da nossa comunidade, que se empenhou na produção de conteúdo cientÃfico de elevada qualidade e partilhada com a Sociedade na forma de livros, capÃtulos de livros, artigos publicados em revistas nacionais e internacionais, resumos de comunicações orais e pósteres, bem como resultado dos trabalhos de 1º e 2º ciclo. Com isto, o conteúdo desta publicação abrange uma ampla variedade de tópicos, desde temas mais fundamentais até estudos de aplicação prática em contextos especÃficos de Saúde, refletindo desta forma a pluralidade e diversidade de áreas que definem, e tornam única, a ESTeSL. Acreditamos que a investigação e pesquisa cientÃfica é um eixo fundamental para o desenvolvimento da sociedade e é por isso que incentivamos os nossos estudantes a envolverem-se em atividades de pesquisa e prática baseada na evidência desde o inÃcio dos seus estudos na ESTeSL. Esta publicação é um exemplo do sucesso desses esforços, sendo a maior de sempre, o que faz com que estejamos muito orgulhosos em partilhar os resultados e descobertas dos nossos investigadores com a comunidade cientÃfica e o público em geral. Esperamos que este Anuário inspire e motive outros estudantes, profissionais de saúde, professores e outros colaboradores a continuarem a explorar novas ideias e contribuir para o avanço da ciência e da tecnologia no corpo de conhecimento próprio das áreas que compõe a ESTeSL. Agradecemos a todos os envolvidos na produção deste anuário e desejamos uma leitura inspiradora e agradável.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Recommended from our members
Co-design As Healing: Exploring The Experiences Of Participants Facing Mental Health Problems
This thesis is an exploration of the healing role of co-design in mental health. Although co-design projects conducted within mental health settings are rising, existing literature tends to focus on the object of design and its outcomes while the experiences of participants per se remain largely unexplored. The guiding research question of this study is not how we design things that improve mental health, but how co-designing, as an act, might do so.
The thesis presents two projects that were organized in collaboration with the mental health charity Islington Mind and the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in London.
The project at Islington Mind used a structured design process inviting participants to design for wellbeing. A case study analysis provides insights on how participants were impacted, summarizing key challenges and opportunities.
The design at PTP worked towards creating a collective brief in an emergent fashion, finally culminating in a board game. The experiences of participants were explored through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), using semi-structured interview data. The analysis served to identify key themes characterising the experience of co-design such as contributing, connecting, thinking and intentioning. In addition, a mixed-methods analysis of questionnaires and interview data exploring participants' wellbeing, showed that all participants who engaged fairly consistently in the project improved after the project ended, although some participants' scores returned to baseline six months later.
Reflecting on both projects, an approach to facilitation within mental health is outlined, detailing how the dimensions of weaving and layered participation, nurturing mattering and facilitating attitudes interlace. This contribution raises awareness of tacit dimensions in the practice of facilitation, articulating the nuances of how to encourage and sustain meaningful and ethical engagement and offering insights into a range of tools. It highlights the importance of remaining reflexive in relation to attitudes and emotions and discusses practical methodological and ethical challenges and ways to resolve them which can be of benefit to researchers embarking on a similar journey.
The thesis also offers detailed insights on how methodologies from different fields were integrated into a whole, arguing for transparency and reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, and how underlying paradigms shift in an interdisciplinary context.
Based on the overall findings, the thesis makes a case for considering design as healing (or a designerly way of healing), highlighting implications at a systems, social and individual level. It makes an original contribution to our understanding of design, highlighting its healing character, and proposes a new way to support mental health. The participants in this study not only had increased their own wellbeing through co-designing, but were also empowered and contributed towards healing the world. Hence, the thesis argues for a unique, holistic perspective of design and mental health, recognizing the interconnectedness of the individual, social and systemic dimensions of the healing processes that are ignited
Marvellous real in the Middle East: a comparative study of magical realism in contemporary women’s fiction
Magical realism has been studied extensively in relation to Latin America and subsequently in other parts of the world, yet the Middle East has not received adequate attention in academic scholarship. This PhD study examines a selection of contemporary female-authored narratives from the Middle East to establish an understanding of the practice of magical realism in this region. The selected texts for this study are: Raja Alem’s Fatma and My Thousand and One Nights; Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men and Touba and the Meaning of Night; Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul and Gina B. Nahai’s Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith.
This study firstly explores the concept of magical realism as a mode of writing and determines its relationship to the Middle Eastern context. It then evaluates the texts under scrutiny by examining how the narrative of magical realism is constructed and what the sources are of the magical component in these texts, specifically in relation to Middle Eastern mythology. It also investigates the ideological aspect behind the employment of magical realism and whether it serves any political goal. The analysis of the selected texts is approached from three standpoints, that is, from literary, mythological and ideological perspectives. I argue that magical realism serves various purposes and that it is applied from perspectives that can be regarded as marginal to their communities’ dominant values, to subvert mainstream ideology. I also demonstrate that the Middle East is a crucial place to investigate magical realism because of the numerous complex cultural values that interact with each other in this region, and which enrich the practice of magical realism
Cultivating Agrobiodiversity in the U.S.: Barriers and Bridges at Multiple Scales
The diversity of crops grown in the United States (U.S.) is declining, causing agricultural landscapes to become more and more simplified. This trend is concerning for the loss of important plant, insect, and animal species, as well as the pollution and degradation of our environment. Through three separate but related studies, this dissertation addresses the need to increase the diversity of these agricultural landscapes in the U.S., particularly through diversifying the type and number of crops grown. The first study uses multiple, openly accessible datasets related to agricultural land use and policies to document and visualize change over recent decades. Through this, I show that U.S. agriculture has gradually become more specialized in the crops grown, crop production is heavily concentrated in certain areas, and crop diversity is continuing to decline. Meanwhile, federal agricultural policy, while having become more influential over how U.S. agriculture operates, incentivizes this specialization. The second study uses nonlinear statistical modeling to identify and compare social, political, and ecological factors that best predict crop diversity across nine regions in the U.S. Factors of climate, prior land use, and farm inputs best predict diversity across regions, but regions show key differences in how factors are important, indicating that patterns at the regional scale constrain and enable further diversification. Finally, the third study relied on interviews with farmers and key informants in southern Idaho’s Magic Valley – a cluster of eight counties that is known to be agriculturally diverse. Interviews gauge what farmers are currently doing to manage crop diversity (the present) and how they imagine alternative landscapes (the imaginary). We found that farmers in the Magic Valley manage current diversity mainly through cover cropping and diverse crop rotations, but daily struggles and political barriers make experimenting with and imagining alternative landscapes difficult and unlikely to occur. Together, these three studies provide an integrated view of how and why U.S. agriculture landscapes simplify or diversify, as well as the barriers and bridges such pathways of diversification
Transportation Planning, Policy, and Electric Micro-Mobilities: A Knowledge Synthesis of Recent Publications
This SSHRC-funded (Grant #972-2020-1009) scoping review synthesizes existing research (2010-2021) related to both private and shared electric micro-mobilities (i.e. e-bikes, e-scooters, e-unicycles, e-skateboards). It considers themes such as: rider demographics, usage, and motivations; mobility justice; benefits of and barriers to EMM use; safety and injuries; modal shift among forms of transportation; rider satisfaction with mode choice; environmental impact; conflict and controversy; EMM pilot programs; and EMM integration, legislation, and policy recommendations. Aside from scholarship, media reports are also included, in order to speak to the environment in which the research takes place
- …