Location based services for everyone

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Radar exchange: Open market for goods and services at no cost

The current society is distinguished by its consumerism and rapid development, which has resulted in the emergence of numerous unutilized items. People concerned about this urgency, on the other hand, have joined a collaborative economy in which goods and services are shared amongst themselves, reducing desperation. With the widespread use of social networks, the emergence of communities and services managed in a distributed manner has grown. As a result, organizations such as Free Cycle and Community Exchange have emerged to aid in the search and exchange of goods. Following the example of these two groups and using available technology, this dissertation documents the development of a Geographic Information System with the goal of providing a web-based platform for the exchange of goods and services. This new approach, in which geospatial information is a key focus, allows users to view available products based on their location, increasing the probability of discovering products nearby. Aside from that, a classification of the user is implemented based on the products and services requested and offered, in order to increase the user's credibility in the eyes of the others, increasing the likelihood of a deal occurring. Throughout this work, the process is described, that is, there search carried out to gain a better understanding of the topic, the assessment of requirements, and the planning and creation of a prototype. To conclude, usability tests on the created solution were conducted in order to evaluate its performance and interface.A sociedade atual é caracterizada pelo seu consumismo e rápido desenvolvimento, o que por sua vez leva ao surgimento de inúmeros bens não utilizados. Contudo, pessoas preocupadas com este desperdício têm aderido a uma economia colaborativa, onde partilham bens e serviços entre si e assim reduzem o desperdício. Com a generalização do uso das redes sociais, o aparecimento de comunidades e serviços geridos de forma partilhada tem aumentado. Como tal, grupos como o Free Cycle e Community Exchange têm emergido para ajudar a procura e a troca dos produtos. Seguindo o exemplo destes dois grupos e aproveitando a tecnologia disponível, esta dissertação documenta a criação de um Sistema de Informação Geográfica com o objetivo de disponibilizar uma plataforma web para a troca dos produtos e de serviços. Esta nova abordagem, onde a informação geográfica é o grande foco, permite aos utilizadores, durante a sua mobilidade quotidiana, a visualização dos produtos disponibilizados consoante a sua localização, aumentando assim a probabilidade de descobrir produtos perto de si. Para além disso,é implementada uma classificação sobre o utilizador com base nos produtos e serviços recebidos e doados, de forma a aumentar a sua credibilidade perante os restantes, elevando as chances de a troca se efetuar. Ao longo deste documento, é descrito o processo tomado, isto é, a pesquisa levada a cabo para melhor compreensão do tema, levantamento dos requisitos, planeamento e criação de um protótipo. Por fim, foram realizados testes de usabilidade sobre a solução criada, para avaliar o desempenho e a interface da solução criada

Changing environmental behaviors through smartphone-based augmented experiences

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestrado em Engenharia de InformáticaThe use of persuasive technologies can induce changes in attitudes or behaviours, even in individuals that other strategies of persuasion can not reach effectively. In addition, this type of technology can be applied in numerous areas such as health, education, finance, e-business, among others. Although persuasion can be seen as something negative, being used to serve the interests of the persuader rather than the interests of the persuaded, this work aims to achieve a common and shared goal: to change people's behaviour towards the environment. A significant part of the population is still not aware of the sustainability problems that our planet is facing, so it is important to inform people about the theme while persuading them to change their behaviour and acquire proenvironmental attitudes. In this dissertation, work was conducted to alert citizens to this issue in a fun and immersive way using mobile devices, more specifically smartphones, and augmented reality technology that was used to create an environmental scanner. This scanner provided the user with informative insight about the surrounding environment, while highlighting the environmental threats. In addition to augmented reality, pro-environmental actions were positively reinforced using a reward system and a virtual character that interacted and motivated the user. A form of rapid spread through social networks was also created, allowing the persuasive effect to quickly reach a large number of users. Finally was performed a study to assess the success of the work done in changing behaviour towards environmental issues, and to study the influence of augmented reality and positive reinforcement in the changing of behaviours and acquisition of pro-environmental attitudes

A Model-Driven Approach for Mobile Business Intelligence

The concept of Mobile Business Intelligence is nowadays gaining prominence in business markets. With the emergence and evolution of mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets, the users gain the opportunity to analyze the corporate information, anywhere and anytime, based on charts, tables and dashboards. However, there is also the question of how to provide the freedom to the user to build its own analytical components. This work will address the problem of developing a hybrid mobile solution towards the Business Intelligence domain, offering monitoring services and simultaneously addressing the problem of user empowerment, with easy configuration and semi-automatic generation of analytical widgets. To provide such capacity to the user, the proposed solution is based on the design of a Domain Specific Modeling Language, aligned with the Model-Driven Development approach and inspired by the Product Lines principles. The last part of this work is dedicated to evaluate the language usability based on an empirical test, executed by a set of subjects with different backgrounds of specialization. In this sense, we define two groups: end users and domain experts. The goal is to determine the extent to which the prototype can be used to empower the end users. As support for the analysis we have extracted a set of measures, alongside with the final appreciation from the domain experts group, composed by people currently working on Business Intelligence

Gesture based interface for image annotation

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaGiven the complexity of visual information, multimedia content search presents more problems than textual search. This level of complexity is related with the difficulty of doing automatic image and video tagging, using a set of keywords to describe the content. Generally, this annotation is performed manually (e.g., Google Image) and the search is based on pre-defined keywords. However, this task takes time and can be dull. In this dissertation project the objective is to define and implement a game to annotate personal digital photos with a semi-automatic system. The game engine tags images automatically and the player role is to contribute with correct annotations. The application is composed by the following main modules: a module for automatic image annotation, a module that manages the game graphical interface (showing images and tags), a module for the game engine and a module for human interaction. The interaction is made with a pre-defined set of gestures, using a web camera. These gestures will be detected using computer vision techniques interpreted as the user actions. The dissertation also presents a detailed analysis of this application, computational modules and design, as well as a series of usability tests