A database for appliances real-life energy performance and consumption assessment

Trabalho de Projeto de Mestrado, Informática, 2021, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasNowadays, the reduction of energy consumption is a pressing matter for the European Union and one field that remains a large part of this energy contribution is the EU buildings and the energy consuming equipment inside. The use of energy labels, in order to assess the energy efficiency on European buildings, has proven to not be enough due to the difference between prediction consumption and real life energy consumption. The SATO platform aims to provide cloud-based self-assessment and optimization of buildings and equipment/appliances energy. It achieves this goal by collecting data about the energy performance of various devices, both legacy and new, through the use of sensors. One of the objectives of this platform is to develop the databases and its dashboards to store and visualize data on the energy consumption of building appliances. With this goal in mind, this thesis will be able to provide the users a comparison between the design predictions and the real live consumption. This comparison is done resorting to the EU energy label metrics, that are stored on the EPREL database. This database contains the energy efficiency information about the devices covered by the Energy labelling regulation, and it was created with the goal of providing the public with this information. The sensor data metrics are obtained by applying the formulas in the regulation on energy labelling for the respective device type. Addi tionally, since this thesis is meant to be integrated in the SATO platform, this databases and metrics will be used in the assessment and development of optimization algorithms for devices and buildings. The current implementation makes available two databases, one to store sensor data and another for metadata and metrics, as well as two different dashboards, one to show device real time consumption’s, consumption metrics and device meta-data, and another to provide the users with a simple comparison between the expected consumption and the real live consumption. Testing was done with two different device types, electronic displays and household refrigerators, with the expectations in mind of the real life consumption being above the displayed the EU energy label. The results ended up being different from the predicted, with the real live consumption obtained from the sensor data being the highest. This may be due to the low amount of collected data

Evaluation of wsn technology for dependable monitoring in water environmnts

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitetura e Redes de Computadores) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2019Few problems arise when trying to reliably monitor a surrounding environment by the use of sensors and a wireless network to disseminate the information gathered. In the context of an aquatic environment, the undulation and the low predictability of the surrounding environment could cause faults in the transmission of data. The initial motivation for the work developed in this thesis was the Aquamon project. Aquamon is a project that has as objective the deployment of a dependable Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for the purposes of water quality monitoring and the study of tidal movements. Therefore, Aquamon, like any other WSN will have to go through the process of choosing a technology that meets its application requirements as well as the requirements imposed by the deployment environment. WSNs can have constraints when it comes to the Quality of Service and availability it can provide. These networks generally have a set requirements that need to be satisfied. Thus, there needs to be a selection of one (or multiple) wireless technologies that can satisfy said requirements. This selection process is usually done in a ad-hoc way, weighting the advantages and disadvantages of different possible solutions with respect to some requirements, often using empirical knowledge or simply dictated by the designer’s preference for some particular technology. When several functional and non-functional requirements have to be addressed, finding an optimal or close to optimal solution may become a hard problem. This thesis proposes a methodology for addressing this optimization problem in an automated way. It considers various application requirements and the characteristics of the available technologies (including Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT, ZigBee and ZigBee Pro) and delivers the solution that better satisfies the requirements. It illustrates how the methodology is applied to a specific use case of WSN-based environmental monitoring in the Seixal Bay

The influence of residual oxidizing impurities on the synthesis of graphene by atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition

The growth of graphene on copper by atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition in a system free of pumping equipment is investigated. The emphasis is put on the necessity of hydrogen presence during graphene synthesis and cooling. In the absence of hydrogen during the growth step or cooling at slow rate, weak carbon coverage, consisting mostly of oxidized and amorphous carbon, is obtained on the copper catalyst. The oxidation originates from the inevitable occurrence of residual oxidizing impurities in the reactor's atmosphere. Graphene with appreciable coverage can be grown within the vacuum-free furnace only upon admitting hydrogen during the growth step. After formation, it is preserved from the destructive effect of residual oxidizing contaminants once exposure at high temperature is minimized by fast cooling or hydrogen flow. Under these conditions, micrometer-sized hexagon-shaped graphene domains of high structural quality are achieved.Comment: Accepted in Carbo

Improving Memory Hierarchy Utilisation for Stencil Computations on Multicore Machines

Although modern supercomputers are composed of multicore machines, one can find scientists that still execute their legacy applications which were developed to monocore cluster where memory hierarchy is dedicated to a sole core. The main objective of this paper is to propose and evaluate an algorithm that identify an efficient blocksize to be applied on MPI stencil computations on multicore machines. Under the light of an extensive experimental analysis, this work shows the benefits of identifying blocksizes that will dividing data on the various cores and suggest a methodology that explore the memory hierarchy available in modern machines

User hints for optimisation processes

Innovative improvements in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and User Interfaces have en-abled intuitive and effective applications for a variety of problems. On the other hand, there has also been the realization that several real-world optimization problems still cannot be totally auto-mated. Very often, user interaction is necessary for refining the optimization problem, managing the computational resources available, or validating or adjusting a computer-generated solution. This thesis investigates how humans can help optimization methods to solve such difficult prob-lems. It presents an interactive framework where users play a dynamic and important role by pro-viding hints. Hints are actions that help to insert domain knowledge, to escape from local minima, to reduce the space of solutions to be explored, or to avoid ambiguity when there is more than one optimal solution. Examples of user hints are adjustments of constraints and of an objective function, focusing automatic methods on a subproblem of higher importance, and manual changes of an ex-isting solution. User hints are given in an intuitive way through a graphical interface. Visualization tools are also included in order to inform about the state of the optimization process. We apply the User Hints framework to three combinatorial optimization problems: Graph Clus-tering, Graph Drawing and Map Labeling. Prototype systems are presented and evaluated for each problem. The results of the study indicate that optimization processes can benefit from human interaction. The main goal of this thesis is to list cases where human interaction is helpful, and provide an ar-chitecture for supporting interactive optimization. Our contributions include the general User Hints framework and particular implementations of it for each optimization problem. We also present a general process, with guidelines, for applying our framework to other optimization problems

Determinants of continuance intention in wearables : the case of smartwatches

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceSmartwatch sales have been growing for the past few years, but their regular use is still sub-par. Understanding the primary determinants of smartwatch continuance intention is thus important for brands, researchers, and users alike. Therefore, a conceptual model was developed that combines the expectation-confirmation model (ECM) with habit, perceived usability, and perceived enjoyment, to explain the continuance intention of smartwatches. To test the conceptual model, we collected data from the U.S.A. (574 valid cases). Our results support the relationships of ECM, such as confirmation, perceived usefulness, and satisfaction, and also the role of habit and perceived usability. Habit was the most important factor to explain the continuance intention of smartwatches

Dynamic phylogenetic inference for sequence-based typing data

Typing methods are widely used in the surveillance of infectious diseases, outbreaks investigation and studies of the natural history of an infection. And their use is becoming standard, in particular with the introduction of High Throughput Sequencing (HTS). On the other hand, the data being generated is massive and many algorithms have been proposed for phylogenetic analysis of typing data, such as the goeBURST algorithm. These algorithms must however be run whenever new data becomes available starting from scratch. We address this issue proposing a dynamic version of goeBURST algorithm. Experimental results show that this new version is efficient on integrating new data and updating inferred evolutionary patterns, improving the update running time by at least one order of magnitude.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Caminando: las actitudes hacia la estadística en estudiantes universitarios en el norte de Portugal

El trabajo que aquí presentamos se centra en el estudio de las actitudes hacia la Estadística de estudiantes universitarios de una universidad en el norte de Portugal. Analizamos las respuestas a los ítems de la Escala de Actitudes hacia la Estadística de Estrada EAEE (Estrada, 2002). Nuestros resultados indican la necesidad de seguir trabajando por y para los estudiantes, potenciando su formación estadística pero sin olvidar la componente afectiva