Mapping information systems maturity: the case of the portuguese hospitality industry

Hospitality is a highly competitive market that struggles to improve its performance. The use of technology is a critical factor for more efficient performance. To understand decision-makers' perception of information systems' influence and importance in their organisations, we conduct a case study in Portugal. The objective was to assess information systems' maturity level of independent hotels and small hotel chains, mapping the level to the hotel's characteristics. In addition, this study explores the types of systems used and hoteliers' main factors, drivers, and limitations to invest in information systems' maturity. We examined 86 companies, representing a total of 195 hotels. The analysis design was done following the Network Exploitation Capability (NEC) model. We found that, generally, hoteliers consider that their companies take more advantage of technology and information systems than they really do. These findings emphasise the importance of the use of technology in hospitality performance and the lack of knowledge that hoteliers have on the subject.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Aspectos psico-sociais do envelhecimento nos seniores

A evolução demográfica traduziu-se num aumento do número e da proporção de seniores em Portugal e no mundo. O estudo deste grupo populacional implica a familiarização com algumas das suas circunstâncias mais relevantes, nas quais se incluem aspectos psico-sociais. Para compreender e poder investigar os seniores portugueses é importante atender a vários aspectos aqui apresentados. Salientamos a diferença entre terceira e quarta idade e a forma como esta permite compreender diferentes perfis de envelhecimento. Enfatizamos a compreensão da especificidade psico-social para colocar o envelhecimento em contexto, assim como o estudo de como o envelhecimento se processa em meio urbano em meio rural. Salientamos também a diferença entre saúde funcional e saúde mental, onde se destaca a prevalência da demência. Referimos como determinadas características inerentes ao processo do envelhecimento têm implicações importantes para a auto-estima e auto-conceito dos seniores. Olhamos para o impacto do isolamento social neste grupo e abordamos a importância da religião nesta fase do ciclo de vida. Finalmente, debatemos a existência de variados modelos de sucesso no envelhecimento. O retrato aqui traçado de algumas das principais variáveis a ter em conta no estudo ou debate do envelhecimento em Portugal é misto, com o aumento da esperança média de vida e os ganhos ao nível da sabedoria sendo contrapostos com perdas cognitivas, sociais e, especialmente na quarta idade, de bem-estar

Grid-Brick Event Processing Framework in GEPS

Experiments like ATLAS at LHC involve a scale of computing and data management that greatly exceeds the capability of existing systems, making it necessary to resort to Grid-based Parallel Event Processing Systems (GEPS). Traditional Grid systems concentrate the data in central data servers which have to be accessed by many nodes each time an analysis or processing job starts. These systems require very powerful central data servers and make little use of the distributed disk space that is available in commodity computers. The Grid-Brick system, which is described in this paper, follows a different approach. The data storage is split among all grid nodes having each one a piece of the whole information. Users submit queries and the system will distribute the tasks through all the nodes and retrieve the result, merging them together in the Job Submit Server. The main advantage of using this system is the huge scalability it provides, while its biggest disadvantage appears in the case of failure of one of the nodes. A workaround for this problem involves data replication or backup.Comment: 6 pages; document for CHEP'03 conferenc

a literature review

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020Despite having been one of the first countries in Europe to introduce provisions in the labour law to promote virtual work and having made strong investments in ICT infrastructure, the adoption of virtual work in Portugal lags significantly behind most European countries. This paper examines the literature, official documents and databases to understand this lag. We found that, notwithstanding the difficulty to measure virtual work, it is possible to say that there were 1.8% of workers in 2005 involved in virtual work. In 2010, less than 3% were involved in virtual work, and in 2015 it grew to 8.2%. The paper identifies two main factors hindering the growth of virtual work: the legal framework and the organisational aspects of work.publishersversionpublishe

a cascading classifier approach

Mentzingen, H., Antonio, N., & Lobo, V. (2023). Joining metadata and textual features to advise administrative courts decisions: a cascading classifier approach. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-023-09348-9Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines: Evidence from the First-Year Rollout of Vaccination Programs

Antonio, N., Rita, P., & Saraiva, P. (2022). Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines: Evidence from the First-Year Rollout of Vaccination Programs. Vaccines, 10(3), 1-19. [409]. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10030409 ---------------- The work by Nuno António, Paulo Rita, and Pedro Saraiva was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) within the Project: UIDB/04152/2020-Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC).The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a number of new realities, sets of data, and opportunities for data-driven approaches, decisions, and conclusions. One particular area for which developments and data have been made available in record time is related to vaccines and their impacts on health conditions and saving lives. In this article, we use public domain information to study the prevalence of vaccines in different countries and how they can save lives. We conclude that there are different clusters of countries, for some of which solid statistical models were built, and show that vaccination rates provide significant contributions to saving lives in such countries, with impacts that can be computed by simulations based upon these models.publishersversionpublishe

Special Issue on Body Area Networks

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Exchange Rate Synchronization for a Set of Currencies from Different Monetary Areas

The degree of co-movement between currencies remains an important subject for international trade and monetary integration across countries. However, the economic literature has given limited answers about the directional relationships among currencies, and whether they have a leader or a driver. Using the Hodrick-Prescott filter and the wavelet methodology, this paper analyzes exchange rate synchronization for a set of twelve currencies belonging to different monetary areas covering the period between January 1980 and July 2020. The empirical results reveal that: i) the U.S. dollar still plays an essential role as a foreign exchange anchor; ii) the euro shows an out-of-phase relationship with the vast majority of currencies, including with the other European currencies; iii) the British pound seems to have departed significantly from the European single currency; iv) the Brazilian real leads the Chinese yuan for most of the sample, and both currencies record great dissimilarities with the other currencies; v) in the absence of short-term foreign exchange market frictions, average bilateral distances between currencies are smaller, and vi) during the international financial crisis, exchange rates became more synchronized

Genetic diversity in the Portuguese Mertolenga Cattle Breed assessed by pedigree analysis

Research Areas: Agriculture ; Veterinary Sciences ; ZoologyThe Mertolenga beef cattle, currently with 27,000 breeding females in Portugal, is the largest Portuguese native breed, despite some variation in the breeding stock over the last years. The purpose of this study was to estimate parameters related to the population structure and genetic diversity and to investigate the major factors affecting genetic erosion in the breed, based on the pedigree herdbook information collected since the 1950s, including records on 221,567 animals from 425 herds. The mean generation intervals were 6.4 years for sires and 7.1 years for dams, respectively. The rate of inbreeding per year was 0.183% ± 0.020% and the correspondent effective population size was 38.83. In the reference population (35,017 calves born between 2015 and 2019), the average inbreeding and relatedness were 8.82% ± 10% and 2.05% ± 1.26%, respectively. The mean relationship among animals from the same and from different herds was 29.25% ± 9.36% and 1.87% ± 1.53%, respectively. The estimates for the effective number of founders, ancestors, founding herds and herds supplying sires were 87.9, 59.4, 21.4 and 73.5, respectively. Although the situation of the Mertolenga breed is not alarming, these results indicate the need to adopt measures to maintain the genetic variability of the population.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio