Explorations on an urban interventions management system: a reflection on how to deal with urban complex systems and deliver dynamic change.

How we plan and manage urban development has become an increasingly complex challenge, due to unpredictable and rapid conditional changes in post-modern cities. In turn, this calls for a paradigm shift in the way we understand and practice urban planning and design. A resilient urban planning system must be open and flexible rather than restrictive and rigid. It must respond promptly and adequately to the fast and diverse ways in which cities are reorganising as they respond to globalisation, environmental challenges and advances in technology. The need for a new kind of urban planning, which is able to embrace the complexity and unpredictability of the post-modern city, has been explored by several planning theorists. However, these theories were often developed from the perspective of urban planning and the city itself. In this thesis, complexity and evolutionary theories are used to approach the subject of the planning process, from a perspective in which the city is considered as the emergent and self-organising product of a sequence of interventions in the urban environment. This research suggests a planning approach focused on the design and selection of human interventions. Within this, the strategic roles for both top-down and bottom-up interventions are investigated, in relation to the formation of urban character and urban development. The research presents and tests exploratory models that help us to recognise, understand and mediate between a complex range of urban actors and external pressures derived from urban conditional changes. Findings from case studies indicate that the models are useful tools to structure and simplify the process of dealing with complex urban problems, and that they yield useful insights into how society should perceive cities in transition, as well as adopting an ideological shift to deal with contemporary and future city planning

A Community-Driven Validation Service for Standard Medical Imaging Objects

Digital medical imaging laboratories contain many distinct types of equipment provided by different manufacturers. Interoperability is a critical issue and the DICOM protocol is a de facto standard in those environments. However, manufacturers' implementation of the standard may have non-conformities at several levels, which will hinder systems' integration. Moreover, medical staff may be responsible for data inconsistencies when entering data. Those situations severely affect the quality of healthcare services since they can disrupt system operations. The existence of software able to confirm data quality and compliance with the DICOM standard is important for programmers, IT staff and healthcare technicians. Although there are a few solutions that try to accomplish this goal, they are unable to deal with certain situations that require user input. Furthermore, these cases usually require the setup of a working environment, which makes the sharing of validation information more difficult. This article proposes and describes the development of a Web DICOM validation service for the community. This solution requires no configuration by the user, promotes validation results share-ability in the community and preserves patient data privacy since files are de-identified on the client side.Comment: Computer Standards & Interfaces, 201

Bringing Order into Things Decentralized and Scalable Ledgering for the Internet-of-Things

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is simultaneously the largest and the fastest growing distributed system known to date. With the expectation of 50 billion of devices coming online by 2020, far surpassing the size of the human population, problems related to scale, trustability and security are anticipated. Current IoT architectures are inherently flawed as they are centralized on the cloud and explore fragile trust-based relationships over a plethora of loosely integrated devices, leading to IoT platforms being non-robust for every party involved and unable to scale properly in the near future. The need for a new architecture that addresses these concerns is urgent as the IoT is progressively more ubiquitous, pervasive and demanding regarding the integration of devices and processing of data increasingly susceptible to reliability and security issues. In this thesis, we propose a decentralized ledgering solution for the IoT, leveraging a recent concept: blockchains. Rather than replacing the cloud, our solution presents a scalable and fault-tolerant middleware for recording transactions between peers, under verifiable and decentralized trustability assumptions and authentication guarantees for IoT devices, cloud services and users. Following on the emergent trend in modern IoT architectures, we leverage smart hubs as blockchain gateways, aggregating, pre-processing and forwarding small amounts of data and transactions in proximity conditions, that will be verified and processed as transactions in the blockchain. The proposed middleware acts as a secure ledger and establishes private channels between peers, requiring transactions in the blockchain to be signed using threshold signature schemes and grouporiented verification properties. The approach improves the decentralization and robustness characteristics under Byzantine fault-tolerance settings, while preserving the blockchain distributed nature

Virtual reconstruction of cranial remains : the H. Heidelbergensis, Kabwe 1 fossil

Human skeletal remains and fossils are often fragmented and distorted, limiting further research. Thus, reconstruction has long been used to restore the original morphology of specimens and enable subsequent research. With advances in computing and imaging, virtual reconstruction approaches are increasingly being applied to this task. Thus, models of fragmentary remains are increasingly being reconstructed from medical images, using visualization software and geometric morphometric techniques to repair defects and restore symmetry. In this chapter we review some virtual reconstruction techniques and provide a description of CT based virtual reconstruction applied to a fossil hominin, the Kabwe 1 cranium. This specimen is dated from 150 - 250 thousand years ago and was reconstructed to enable further biomechanical research, however the approaches and tools used to make the reconstruction are directly applicable to more recent skeletal remains

Recent hominim cranial form and function

This thesis aims to assess if biting mechanics drives craniofacial morphology in recent hominins. To that end, a virtual functional morphology toolkit, that includes Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Geometric Morphometrics (GM), is used to simulate biting, measure bite force and quantify deformations arising due to simulated biting in Homo sapiens and its proposed ancestral species, Homo heidelbergensis. Moreover, the mechanical significance of the frontal sinus and of the brow-ridge is also assessed in Kabwe 1 (a Homo heidelbergensis specimen). The frontal sinus is examined by comparing the mechanical performance in three FE models with varying sinus morphology. A similar approach is applied to the brow-ridge study. This approach relies on the assumption that FEA approximates reality. Thus, a validation study compares the deformations experienced by a real cranium under experimental loading with those experienced by an FE model under equivalent virtual loading to verify this assumption. A sensitivity analysis examines how simplifications in segmentation impact on FEA results. Lastly, the virtual reconstruction of Kabwe 1 is described.Results show that prediction of absolute strain magnitudes is not precise, but the distribution of regions of larger and smaller (i.e. pattern of) deformations experienced by the real cranium is reasonably approximated by FEA, despite discrepancies in the alveolus. Simplification of segmentation stiffens the model but has no impact on the pattern of deformations, with the exception of the alveolus. Comparison of the biting performance of Kabwe 1 and H. sapiens suggests that morphological differences between the two species are likely not driven by selection of the masticatory system. Frontal sinus morphogenesis and morphology are possibly impacted by biting mechanics in the sense that very low strains are experienced by this region. Because bone adapts to strains, the frontal sinus is possibly impacted by this mechanism. Lastly, biting mechanics has limited impact on brow-ridge morphology and does not explain fully the enormous brow-ridge of Kabwe 1. Hence, other explanations are necessary to explain this prominent feature

Testing the reliability of CT scan‐based dental wear magnitude scoring

Objectives: Digital models are now frequently used in biological anthropology (bio anthropology) research. Despite several studies validating this type of research, none has examined if the assessment of dental wear magnitude based on Computerized Tomography (CT) scans is reliable. Thus, this study aims to fill this gap and assess if dental wear magnitude scoring based on CT scans provides results consistent with scoring based on direct observation of the physical specimens. Materials and Methods: Dental wear magnitude from 412 teeth of 35 mandibles originating from the Portuguese Muge and Sado Mesolithic shell-middens was scored. The mandibles were also CT scanned and visualized using 3D Slicer. CT scan based scoring of dental wear magnitude was then undertaken. Two scoring rounds were undertaken for each observation method (totaling four scoring rounds) and an intra-observer error test was performed. The averaged results of the two observation methods were compared via boxplots with paired cases. Results: Intra-observer error was negligible and non-significant. Scoring results are comparable between the two observation methods. Notwithstanding, some differ ences were found, in which CT scan assessment generally overestimates dental wear when compared to direct observation. Discussion: Our results generally validate the use of CT scans in studies of dental wear magnitude. Notwithstanding several caveats relating to CT scanning and visualization limitations should be considered to avoid over or under-estimation of dental wear.ALG-01-0145-FEDER-29680, 57/2016/CP1361/CT0029info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Construção de Linguagens Específicas de Domínio e a sua Integração com IDEs

Low-code platforms are presented as model-based software development solutions. In this sense, they could be described as applications of the Model-driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm. Despite the apparent success of these development platforms, they do not appear to adhere to standards and are frequently closed-source solutions. These characteristics may cause problems in the maintenance and evolution of solutions developed on these platforms in the future. One of these issues is the difficulty in migrating solutions to other platforms, implying that the client/user is dependent on the platform. The goal of the study is to externalize low-code platform modeling or any DSL to more general-purpose integrated development environments (IDE) like Visual Studio Code or Eclipse. As a result, users are able to use DSLs to model their applications in the IDE and integrate them with more general-purpose programming languages. This dissertation starts by providing an overview of the current state of the use of domainspecific language in general-purpose IDE environments. Furthermore, several designs were developed to find the best solution that achieves the goal. The designs are then compared, and the best one is selected to be implemented. The solution developed still has quite some future work to be done. It lacks many of the features found in a full-fledged IDE for a general-purpose language, like Visual Studio Code supports Javascript. Nonetheless, it may be quite useful when deploying a DSL to a generalpurpose IDE.As plataformas low-code são apresentadas como soluções de desenvolvimento de software baseadas em modelos. Nesse sentido, podem ser descritas como aplicações do paradigma Model-driven Engineering (MDE). Apesar do aparente sucesso dessas plataformas de desenvolvimento, não parecem aderir aos padrões e frequentemente são soluções de código fechado. Essas características podem causar problemas na manutenção e evolução das soluções desenvolvidas nessas plataformas no futuro. Um desses problemas é a dificuldade em migrar soluções para outras plataformas, implicando que o cliente seja dependente da plataforma. O objetivo do estudo é externalizar a modelagem de plataforma low-code ou de uma linguagens específica de domínio (DSL) para ambientes de desenvolvimento integrado (IDE) de propósito geral, como Visual Studio Code ou Eclipse. Como resultado, os usuários poderão usar DSLs para modelar seus aplicativos no IDE e integrá-los com linguagens de programação mais gerais. Esta dissertação começa fornecendo uma visão geral do estado atual do uso de DSL em ambientes IDE de uso geral. Além disso, vários designs foram desenvolvidos para encontrar a melhor solução que atinja o objetivo. Os designs são então comparados e o melhor é selecionado para ser implementado. A solução desenvolvida ainda tem bastante trabalho a ser feito. Faltam muitas das funcionalidades encontrados em um IDE para uma linguagem de uso geral, tal com o Visual Studio Code tem suporte para Javascript. No entanto, pode ser bastante útil ao implantar uma DSL num IDE de uso geral

The effect of binge-watching on the subscription of video on demand: results from randomized experiments

We analyze the outcomes of two randomized field experiments to study the effect of binge-watching on subscription to video on demand. In both cases, we offered access to subscription VoD (SVoD) to a random set of households for several weeks and used another random set of households as a control group. In both cases, we find that the households that binge-watch TV shows are less likely to pay for SVoD after these free trials. Our results suggest that binge-watchers deplete the content of interest to them very quickly, which reduces their short-term willingness to pay for SVoD. We also show that recommendation reminders aimed at widening the content preferences of households offset the negative effect of binge-watching and lessen the concerns of binge-watchers with lack of content refresh. We discuss that these recommendation reminders may help content providers manage supply costs, which may otherwise become prohibitive with frequent updates to SVoD catalogs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio