The study of fasciation

Since its introduction after Columbus, maize provoked a silence revolution on north and central region of Portugal, reshaping crop systems, agronomy, landscape and culture along the years. In the 1940s’ the advent of American hybrid seeds success started to contribute to genetic erosion. At NUMI (Maize Breeding Station at Braga) Silas Pêgo understood this threat and several maize collecting missions were organized. This collecting missions, paved the way for ex-situ conservation. In addition they feed in-situ/on farm and on station activities via prebreeding.(...

Operational indicators for public transport companies

The Operational Indicators Board is a top level oriented module for mass transportcompanies. The proposal is to collect and to show the planning and control information tosupport the decision making process. In this extended abstract the authors describe theindicators identification process and discuss the main ideas for the module functionality.The authors acknowledge the financial support given by Agência de Inovação to theEUROBUS project in which the work here described is included

Guia de campo "A febre do ouro"

Programa e guia de campo do Curso de primavera do Projecto ZOM 3D 2018

Portugal’s changing defense industry: is the triple helix model of knowledge society replacing state leadership model?

The defense industry has unique features involving national sovereignty. Despite the characteristics that led to the separation of the military and civil spheres, since the 1990s, the number of dual-use projects has been growing. Taking into account that Portugal is a small European country, this paper analyzes the relationships within the defense industry in order to determine how university–industry–government relationships (the Triple Helix) function in this specific industry. The analysis of 145 projects of the Portuguese Ministry of Defense led to the following conclusions: first, academia was represented in more than 90% of the projects, and 40% of those projects have a dual-use application; second, there is a predominance of knowledge production, dissemination and application, for which the university’s institutional sphere is essential and third, the Triple Helix system evolves into a network of relationships that involve projects with both civil and military applications.FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(undefined

A construção de um sistema de armazenamento de dados no âmbito do sistema GIST98/EUROBUS

Tese de Mestrado. Gestão de Empresas. Escola de Gestão do Porto. Universidade do Porto. 200

Travel time prediction for the planning of mass transit companies: a machine learning approach

In this thesis we undertook a study in order to know how travel time prediction can be used in mass transit companies for planning purposes. Two different problems were identified: the definition of travel times (1) for timetables and (2) for bus and driver duties. All these studies assume the existence of data on the actual trips, typically obtained from Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems.The first problem is a well-known problem with several related studies in the literature. Our approach is not analytical. Instead, we have designed and developed a decision support system that uses past data from the same line and representative of the period the timetable will cover. This problem was the least studied.With respect to the second problem, travel time prediction three days ahead, we focused on how much we can increase in accuracy if we predict travel times for the definition of bus and driver duties as near the date as possible, insteadof using the scheduled travel times (STT). The reason for doing this is that, if the increment is important, it is expected to reduce operational costs and/or increase passengers' satisfaction.In this second problem we used machine learning approaches. However, we started by defining a baseline method (in order to evaluate comparatively the results obtained with more sophisticated methods) and an expert based method using the knowledge we had at the time together with the tra±c experts from the STCP company. Then, we tried three different algorithms with reportedgood results in different problems. They were: support vector machines, random forests and projection pursuit regression. For each of these algorithms, exhaustive tests were done in order to tune parameters. Other tests were done using the three focusing tasks: example selection, domain values selection and feature selection. Accuracy was improved using these approaches.The next step was to experiment heterogeneous ensemble approaches in order to ameliorate further the results by comparison with the use of just one model. An extensive survey on ensemble methods for regression was undertaken.Several experiments using the dynamic selection approach were executed. Approaches using ensembles have improved results consistently when compared to the use of just one model.Experiments on the second problem finished by comparing the baseline, the expert based, the best single algorithm (with the respective tuned parameters and focusing tasks), and the ensemble approach, against the use of STT, onvarious routes. Results gave a small advantage in terms of accuracy to the ensemble approach when compared to the expert based method. However, the expert based approach needs less data and is much faster to tune. The actual method used by STCP (the use of STT) was competitive for circular routes. However, this result can be explained, at least partially, by how these routes are controlled. On the rest of the routes tested, it was clearly beaten.We also try to give practical answers in using travel time predictions for the planning of mass transit companies, using the STCP company as study case. The impact of travel time prediction in the business goals, namely clients'satisfaction and operational costs, is not addressed despite it is the natural step forward of this research