Looking for efective ways of achieving and sustaining Business-IT Alignment

Aligning Business and Information Technologies strategies has been a subject studied for a long time. Despite all the efforts, achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment remains a challenge requiring even more agility nowadays to keep up with the competition in a turbulent organizational environment. Past contributions are uncovered in this paper calling particular attention to the development of Enterprise Architecture as a way of addressing this challenge. However, this should be a process to be carried out in the most effective ways looking especially at time and costs. Having proposed frameworks as a point of departure to reflect on the ways they may or may not work in practice, a dialogical action research is proposed for this work involving a close interaction with consultant companies. The resulting improved expertise both from the researcher and practitioners involved should allow for the identification of the most effective ways of achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment.(undefined

The organizational competences model: a contribution for business-IT alignment

Business-IT alignment has consistently ranked in the top five IT management concerns for almost a decade now. Despite a considerable research since the 90s, business-IT alignment still remains a challenge even more in turbulent organizational environments requiring business strategy to be more frequently examined and changed. We need effective ways to achieve and sustain alignment between the information systems and technology strategy and the business strategy so organizations become more flexible and agile. Enterprise architecture may be one of those effective ways particularly when developed under a business process management approach. Looking into a consulting practice that has adopted such approach, this research highlights the role of one particular model, the organizational competences model, in the clarification of the strategy and in the development of the enterprise architecture for a wine regulatory commission, the organization that was used as a case study

Dialogical action research for better enterprise architecture implementation

Business-IT alignment has been studied for quite some time but it is still a key concern for IT executives. Traditional approaches may have been successful in the past, as researchers have been studying business-IT alignment concerning its impact on organizational performance or its antecedents. However, the question remains: “how to provide an easy and quick way of achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment?” Enterprise Architecture implementation under a Business Process Management approach may be a useful way of looking into good practices to achieve and sustain business-IT alignment. This work emphasizes the adoption of Dialogical Action Research as an adequate methodology to improve theoria and praxis for a better enterprise architecture implementation. Supported on reflective one-on-one dialogues between researcher and practitioner, dialogical action research acknowledges the important role and contributions of the latter for enterprise architecture implementation when compared with the modest contributions from academia. Emerging from many years of practice, a particular praxis is under examination in this work particularly regarding the development of an organizational competences model considered as an important piece for enterprise architecture implementation. Such model fosters the discussion of the business strategy while making clear the interrelations among competences and more explicit the business model. From a dialogical action research, as work is carried out, recommendations will be issued to improve consulting praxis and inform theoria while solving real world problems in the course of enterprise architecture implementation at municipalities.This work is supported by FEDER funding through the Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme – COMPETE and national funding through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology under the project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674

Genetic diversity and structure of the portuguese pear (Pyrus communis L.) germplasm

A rich heritage of traditional pear varieties is kept in national Portuguese collections. Out of these varieties, “Rocha” dominates national pear production. Although a noticeable phenotypic variation among clones of this variety has been reported, little is known about its genetic variability, as to date molecular studies have been performed on a single “Rocha” clone. Eleven Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) markers were used to assess the genetic diversity of 130 local cultivars, 80 of them being “Rocha” clones. The results allowed the di erentiation of 75 genotypes of which 29 are “Rocha”. Three synonyms groups and four homonymous groups of other local varieties were confirmed. A Bayesian model-based clustering approach identified two distinct clusters. Using flow cytometry, six cultivars were found to be triploids. These results show high genetic variability among “Rocha” clones. In conclusion, there is a need for di erent “Rocha” clones to be preserved to enable the correct selection of the multiplication materialinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

“I didn’t mean to steal someone else’s words!”:a forensic linguistic approach to detecting intentional plagiarism

The concept of plagiarism is not uncommonly associated with the concept of intellectual property, both for historical and legal reasons: the approach to the ownership of ‘moral’, nonmaterial goods has evolved to the right to individual property, and consequently a need was raised to establish a legal framework to cope with the infringement of those rights. The solution to plagiarism therefore falls most often under two categories: ethical and legal. On the ethical side, education and intercultural studies have addressed plagiarism critically, not only as a means to improve academic ethics policies (PlagiarismAdvice.org, 2008), but mainly to demonstrate that if anything the concept of plagiarism is far from being universal (Howard & Robillard, 2008). Even if differently, Howard (1995) and Scollon (1994, 1995) argued, and Angèlil-Carter (2000) and Pecorari (2008) later emphasised that the concept of plagiarism cannot be studied on the grounds that one definition is clearly understandable by everyone. Scollon (1994, 1995), for example, claimed that authorship attribution is particularly a problem in non-native writing in English, and so did Pecorari (2008) in her comprehensive analysis of academic plagiarism. If among higher education students plagiarism is often a problem of literacy, with prior, conflicting social discourses that may interfere with academic discourse, as Angèlil-Carter (2000) demonstrates, we then have to aver that a distinction should be made between intentional and inadvertent plagiarism: plagiarism should be prosecuted when intentional, but if it is part of the learning process and results from the plagiarist’s unfamiliarity with the text or topic it should be considered ‘positive plagiarism’ (Howard, 1995: 796) and hence not an offense. Determining the intention behind the instances of plagiarism therefore determines the nature of the disciplinary action adopted. Unfortunately, in order to demonstrate the intention to deceive and charge students with accusations of plagiarism, teachers necessarily have to position themselves as ‘plagiarism police’, although it has been argued otherwise (Robillard, 2008). Practice demonstrates that in their daily activities teachers will find themselves being required a command of investigative skills and tools that they most often lack. We thus claim that the ‘intention to deceive’ cannot inevitably be dissociated from plagiarism as a legal issue, even if Garner (2009) asserts that generally plagiarism is immoral but not illegal, and Goldstein (2003) makes the same severance. However, these claims, and the claim that only cases of copyright infringement tend to go to court, have recently been challenged, mainly by forensic linguists, who have been actively involved in cases of plagiarism. Turell (2008), for instance, demonstrated that plagiarism is often connoted with an illegal appropriation of ideas. Previously, she (Turell, 2004) had demonstrated by comparison of four translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Spanish that the use of linguistic evidence is able to demonstrate instances of plagiarism. This challenge is also reinforced by practice in international organisations, such as the IEEE, to whom plagiarism potentially has ‘severe ethical and legal consequences’ (IEEE, 2006: 57). What plagiarism definitions used by publishers and organisations have in common – and which the academia usually lacks – is their focus on the legal nature. We speculate that this is due to the relation they intentionally establish with copyright laws, whereas in education the focus tends to shift from the legal to the ethical aspects. However, the number of plagiarism cases taken to court is very small, and jurisprudence is still being developed on the topic. In countries within the Civil Law tradition, Turell (2008) claims, (forensic) linguists are seldom called upon as expert witnesses in cases of plagiarism, either because plagiarists are rarely taken to court or because there is little tradition of accepting linguistic evidence. In spite of the investigative and evidential potential of forensic linguistics to demonstrate the plagiarist’s intention or otherwise, this potential is restricted by the ability to identify a text as being suspect of plagiarism. In an era with such a massive textual production, ‘policing’ plagiarism thus becomes an extraordinarily difficult task without the assistance of plagiarism detection systems. Although plagiarism detection has attracted the attention of computer engineers and software developers for years, a lot of research is still needed. Given the investigative nature of academic plagiarism, plagiarism detection has of necessity to consider not only concepts of education and computational linguistics, but also forensic linguistics. Especially, if intended to counter claims of being a ‘simplistic response’ (Robillard & Howard, 2008). In this paper, we use a corpus of essays written by university students who were accused of plagiarism, to demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of improper paraphrasing in suspect texts has the potential to identify and provide evidence of intention. A linguistic analysis of the corpus texts shows that the plagiarist acts on the paradigmatic axis to replace relevant lexical items with a related word from the same semantic field, i.e. a synonym, a subordinate, a superordinate, etc. In other words, relevant lexical items were replaced with related, but not identical, ones. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates that the word order is often changed intentionally to disguise the borrowing. On the other hand, the linguistic analysis of linking and explanatory verbs (i.e. referencing verbs) and prepositions shows that these have the potential to discriminate instances of ‘patchwriting’ and instances of plagiarism. This research demonstrates that the referencing verbs are borrowed from the original in an attempt to construct the new text cohesively when the plagiarism is inadvertent, and that the plagiarist has made an effort to prevent the reader from identifying the text as plagiarism, when it is intentional. In some of these cases, the referencing elements prove being able to identify direct quotations and thus ‘betray’ and denounce plagiarism. Finally, we demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of these verbs is critical to allow detection software to identify them as proper paraphrasing and not – mistakenly and simplistically – as plagiarism

A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Techniques for IoT Intrusion Detection

The digital transformation faces tremendous security challenges. In particular, the growing number of cyber-attacks targeting Internet of Things (IoT) systems restates the need for a reliable detection of malicious network activity. This paper presents a comparative analysis of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning techniques on nine malware captures of the IoT-23 dataset, considering both binary and multi-class classification scenarios. The developed models consisted of Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Isolation Forest (iForest), Local Outlier Factor (LOF) and a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model based on a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQIN), adapted to the intrusion detection context. The most reliable performance was achieved by LightGBM. Nonetheless, iForest displayed good anomaly detection results and the DRL model demonstrated the possible benefits of employing this methodology to continuously improve the detection. Overall, the obtained results indicate that the analyzed techniques are well suited for IoT intrusion detection.The present work was done and funded in the scope of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under project SeCoIIA (grant agreement no. 871967). This work has also received funding from UIDP/00760/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Genome-wide clonal variability in European pear “Rocha” using high-throughput sequencing

Pears (Pyrus) are one of the most economically important fruits worldwide. The Pyrus genus is characterized by a high degree of genetic variability between species and interspecific hybrids, and several studies have been performed to assess this variability for both cultivated and wild accessions. These studies have mostly been limited by the resolving power of traditional molecular markers, although in the recent past the availability of reference genome sequences or SNP arrays for pear have enhanced the capability of high-resolution genomics studies. These tools can also be applied to better understand the intra-varietal (or clonal) variability in pear. Here we report the first high resolution genomics analysis of a pear clonal population using whole genome sequencing (WGS). Results showed unique signatures for the accumulation of mutations and transposable element insertions in each clone, which are likely related to their history of propagation and cultivation. The nucleotide diversity remained low in the clonal collection with the exception of few genomic windows, suggesting that balancing selection may be occurring. These windows included mainly genes related to plant fertility. Regions with higher mutational load were partially associated with transcription factors, probably reflecting the distinctive phenotypes in the collection. The annotation of variants also revealed the theoretical disruption of relevant genes in pear. Taken together, the results from this study show that pear clones accumulate mutations differently, and that those mutations can play a role on pear phenotypes, meaning that the study of pear clonal populations can be relevant in genetic studies, mainly when comparing with traditional association studies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Estudo da floração da nogueira na região de Beja

Projecto nº 347 - Centro Hortofrutícola - Acção 8.1 do PO AGRO. Instituto Politécnico de Beja. Escola Superior Agrária, 2004.O estudo da floração da nogueira, remete-nos a um problema que se tem vindo a verificar ultimamente: desfasamentos da floração masculina e feminina, impedido as árvores de produzirem em quantidade e qualidade. Este projecto tem como principais objectivos obter dados relativos à floração masculina e feminina da nogueira, de modo a verificar-se a sua coincidência e precocidade. Este projecto visa ainda obter dados acerca da polinização cruzada. Neste trabalho serão apresentados e discutidos os resultados dos dados relativos à floração masculina e feminina de cultivares instaladas na região de Beja, mais precisamente no Monte da Raposinha e no Centro Horto – frutícola da ESAB, e ainda a comparação da floração da nogueira na região de Beja com a região de Múrcia em Espanha e com cultivares instaladas em França

Final year Lean projects: advantages for companies, students and academia

The Integrated Master Degree on Industrial Engineering and Management, from the Department of Production and Systems of University of Minho – Portugal, requires the development of an individual final project which is almost exclusively developed in an industrial context. The degree is awarded upon the successful development of an individual masters’ thesis which directly derives from one such project. The process is triggered by companies which make a general proposal based on specific industrial challenges. The proposal might simply identify the theme and require one or more students to collaborate with them. Many of these projects involve the Lean Production paradigm, which to be successfully implemented, needs a change of culture inside the company that is often promoted by the students themselves. From this partnership there are advantages for both sides: companies, students and academia. Some advantages for students are the opportunity to work in an industrial environment with different professionals, gain some experience, enrich the curriculum, apply and explore the knowledge acquired in the university, transform theories into practice, and develop/apply transversal competences, such as those of teamwork, project management, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication skills, etc. Additionally, students develop awareness for the importance of their professional life, entrepreneurial attitude, and initiative spirit, among others. Beyond the project achievements, such as monetary gains stemmed from shop floor improvements, companies renew their staff, bring new ideas and knowledge, reinforce the links with the university, conduct low cost R&D, uncover new challenges, etc. University and supervisors (academia) gain recognition, practical experience, gain access to case studies and practical examples for classes, and so on. This paper aims to discuss the gains achieved by companies, students and academia, resulting from these industrial projects, and also some drawbacks. These drawbacks are bypassed when healthy partnerships are established, so the paper concludes with some guidelines to achieve this. The methodology applied in this paper uses document analysis for data collection. With respect to data analysis it uses content analysis. The main source of information is a set of master thesis concluded between 2011 and 2013 (inclusive), supervised by some of the authors of this paper

Revisiting Vitis vinifera Subtilase Gene Family: A Possible Role in Grapevine Resistance against Plasmopara viticola

Subtilisin-like proteases, also known as subtilases, are a very diverse family of serine peptidases present in many organisms. In grapevine, there are hints of the involvement of subtilases in defense mechanisms, but their role is not yet understood. The first characterization of the subtilase gene family was performed in 2014. However, simultaneously, the grapevine genome was re-annotated and several sequences were re-annotated or retrieved. We have performed a re-characterization of this family in grapevine and identified 82 genes coding for 97 putative proteins, as result of alternative splicing. All the subtilases identified present the characteristic S8 peptidase domain and the majority of them also have a pro-domain I9 inhibitor, a protease-associated (PA) domain, and a signal peptide for targeting to the secretory pathway. Phylogenetic studies revealed six subtilase groups denominated VvSBT1 to VvSBT6. As several evidences have highlighted the participation of plant subtilases in response to biotic stimulus, we have investigated subtilase participation in grapevine resistance to Plasmopara viticola, the causative agent of downy mildew. Fourteen grapevine subtilases presenting either high homology to P69C from tomato, SBT3.3 from Arabidopsis thaliana or located near the Resistance to P. viticola (RPV) locus were selected. Expression studies were conducted in the grapevine-P. viticola pathosystem with resistant and susceptible cultivars. Our results may indicate that some of grapevine subtilisins are potentially participating in the defense response against this biotrophic oomycete.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio