A importância do uso do solo em planos municipais de adaptação e mitigação das alterações climáticas

Climate change requires an effective response in the current context. The scientific literature has been advocating adaptation and mitigation measures as possible solutions to the problem. This dissertation studies the weighting of land use in municipal climate change adaptation and mitigation plans and also assesses how these plans consider university campuses and their role in the climate transition. The documents analyzed refer to the municipalities of Aveiro (Portugal), Barcelona (Spain) and Lódz (Poland). For this purpose a 5-step methodology was identified. In the first step a literature review was carried out. In the second, the development of a methodology that allowed the analysis of climate laws and municipal plans for adaptation and mitigation to climate change, especially regarding the role of land use as an agent for adaptation to climate change. In the third, the weighting of land use in climate laws was analyzed. In the fourth phase, the municipal climate change adaptation and mitigation plans of the chosen municipalities were analyzed, how they weight land use issues and the role of university campuses as agents of transformation and adaptation. Finally, the fifth phase presents the discussion of results and conclusions. It is visible the use of some strategies and measures related to their use in municipal plans and their integration in climate laws. Still, it is concluded that the weighting of land use is still far from what is expected for the advantages it offers. The measure most addressed by both plans is the creation and implementation of green infrastructure in the municipalities. As for the university campuses it is highlighted the great importance they have in the innovation and implementation of green measures, although they are not given much importance in the development of the plans.As alterações climáticas exigem uma resposta eficaz no contexto atual. A literatura científica tem vindo a defender as medidas de adaptação e mitigação, como possíveis soluções para o problema. Esta dissertação estuda a ponderação do uso do solo nos planos municipais de adaptação e mitigação às alterações climáticas e ainda avaliar de que forma estes planos consideram os campus universitários e o seu papel na transição climática. Os documentos analisados referem-se aos municípios de Aveiro (Portugal), Barcelona (Espanha) e Lódz (Polónia). Para o efeito foi identificada uma metodologia que teve por base 5 etapas. Numa primeira etapa procedeu-se à revisão de literatura da especialidade. Na segunda, o desenvolvimento de uma metodologia que permitisse analisar as leis do clima e os planos municipais de adaptação e mitigação às alterações climáticas, em especial no que diz respeito ao papel do uso do solo como agente de adaptação às alterações climáticas. Na terceira, foi analisada a ponderação do uso dos solos nas leis do clima. Na quarta fase, foram analisados os planos municipais de adaptação e mitigação às alterações climáticas dos municípios escolhidos, o modo como ponderam as questões do uso do solo e o papel dos campus universitários como agentes de transformação e adaptação. Por fim, na quinta fase apresenta-se a discussão de resultados e as conclusões. É visível a utilização de algumas estratégias e medidas relacionadas com o seu uso nos planos municipais e sua integração nas leis do clima. Ainda assim, conclui-se que a ponderação do uso do solo está ainda longe do esperado, para as vantagens que ele oferece. A medida mais abordada por ambos os planos é a criação e implementação de infraestruturas verdes nos municípios. Quanto aos campus universitários salienta-se a grande importância que estes tem na inovação e implementação de medidas verdes, embora não lhes seja dada grande importância no desenvolvimento dos planos.Mestrado em Engenharia do Ambient

E-Government Interoperability Enterprise Architecture. Systematic Literature Review

Public administrations have been introducing innovations such as digital initiatives and those initiatives are related to interoperability between systems managed by different government agencies. Despite those efforts citizens and businesses are still claiming for better digital public services. To understand interoperability challenges, this paper presents a systematic literature review addressing 1) the levels of interoperability that must be considered in government services, 2) the key motivation for interoperability, and 3) the challenges in the e-government ecosystem. From 680 papers we selected 28 to conduct a deep analysis. As a result, we have identified three core interoperability layers: technical, semantic, and organizational. We also present e-government interoperability project challenges related with strategic, policy, technological and barriers, and common modeling language. On the other hand, using ArchiMate, we have identified the elements of the e-Government interoperability motivation layer and used them to test how Enterprise Architecture can manage e-Government interoperabilit

Sparse distributed representations as word embeddings for language understanding

Word embeddings are vector representations of words that capture semantic and syntactic similarities between them. Similar words tend to have closer vector representations in a N dimensional space considering, for instance, Euclidean distance between the points associated with the word vector representations in a continuous vector space. This property, makes word embeddings valuable in several Natural Language Processing tasks, from word analogy and similarity evaluation to the more complex text categorization, summarization or translation tasks. Typically state of the art word embeddings are dense vector representations, with low dimensionality varying from tens to hundreds of floating number dimensions, usually obtained from unsupervised learning on considerable amounts of text data by training and optimizing an objective function of a neural network. This work presents a methodology to derive word embeddings as binary sparse vectors, or word vector representations with high dimensionality, sparse representation and binary features (e.g. composed only by ones and zeros). The proposed methodology tries to overcome some disadvantages associated with state of the art approaches, namely the size of corpus needed for training the model, while presenting comparable evaluations in several Natural Language Processing tasks. Results show that high dimensionality sparse binary vectors representations, obtained from a very limited amount of training data, achieve comparable performances in similarity and categorization intrinsic tasks, whereas in analogy tasks good results are obtained only for nouns categories. Our embeddings outperformed eight state of the art word embeddings in word similarity tasks, and two word embeddings in categorization tasks.A designação word embeddings refere-se a representações vetoriais das palavras que capturam as similaridades semânticas e sintáticas entre estas. Palavras similares tendem a ser representadas por vetores próximos num espaço N dimensional considerando, por exemplo, a distância Euclidiana entre os pontos associados a estas representações vetoriais num espaço vetorial contínuo. Esta propriedade, torna as word embeddings importantes em várias tarefas de Processamento Natural da Língua, desde avaliações de analogia e similaridade entre palavras, às mais complexas tarefas de categorização, sumarização e tradução automática de texto. Tipicamente, as word embeddings são constituídas por vetores densos, de dimensionalidade reduzida. São obtidas a partir de aprendizagem não supervisionada, recorrendo a consideráveis quantidades de dados, através da otimização de uma função objetivo de uma rede neuronal. Este trabalho propõe uma metodologia para obter word embeddings constituídas por vetores binários esparsos, ou seja, representações vetoriais das palavras simultaneamente binárias (e.g. compostas apenas por zeros e uns), esparsas e com elevada dimensionalidade. A metodologia proposta tenta superar algumas desvantagens associadas às metodologias do estado da arte, nomeadamente o elevado volume de dados necessário para treinar os modelos, e simultaneamente apresentar resultados comparáveis em várias tarefas de Processamento Natural da Língua. Os resultados deste trabalho mostram que estas representações, obtidas a partir de uma quantidade limitada de dados de treino, obtêm performances consideráveis em tarefas de similaridade e categorização de palavras. Por outro lado, em tarefas de analogia de palavras apenas se obtém resultados consideráveis para a categoria gramatical dos substantivos. As word embeddings obtidas com a metodologia proposta, e comparando com o estado da arte, superaram a performance de oito word embeddings em tarefas de similaridade, e de duas word embeddings em tarefas de categorização de palavras

Radioisótopos e sociedade : o legado de Marie Curie 100 anos depois

No ano em que se comemora o centenário da atribuição do Prémio Nobel da Química a Marie Curie e o Ano Internacional da Química, é oportuno recordar e analisar a herança deixada à Humanidade por esta cientista excepcional. Trata-se de um legado que não só revolucionou a ciência como igualmente teve impactos profundos e incontornáveis na sociedade. A aplicação clínica dos radioisótopos, por ela e por Pierre Curie preconizada, constitui uma das armas mais poderosas para o combate ao cancro actualmente disponíveis

Towards Secure, Decentralized, and Automatic Audits With Blockchain

Organizations are testing the potential of blockchain technology in different areas, bringing implications to record-keeping and the associated business processes, namely audits. Permissioned, private blockchain frameworks can contribute to the processes behind audits by (i) alleviating auditor’s work, (ii) hindering fraud and collusion between organizations and auditors, (iii) promote synergies between organizations and their stakeholders, and (iv) protecting access to sensitive information. This paper studies the use of blockchain technology as an enhancer of secure, distributed, and more automatized audits. The proposed solution uses a permissioned, consortium, blockchain to store audit logs. The blockchain is then leveraged to perform distributed and automatic audits over the recorded logs, aiming to reduce costs associated with audits. In particular, the solution is based on a 4-layer architecture: data acquisition, data transfer, data audit, and data analysis & storage layers. The evaluation shows that the proposed solution is secure and can save and analyse up to around 30 audit log entries per second

Development of Plasmonic Nanosandwiches for Biosensing Applications

Structures composed of two gold disks with different diameters and separated by a thin alumina layer were studied for protein biodetection. The small top disk will be used as the biosensing element since it has a shorter decay length (and thus, it has a higher sensitivity) whereas the big bottom one will give a high signal due to its bigger interaction with light. The interaction between both disks will happen through plasmon hybridisation. The samples were prepared using colloidal lithography and material deposition was made through an electron beam assisted evaporation system. A fabrication method was developed to spatially isolate the bottom disk from the sensing medium to fully exploit the small disk’s higher sensitivity. Sample’s characterisation consisted in a morphologic analysis by scanning electronic microscopy (SEM), the optical response was studied experimentally and by finite-domain time-difference (FDTD) simulations and also the electric field distribution was analysed in three types of structures. Structures with the upper disk centred relative to the lower disk and at the edge of it. The oxide’s thickness effect was studied (3 and 6 nm). The low energy peak is mainly given by a plasmonic gap dipole mode, whereas as the high energy peak is given by a contribution from a gap mode and the structure’s overall net dipole. The structure with a smaller separation and the top disk centre regarding the bottom disk was found to have a higher electric field enhancement around it and should be the one to be used as a biosensor

Heuristics’ Library for Programs, Projects and Portfolios alignment

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a tool that captures what is essential to business, Information Technology and its evolution. It focuses on the relationship between business processes, information sharing and technology infrastructures within an organization. With this, the need to align and evaluate, through strategy and objectives, strategic planning of organizations in the EA with the implementation of project portfolio is a complex challenge. Thus, in this research, we survey and apply metrics, patterns, and principles of the EA, as well as heuristics. All of them enable the measurement of quality attributes in the EA to which it must respond to be accepted. This article proposes an approach that allow the evaluation of the alignment between the portfolio and the strategy in the context of EA, within an organization, through a library of heuristics, created in ArchiMate. The proposed solution will be demonstrated when applied to a government organization

Comparison of Commercial and Open-Source CFD Solvers on Surface Tension Dominated Flows

Problems involving multiphase flows require a physical understanding of how the phenomenadevelop and the specific interactions they manifest. For surface tension relevant flows, suchas bubbles and droplets, the importance of modelling and predicting small-scale behaviouris crucial in accurately defining the liquid-gas interface and complex interactions that may takeplace. Axisymmetric numerical simulations of single droplets impacting onto thin liquid films areperformed using commercial and open-source CFD codes. ANSYS Fluent®is the commercialsoftware employed, whereas Basilisk is the open-source CFD solver adopted. The incompress-ible Navier-Stokes equations are coupled and handled differently throughout each software.A solution-adaptive mesh refinement tool is adopted to reduce computational cost. Softwarecomparison is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, namely crown height and outerdiameter measurements, and the crown curvature and occurrence of splashing, respectively.Results show that Basilisk simulations are in good agreement with the experimental data. Fluent follows the tendency for the crown outer diameter however, in terms of height, the modelunder-predicts its growth and collapses at later stages of the impact for lower thicknessesFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologiainfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio