Knowledge management framework based on brain models and human physiology

The life of humans and most living beings depend on sensation and perception for the best assessment of the surrounding world. Sensorial organs acquire a variety of stimuli that are interpreted and integrated in our brain for immediate use or stored in memory for later recall. Among the reasoning aspects, a person has to decide what to do with available information. Emotions are classifiers of collected information, assigning a personal meaning to objects, events and individuals, making part of our own identity. Emotions play a decisive role in cognitive processes as reasoning, decision and memory by assigning relevance to collected information. The access to pervasive computing devices, empowered by the ability to sense and perceive the world, provides new forms of acquiring and integrating information. But prior to data assessment on its usefulness, systems must capture and ensure that data is properly managed for diverse possible goals. Portable and wearable devices are now able to gather and store information, from the environment and from our body, using cloud based services and Internet connections. Systems limitations in handling sensorial data, compared with our sensorial capabilities constitute an identified problem. Another problem is the lack of interoperability between humans and devices, as they do not properly understand human’s emotional states and human needs. Addressing those problems is a motivation for the present research work. The mission hereby assumed is to include sensorial and physiological data into a Framework that will be able to manage collected data towards human cognitive functions, supported by a new data model. By learning from selected human functional and behavioural models and reasoning over collected data, the Framework aims at providing evaluation on a person’s emotional state, for empowering human centric applications, along with the capability of storing episodic information on a person’s life with physiologic indicators on emotional states to be used by new generation applications

Parc#: parallel computing with c# in .net

This paper describes experiments with the development of a parallel computing platform on top of a compatible C# implementation: the Mono project. This implementation has the advantage of running on both Windows and UNIX platforms and has reached a stable state. This paper presents performance results obtained and compares these results with implementations in Java/RMI. The results show that the Mono network performance, critical for parallel applications, has greatly improved in recent releases, that it is superior to the Java RMI and is close to the performance of the new Java nio package. The Mono virtual machine is not yet so highly tuned as the Sun JVM and Thread scheduling needs to be improved. Overall, this platform is a new alternative to explore in the future for parallel computing(undefined

Creation of value with open source software in the telecommunications field

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

AutoOC: Automated multi-objective design of deep autoencoders and one-class classifiers using grammatical evolution

One-Class Classification (OCC) corresponds to a subclass of unsupervised Machine Learning (ML) that is valuable when labeled data is non-existent. In this paper, we present AutoOC, a computationally efficient Grammatical Evolution (GE) approach that automatically searches for OCC models. AutoOC assumes a multi-objective optimization, aiming to increase the OCC predictive performance while reducing the ML training time. AutoOC also includes two execution speedup mechanisms, a periodic training sampling, and a multi-core fitness evaluation. In particular, we study two AutoOC variants: a pure Neuroevolution (NE) setup that optimizes two types of deep learning models, namely dense Autoencoder (AE) and Variational Autoencoder (VAE); and a general Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) ALL setup that considers five distinct OCC base learners, specifically Isolation Forest (IF), Local Outlier Factor (LOF), One-Class SVM (OC-SVM), AE and VAE. Several experiments were conducted, using eight public OpenML datasets and two validation scenarios (unsupervised and supervised). The results show that AutoOC requires a reasonable amount of execution time and tends to obtain lightweight OCC models. Moreover, AutoOC provides quality predictive results, outperforming a baseline IF for all analyzed datasets and surpassing the best supervised OpenML human modeling for two datasets.- (undefined

JaSkel: a java skeleton-based framework for structured cluster and grid computing

This paper presents JaSkel, a skeleton-based framework to develop parallel and grid applications. The framework provides a set of Java abstract classes as a skeleton catalogue, which implements recurring parallel interaction paradigms. This approach aims to improve code efficiency and portability. It also helps to structure scalable applications through the refinement and composition of skeletons. Evaluation results show that using the provided skeletons do contribute to improve both application development time and execution performanceFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - PPC-VM Project(POSI/CHS/47158/2002); Project SeARCH (contract REEQ/443/2001)

Financiamento das pequenas e médias empresas: análise das empresas do distrito do Porto em Portugal

ABSTRACTFinancing of small and medium-sized companies: analysis of companies from Porto District, PortugalIn this article, the purpose is to know and analyze the more used products and financing forms by small and medium companies in the district of Porto, in Portugal. The aim is also to realize the acceptability and the propensity for use of alternative forms of financing and understand what the companies’ difficulties to access credit are. The method used is quantitative and exploratory, with a survey sent to 1,600 companies in the district of Porto, about the different ways of financing used by organizations. The results indicate that bank credit is the main source of financing for small and medium companies, followed by self-financing. The financing by issuing stocks and bonds is residual. The results show three important factors when companies need to finance up: the company’s growth, the cost of borrowing and bureaucratic aspects. Despite the exploratory characteristic of this study, the three factors found are a contribution to the study on the financing of small and medium companies, deserving attention from investors, managers and equity holders

A matemática e o jogo: Influência no rendimento escolar

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências da Educação especialidade em Educação e DesenvolvimentoAlunos do 1ºCEB participaram num estudo para determinar a eficácia de práticas pedagógicas baseadas numa abordagem com jogos didácticos. Estes alunos foram separados em dois grupos. Uma parte dos alunos submeteu-se a actividades com jogos didácticos. Este tornou-se o grupo de estudo. Quando se iniciou o estudo, os alunos foram submetidos a um teste de Matemática baseado no programa oficial. Este teste serviu como pré-teste. Todos os alunos prosseguiram com as aulas, mas o grupo de estudo recebeu adicionalmente actividades com jogos didácticos como tratamento experimental por um período de 5 semanas. No final desse período, todos os alunos foram submetidos a outro teste de Matemática, desta vez servido de pós-teste. A análise dos grupos demonstrou um aumento estatisticamente significativo, acima dos 13%, nas classificações do grupo de estudo sobre o grupo de controlo

A influência de John Dunning na investigação em estratégia e negócios internacionais: um estudo bibliométrico no Strategic Management Journal

O objectivo deste artigo é analisar a contribuição de John Dunning, na investigação em estratégia e negócios internacionais. Para este estudo, procedemos à análise dos artigos publicados por Dunning e a um estudo bibliométrico no Strategic Management Journal, no período entre 1980 e 2009. Verificamos que além da influência na disciplina de negócios internacionais, a influência de Dunning se estende a teorias e conceitos para além desta. Em particular, revelam-se as ligações com a visão baseada nos recursos, a teoria dos custos de transacção, a teoria evolucionista e mais genericamente com a teoria da empresa multinacional

O DIREITO DE PROPRIEDADE E A PROTEÇÃO LEGAL DAS FLORESTAS.

O presente artigo tem por finalidade enaltecer que a proteção jurídica das florestas insere-se na função social do direito de propriedade, limitando-o, impondo ao proprietário a obrigação de garantir à sociedade os benefícios de um meio ambiente sadio nos termos da Constituição Federal e do Código Florestal