Growth, Reform Indicators and Policy Complementaries

This paper discusses the design of structural policies by relating second-best results and the complementarity of reforms. It computes a complementarity index based on structural reform indicators compiled by the EBRD for transition countries, assuming that the run-up to EU integration corresponds to a nearly complete policy cycle. Using econometric panel estimates, the level of reforms and changes in their complementarity are found to be positively related to output growth, corrected for endogeneity, and given initial conditions and the extent of macroeconomic stabilisation.

Growth, Reform indicators and Policy complementarities

This paper discusses the design of structural policies by relating second-best results and the complementarity of reforms. It computes a complementarity index based on structural reform indicators compiled by the EBRD for transition countries, assuming that the run-up to EU integration corresponds to a nearly complete policy cycle. Using econometric panel estimates, the level of reforms and changes in their complementarity are found to be positively related to output growth, corrected for endogeneity, and given initial conditions and the extent of macroeconomic stabilisation.

Growth, Reform Indicators and Policy Complementarities.

In order to assess the growth implications of policy complementarities, this paper applies second-best results to reform indicators. During the transition from central planning to EU integration, which corresponds to a policy cycle, a complementarity index based on structural indicators compiled by the European Bank for Reconstruc- tion and Development (EBRD) decreases and then increases while the level of reforms tends to rise throughout. Corrected for initial conditions, the extent of macroeconomic stabilization and endogeneity, the level of reforms and changes in their complementarity are found to be positively related to output growth. The study uses panel data for 27 countries between 1989 and 2004.Second-best; complementarity; structural reforms; reform indicators; economic growth; transition; panel data;

GeoCensus: extracção de informação geográfica da Web

O sistema GeoCensus tem como objectivo a extracção de informação geográfica da Web. Através da colecta exaustiva (para já apenas uma amostra significativa) de páginas Web existentes em Portugal, o sistema localiza geograficamente os servidores que hospedam as páginas colectadas. A localização geográfica das páginas pode ser realizada usando diferentes fontes de informação, nomeadamente a localização geográfica dos servidores Web que hospedam as páginas, os nomes geográficos extraídos do seu conteúdo e a localização geográfica das páginas adjacentes na topologia da Web. Estas fontes diferentes de evidência geográfica podem ser usadas, de forma combinada ou isolada, para localizar geograficamente as audiências das páginas (público alvo). A utilização de diferentes fontes de informação permite uma maior abrangência do sistema de localização geográfica, uma vez que uma grande parte das páginas não têm informação geográfica explícita ou apresentam poucos relacionamentos (nós de entrada e saída) na topologia da Web. Desta forma, a localização duma página pode ser determinada quer pela informação explícita que contém, quer pelas relações que estabelece na topologia Web (páginas que referencia ou em que é referenciada) e também pela localização geográfica do servidor Web em que está hospedada. Caso as diferentes fontes de evidência existam, a sua combinação pode permitir aumentar o eficácia do sistema. Este artigo apresenta o sistema GeoCensus, descrevendo os diversos componentes que integram a sua arquitectura e ainda as diferentes tecnologias utilizadas na sua concretização. São ainda sistematizadas as diversas heurísticas para cálculo estimado do âmbito geográfico das páginas. Para já, é apenas explorada a localização geográfica dos servidores que hospedam as páginas e as ligações entre as páginas estabelecidas pelas referências. São apresentados resultados ilustrativos com toda a informação necessária para o cálculo do âmbito geográfico das páginas

Recolha e análise de dados de contactos físicos e sociais numa rede tolerante a atrasos

As redes tolerantes a atrasos surgiram com o propósito de abordar o problema de comunicação em redes onde a ligação é intermitente e feita através de contactos oportunistas. Um caso particular destas redes são aquelas em que os nós são dispositivos transportados por pessoas, as Pocket Switch Networks. A relação social entre os nós tem sido recentemente explorada na decisão de encaminhamento neste tipo de redes.Neste trabalho, foi concebido um sistema de recolha de dados dos contactos físicos e sociais numa RTA com o objetivo de avaliar uma nova métrica social a ser usada na decisão de encaminhamento

Internet of things for medication control: service implementation and testing

RFID technology (Radio Frequency IDentification) enables putting an identification label (e.g. tag) into a certain object and, by means of a reader, get the information related to it without any physical contact. The use of these tags in medical context enables a rapid and precise identification of each patient and, by means of Internet of Things (IoT), enables a ubiquitous and quick access to medical related records. These technologies, RFID and IoT, integrated within a suitable system, promote a better physician-patient interaction. A simple IoT-enabled system can send warnings to any physician, nurse or other health caregiver. Therefore, with a simple IoT architecture one may remotely monitor and control the patient's well being. This paper presents an IoT architecture, using RFID tags, able to easily and remotely establish a medication control system, beginning from physicians prescription to pharmaceutical drug administration. This paper presents the implementation and analysis of a prototype service, with a web interface, allowing for a first evaluation of the proposed service. The prototype service - based on RFID, EPC (Electronic Product Code) and ONS (Object Name Service) - and its web interface are presented and evaluated. Some use cases are presented and evaluated using this prototype service entitled "RFID-based IoT for medication control".Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Internet of things for medication control: e-health architecture and service implementation

The use of Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) in medical context enables drug identification but also a rapid and, of course, precise identification of patients, physicians, nurses or any other health caregiver. Combining RFID tag identification with structured and secure Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, one can establish a ubiquitous and quick access to any type of medical related records, as long as one can control and adequately secure all the Internet mediated interactions. This paper presents an e-Health service architecture, along with the corresponding Internet of Things prototype implementation, that makes use of RFID tags and Electronic Product Codes (EPC) standards, in order to easily establish in a ubiquitous manner a medication control system. The system, presented and tested, has a web interface and allowed for a first evaluation of the e-health proposed service. As the service is mainly focused on elderly Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions, all these technologies - RFID, EPC, Object Naming Service (ONS) and IoT – have been integrated into a suitable system, able to promote better patient/physician, patient/nurse and, generally, any patient/health caregiver, interactions. The whole prototype service, entitled "RFID-based IoT for Medication Control", and its web interface are presented and evaluated.FEDER Funds through the Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade – COMPETE and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-02267

Use of Co-occurrences for temporal expressions annotation

The annotation or extraction of temporal information from text documents is becoming increasingly important in many natural language processing applications such as text summarization, information retrieval, question answering, etc.. This paper presents an original method for easy recognition of temporal expressions in text documents. The method creates semantically classified temporal patterns, using word co-occurrences obtained from training corpora and a pre-defined seed keywords set, derived from the used language temporal references. A participation on a Portuguese named entity evaluation contest showed promising effectiveness and efficiency results. This approach can be adapted to recognize other type of expressions or languages, within other contexts, by defining the suitable word sets and training corpora.FC

A countermeasure approach for brute-force timing attacks on cache privacy in named data networking architectures

One key feature of named data networks (NDN) is supporting in-network caching to increase the content distribution for today’s Internet needs. However, previously cached contents may be threatened by side-channel timing measurements/attacks. For example, one adversary can identify previously cached contents by distinguishing between uncached and cached contents from the in-network caching node, namely the edge NDN router. The attacks can be mitigated by the previously proposed methods effectively. However, these countermeasures may be against the NDN paradigm, affecting the content distribution performance. This work studied the side-channel timing attack on streaming over NDN applications and proposed a capable approach to mitigate it. Firstly, a recent side-channel timing attack, designated by brute-force, was implemented on ndnSIM using the AT&T network topology. Then, a multi-level countermeasure method, designated by detection and defense (DaD), is proposed to mitigate this attack. Simulation results showed that DaD distinguishes between legitimate and adversary nodes. During the attack, the proposed DaD multi-level approach achieved the minimum cache hit ratio (≈0.7%) compared to traditional countermeasures (≈4.1% in probabilistic and ≈3.7% in freshness) without compromising legitimate requests.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

Energy impact analysis on DTN routing protocols

In this paper, a mechanism designed and implemented on a simulator module is used to study the energy consumption of a network node in a DTN. The mechanism accounts energy consumption in transmission and reception of a message and also in neighboring nodes discovery. These are routine operations performed by nodes as cell phones or PDAs that traditionally integrate the Delay Tolerant Networks. This module includes a battery recharging option, which makes the simulation environment more realistic. The energy module enables the study of the energy consumption impact on the routing protocols used by Delay Tolerant Networks. The experimental results show that, when energy consumption is considered, the optimal operating parameters of the protocols change substantially. As the search for neighboring nodes is mainly responsible for the energy consumption of the nodes, the design of new protocols whose strategy is based only on the reduction of messages exchanged may have little impact in terms of actual network performance.FC