Towards an academic social network for Bologna process

The Bologna Process aimed to build a European Higher Education Area promoting student's mobility. The adoption of Bologna Declaration directives requires a self management distributed approach to deal with student's mobility, allowing frequent updates in institutions rules or legislation. This paper suggests a computational system architecture, which follows a social network design. A set of structured annotations is proposed in order to organize the user's information. For instance, when the user is a student its annotations are organized into an academic record. The academic record data is used to discover interests, namely mobility interests, among students that belongs the academic network. These ideas have been applied into a demonstrator that includes a mobility simulator to compare and show the student's academic evolution

A student personal system for bologna process mobility

The Bologna Process aimed to build a European Higher Education Area with the objective of promoting students mobility. The adoption of Bologna Declaration directives requires a decentralized approach that accelerates student's mobility, based on frequently updated legislation. This paper proposes a student personal system to manage student's academic information. This system is supported by a flexible model that integrates, for instance, knowledge about the student attended courses or about a course that the student wishes to apply. Essentially, this model holds a (i) Student's Academic Record with skills acquired in academic course units, professional experience or training and an (ii) Individual Studies Plan, which places the student in a particular (iii) Course Plan setting the curricular structure that the student wishes to apply

Academic social network in EHES

This paper presents the foundations of an Academic Social Network (ASN) focusing the Bologna Declaration and the Bologna Process (BP) mobility issues using ontological support. An ASN will permit students to share commons academic interests, preferences and mobility paths in the European Higher Education Space (EHES). The description of the conceptual support is ontology based allowing knowledge sharing and reuse. An approach is presented by merging Academic Ontology to Support the Bologna Mobility Process with Friend of a Friend ontology. The resulting ontology supports the student mobility profile in the ASN. The strategies to make available, in the network, knowledge about mobility issues, are presented including knowledge discovery and simulation approaches to cover student's mobility scenarios for BP

Reputation as a service

In this research work, we introduce the concept of a reputation service to evaluate user collaboration towards community or system goal. Online reputation mechanisms allow members of a community to submit their opinions (feedback) regarding other community members and their publication activity. Submitted opinions are analyzed, aggregated with feedback posted by other members and made publicly available to the community in the form of member feedback profiles. We propose a conceptual system that can be used in several contexts, namely in our public transportation recommender system developed in the framework of the European Project START

Integra system

The current work deals with the scenario of growing population in the cities and the associated sustainable mobility problems. To address this problem it is developed an system called INTEGRA for a mobile device, based on the integration from different data sources such as multi-modal public transportation systems, car and bike sharing. This system is able to show and give guidance towards points of interests (POI) and promote a social collaborative network for the share of notations towards POI classification. This work is a contribution for the European Project START, where we propose the Integra System. This system’s goal is to make travel easy and sustainable improving information systems integration. This goal is shared by transport operators and authorities associated to the Integra registered brand, promoted by the START consortium, that is already prepared for UK, France, Spain and Portugal

Social Mobility Advisor

Seamless access to updated information about mobility options is a key factor for sustainable economic development. In this context, the adoption of information systems, with innovative features, meet these needs by stimulating the interest and curiosity of end users. There are well known difficulties, even for regular travelers, to get the most suitable mobility options combining available transport modes. Also, the sustainable mobility has become the new imperative for transport policy. In this paper we present a collaborative platform that supports a Social Network, in which users can search and share sustainable mobility experiences. This platform includes a reputation and a recommender systems specially designed to deal with mobility options

Cloud terminals for ticketing systems

In this research work, we introduce the concept of a thin device implemented on a cloud platform for terminal devices on the front end of ticketing systems. Therefore, we propose the evolution of the traditional architecture of ticketing for a cloud based architecture in which the core processes of ticketing are offered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, which can be subscribed by transport operators that pay-per-use. Ticketing terminal devices (e.g., gates, validators, vending machines) are integrated in the cloud environment creating the concept for a ‘thin’ device. This approach is achieved by moving business logic from terminals to the cloud. Each terminal is registered to be managed by each own operator, configuring a multi-tenancy implementation which is vendor hardware independent, allowing to address elasticity and interoperability issues. The elasticity of the cloud will support the expansion/implosion of small (transport) operators business around electronic ticketing. In the near future, this ticketing solution will promote collaboration between operators

Recommender system for drivers of electric vehicles

Being the next big step in automobile industry, electric vehicles continue to have limited autonomy which associated with the long charging times, limited charging stations and undeveloped smart grid infrastructure demands for a hard planning of the daily use of the vehicle. This paper presents an information system that will help the driver in the daily use of his electric vehicle, minimizing the problem of range anxiety thru the continuous control of the vehicle range and presenting in time relevant information about the charging stations within reach. Given the success of recommendation systems on automatically delivering the relevant information in numerous areas of usage, it can be applied in this scenario as well as with the objective of maximizing the relevance of the information presented to the driver, which should be the strictly needed for him to make his decisions filtering out the unnecessary one.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Taas – ticketing as a service

The goal of this research work is to introduce the concept of a lower cost flexible system for ticketing purposes implemented on a cloud platform. We propose therefore the evolution of the traditional architecture of ticketing for a cloud based architecture in which the core processes of ticketing are offered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, which can be subscribed by operators that pay-per-use. Ticketing terminal equipment (e.g. gates, validators, vending machines) are integrated in the cloud environment. This approach is achieved by moving business logic from terminals to the cloud. Each terminal is registered to be managed by each own operator, configuring a multi-tenant implementation which is vendor hardware independent, allowing to address elasticity and interoperability issues. The elasticity of the cloud will support the expansion/implosion of small (transport) operators business around electronic ticketing. In the near future, this ticketing solution will promote collaboration between transport operators

Avaliação de dimensões psicológicas nos comportamentos de exercício e actividade física em estudantes universitários : características psicométricas de medidas de atitudes e estados de humor associados à prática desportiva

Apesar dos benefícios da evidência para os benefícios do exercício e da actividade física, nomeadamente nos estados de humor e afectivos, a investigação actual evidencia que o número de indivíduos envolvidos na sua prática, de uma forma regular e sistemática, é ainda insuficiente, encontrando-se ainda longe dos valores recomendados e/ou desejáveis. Entre outras dimensões psicológicas, as atitudes face ao exercício parecem constituir um factor central e determinante em tal envolvimento e prática. No âmbito de um projecto de investigação longitudinal mais vasto, em curso na Universidade do Minho, apresentam-se dados preliminares da avaliação das atitudes face ao exercício e dos estados de humor associados à prática de exercício físico, junto de uma amostra inicial de mais de 1.800 jovens estudantes universitários (1º ano), de todos os cursos da Universidade do Minho. Os participantes no estudo constituem assim uma amostra significativa de jovens estudantes em plena transição académica e no início do seu novo ciclo de estudos (ensino superior). Esta apresentação tem como objectivo central a análise de resultados preliminares relativos às propriedades psicométricas (e.g., estrutura factorial, consistência interna e validade), de dois instrumentos de avaliação psicológica que integram a “Escala de Comportamentos e Atitudes Face ao Exercício Físico” utilizada neste projecto de investigação (Cruz & Gomes, 2006): a “Escala de Atitudes Face ao Exercício” (EAFE) e uma versão portuguesa do “Profile of Mood States – POMS” (McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1981; Cruz & Mota, 1997). Tais resultados parecem evidenciar as boas características psicométricas de ambos os instrumentos, fornecendo apoio adicional para a utilidade e validade do seu uso no domínio da Psicologia do Desporto, do Exercício e da Saúde, em geral. Adicionalmente, enfatizam-se e discutem-se, entre outras, as diferenças observadas entre praticantes e não praticantes de exercício regular, bem como as vantagens e benefícios da implementação de programas de promoção do exercício e actividade física junto da população universitária