The globalisation in the clothing sector and its implications for work organisation: a view from the Portuguese case

The clothing sector in Portugal is still seen, in many aspects as a traditional sector with some average characteristics, such as: low level of qualifications, less flexible labour legislation and stronger unionisation, very low salaries and low capability of investment in innovation and new technology. Is, nevertheless, a very important sector in terms of labour market, with increased weight in the exporting structure. Globalisation and delocalisation are having a strong impact in the organisation of work and in occupational careers in the sector. With the pressure of global competitiveness in what concerns time and prices, very few companies are able to keep a position in the market without changes in organisation of work and workers. And those that can perform good responses to such challenges are achieving a better economical stability. The companies have found different ways to face this reality according to size, capital and position. We could find two main paths: one where companies outsource a part or the entire production to another territory (for example, several manufacturing tasks), close and/or dismissal the workers. Other path, where companies up skilled their capacities investing, for example, in design, workers training, conception and introduction of new or original products. This paper will present some results from the European project WORKS – Work organisation and restructuring in the knowledge society (6th Framework Programme), focusing the Portuguese case studies in several clothing companies in what concern implications of global context for the companies in general and for the workers in particular, in a comparative analysis with some other European countries.Clothing Industry; Restructuring; Work; Knowledge Society

Futures of automobile industry and challenges on sustainable development and mobility

Portugal had only very few foresight exercises on the automobile sector, and the most recent one was a survey held in a project on work organisation systems in the automobile industry, its recent historical paths and the special strategies of location of companies (the WorTiS project). This involved several teams with different disciplinary backgrounds and from two Portuguese universities. The provisional main results of the first round of a Delphi survey held in Portugal on the automotive sector were already published, but a further analysis was not yet done. This foresight survey was done under the WorTiS project, developed in 2004 by IET – Research Centre on Enterprise and Work Innovation (at FCT-UNL), and financed by the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology. Some of this experience on foresight analysis is also been transferred to other projects, namely the WORKS project on work organisation restructuring in the knowledge society that received the support from EC and still is running. The majority of experts considered having an average of less knowledge in almost all the scenario topics presented. This means that information on the automotive industry is not spread enough among academics or experts in related fields (regional scientists, innovation economists, engineers, sociologists). Some have a good knowledge but in very specialised fields. Others have expertise on foresight, or macroeconomics, or management sciences, but feel insecure on issues related with futures of automobile sector. Nevertheless, we considered specially the topics where the experts considered themselves to have some knowledge. There were no “irrelevant” topics considered as such by the expert panel. There are also no topics that are not considered a need for co-operation. The lack of technological infrastructures was not considered as a hindered factor for the accomplishment of any scenario. The experts’ panel considered no other international competence besides US, Japan or Germany in these topics. Special focus will be made in this paper on the topic 2. Public policy and automobile industries, and more specifically on the technological and/or research policies issues, where one can specify the automobile’s role in transport policies with further implications like environment, safety, energy, mobility.automotive industry; scenario; economical co-operation; technology; Delphi survey

Automatic characterization and generation of music loops and instrument samples for electronic music production

Repurposing audio material to create new music - also known as sampling - was a foundation of electronic music and is a fundamental component of this practice. Currently, large-scale databases of audio offer vast collections of audio material for users to work with. The navigation on these databases is heavily focused on hierarchical tree directories. Consequently, sound retrieval is tiresome and often identified as an undesired interruption in the creative process. We address two fundamental methods for navigating sounds: characterization and generation. Characterizing loops and one-shots in terms of instruments or instrumentation allows for organizing unstructured collections and a faster retrieval for music-making. The generation of loops and one-shot sounds enables the creation of new sounds not present in an audio collection through interpolation or modification of the existing material. To achieve this, we employ deep-learning-based data-driven methodologies for classification and generation.Repurposing audio material to create new music - also known as sampling - was a foundation of electronic music and is a fundamental component of this practice. Currently, large-scale databases of audio offer vast collections of audio material for users to work with. The navigation on these databases is heavily focused on hierarchical tree directories. Consequently, sound retrieval is tiresome and often identified as an undesired interruption in the creative process. We address two fundamental methods for navigating sounds: characterization and generation. Characterizing loops and one-shots in terms of instruments or instrumentation allows for organizing unstructured collections and a faster retrieval for music-making. The generation of loops and one-shot sounds enables the creation of new sounds not present in an audio collection through interpolation or modification of the existing material. To achieve this, we employ deep-learning-based data-driven methodologies for classification and generation

Síntese, simulação e a internet

A síntese de imagem a partir descrições tridimensionais de ambientes virtuais, ou até de simples objectos, é um campo fascinante tanto para os investigadores da área como para o público em geral. A animação e a possibilidade de interagir com ambientes virtuais é certamente responsável por uma grande fatia deste fascínio. As aplicações derivadas da sintetização e simulação são extraordinariamente abrangentes e tem tido um sucesso impensável há uma década atrás, verificando-se que a industria do entretenimento ocupa naturalmente um lugar de destaque nesta lista. Os jogos de computador, cinema e televisão são talvez as áreas onde a sintetização e simulação é mais visível. A cultura, a ciência, o ensino, e o comércio electrónico são também áreas de potencial aplicação deste paradigma. Nestes casos a Internet é potencialmente um dos veículos de eleição para a disseminação de informação. No entanto, na Internet nem sempre se verificou essa tendência. De facto verifica-se que a utilização de gráficos tridimensionais (3D) na I. tem tido uma reputação negativa para o público em geral. Propõe-se aqui analisar o percurso deste meio no contexto da I. de forma a averiguar quais as causas desta reputação. Para terminar num tom positivo serão apresentados alguns exemplos interessantes da utilização deste paradigma de comunicação, assim como alguns casos de sucesso que podem ter um papel importante na reabilitação do 3D e consequente generalização da sua utilização

Robust reconstruction of 3D points from images

This paper presents a robust approach for 3D point recon- struction based on a set of images taken from a static scene with known, but not necessarily exact or regular, camera parameters. The points to be reconstructed are chosen from the contours of images, and a world-based formulationof the reconstruction problem and associated epipolar geom- etry is used. The result is a powerful mean of transpar- ently integrating contributions from multiple images, and increased robustness to situations such as occlusions or ap- parent contours. Two steps for adding robustness are pro- posed:cross-checking, which validates a reconstructed point taken from an image by projecting it on a special subset of the remaining images; andmerging, which fuses pairs of re- constructed points that are close in 3D space and that were initially chosen from different images. Results obtained with a synthetic scene (for ground truth comparison and error assessment), and two real scenes show the improved robustness achieved with the steps proposed

Exploring alternative devices for blind users

The ability to take advantage of the information society is becoming a must for everyone. Computer literacy is becoming more and more important for individuals as well as corporations. Therefore no efforts must be spared to integrate everyone in this new and exciting development. If for non-disabled persons this can be a challenge, for certain types of disabilities the effort of adaptation is huge. In this paper we focus on blind users. One of the current alternatives for blind users is based on specific hardware that tends to be limited in features and expansibility or very expensive. The other alternative is PC based software. This latest option, although very powerful, has also several disadvantages, namely the lack of practical mobility. In this paper we present a new approach, the PalmPCs. PalmPCs are a cheap alternative compared to the hardware mentioned above, they are truly mobile, and they are widely available today. We argue that software can be written for these devices that satisfies the needs of the majority of the blind users. A small application for WindowsCE is presented in which the interface was specifically designed for blind users.Secretariado Nacional para a Reabilitação e Integração das Pessoas com Deficiência - Programa CITE IV

GParticles: a flexible GPU-based particle library

Particle systems are widely used to create visual effects with a large number of elements (or particles). Earlier works were CPU based, while recent developments use the GPU to take advantage of the fact that, in most cases, particles are independent entities. In here, we propose a GPU-based library that focuses on extensibility and ease of use. The library allows for virtually any particle logic to be implemented, supporting fully programmable shader based effects, facilitating the definition of multiple resources and providing full control over the particle system’s simulation execution. Projects can be easily specified using XML, and extended via shaders and stubs, C functions that can be executed in between particle system’s processing stages. The examples presented illustrate the potential of the API, with multiple particle systems acting in a sequence, later extended to create custom graphic effects.COMPETE: POCI-01- 0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundaçãao para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/201

Testing AudioBrowser

We are developing AudioBrowser, a browser for visually impaired users. This paper presents a usability analysis study that was carried out on the first version of the browser. Due to the lack of availability of visually impaired users not involved with the tool's design, we had to resort to s imulate a visual impaired situation with regular sighted users. Although this may seem unrealistic we believe that this is actually a worst case scenario. The problems identified during this study are described, and proposals for the next version of the tool are put forward.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - POSI/SRI/41952/2001