Efficient energy storage systems are increasingly needed due to advances in portable electronics and transport vehicles, with lithium-ion batteries standing out among the most suitable energy storage systems for a large variety of applications. In lithium-ion batteries, the porous separator membrane plays a relevant role as it is placed between the electrodes, serves as a charge transfer medium, and affects the cycle behavior. Typically, porous separator membranes are comprised of a synthetic polymeric matrix embedded in the electrolyte solution. The present chapter focus on recent advances in synthetic polymers for porous separation membranes as well as on the techniques for membrane preparation and physicochemical characterization. The main challenges to improve the synthetic polymer performance for battery separator membrane applications are also discussed.

Este projecto consiste em fazer um exercício de tradução literária com base no short story “Night of Quicken Trees”, da autoria de Claire Keegan, e na sua tradução para o português europeu. Os pontos centrais deste projecto prendem-se com os seguintes objectivos: (a) tentar, nesta tradução, estabelecer um equilíbrio entre adequação e aceitabilidade, permitindo uma justa medida entre a cultura de Partida e a Cultura de Chegada; (b) observar a importância das expressões idiomáticas no short story; (c) analisar a as expressões idiomáticas do Texto de Partida e a forma como elas se traduzem para o Texto de Chegada; (d) observar o papel que a superstição, como elemento caracterizador da Cultura irlandesa, desempenha no Texto de Partida; (e) analisar os elementos religiosos no short story e a forma como estes se relacionam com a superstição; (f) examinar e comentar diversos aspectos tradutórios com os quais a tradução deste short story se deparou. Procedeu-se, assim, à análise de vários exemplos retirados do Texto de Partida e do Texto de Chegada, constatando-se pelos resultados que, por razões relacionadas com a manutenção da idiomaticidade e de elementos culturais específicos da Cultura de Partida, o almejado equilíbrio tradutório não foi atingido em pleno. Através do exemplos, também se puderam comprovar as funções essenciais exercidas pelas expressões idiomáticas e pela superstição no short story, assim como, uma nítida ligação da superstição com certos elementos religiosos.

This report describes the design and implementation of a tool to timestamp distributed events, using a standard PC hardware platform. The Event Timestamping Tool (ETT) is a small software kernel that detects externally generated events using two probe sources, and stores the respective timestamps with known precision bounds. A specialized kernel solution minimizes the response time for an event detection and registration and, consequently, maximizes the precision of the tool. Our approach exploits the Pentium processor internal timestamp counter to provide timestamps with fine granularity

The complex way radio waves propagate indoors, leads to the derivation of location using fingerprinting techniques. In this cases, location is computed relying on WiFi signals strength mapping. Recent Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) provides new opportunities to explore positioning. Indoor location identification plays a fundamental role as a business and personal level. At a business level, indoor location pinpointing where GPS signal is nonexistent is used to advise users and send push notifications (e.g., stores publicity, guide persons with special needs, or even for emergency evacuation). In this work is studied how BLE beacons radio signals can be used for indoor location scenarios, as well as their precision. The proposed study is performed inside the campus of Viseu Polytechnic Institute, using hundreds of students, each with his smartphone, as proof of concept. Experimental results show that BLE allows having less than 1.5 meters error approximately 90% of the times.

Local image feature detection (or extraction, if we want to use a more semantically correct term) is a central and extremely active research topic in the field of computer vision. Reliable solutions to prominent problems such as matching, content-based image retrieval, object (class) recognition, and symmetry detection, often make use of local image features. It is widely accepted that a good local feature detector is the one that efficiently retrieves distinctive, accurate, and repeatable features in the presence of a wide variety of photometric and geometric transformations. However, these requirements are not always the most important. In fact, not all the applications require the same properties from a local feature detector. We can distinguish three broad categories of applications according to the required properties. The first category includes applications in which the semantic meaning of a particular type of features is exploited. For instance, edge or even ridge detection can be used to identify blood vessels in medical images or watercourses in aerial images. Another example in this category is the use of blob extraction to identify blob-like organisms in microscopic images. A second category includes tasks such as matching, tracking, and registration, which mainly require distinctive, repeatable, and accurate features. Finally, a third category comprises applications such as object (class) recognition, image retrieval, scene classification, and image compression. For this category, it is crucial that features preserve the most informative image content (robust image representation), while requirements such as repeatability and accuracy are of less importance. Our research work is mainly focused on the problem of providing a robust image representation through the use of local features. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide the so-called robust image representation. It is fundamental to analyze the completeness of local features, i.e., the amount of image information preserved by local features, as well as the often neglected complementarity between sets of features. The major contributions of this work come in the form of two substantially different local feature detectors aimed at providing considerably robust image representations. The first algorithm is an information theoretic-based keypoint extraction that responds to complementary local structures that are salient (highly informative) within the image context. This method represents a new paradigm in local feature extraction, as it introduces context-awareness principles. The second algorithm extracts Stable Salient Shapes, a novel type of regions, which are obtained through a feature-driven detection of Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER). This method provides compact and robust image representations and overcomes some of the major shortcomings of MSER detection. We empirically validate the methods by investigating the repeatability, accuracy, completeness, and complementarity of the proposed features on standard benchmarks. Under these results, we discuss the applicability of both methods.

Quantile regression estimates of returns to education are used to address the relation between schooling and wage inequality. Empirical evidence for male workers from 16 countries for the mid 1990s suggests a robust stylised fact: Returns to schooling are higher for the more skilled individuals, conditional on their observable characteristics. This suggests that schooling has a positive impact upon within-levels wage inequality. Factors such as over-education, ability – schooling interactions and school quality or different fields of study may be driving this result. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A incidência da Insuficiência Renal Crónica (IRC) em Portugal tem aumentado progressivamente. De acordo com o relatório de 2013 da Sociedade Portuguesa de Nefrologia (SPN; 2014), no nosso país, encontram-se em terapia renal substitutiva (TRS) 18345 pessoas. Destas, 10977 fazem hemodiálise (HD). Este tratamento, por si só, implica uma imobilidade acrescida, confinando as pessoas a um cadeirão cerca de 15 horas por semana. Para além disso, a própria IRC e a HD, pelo catabolismo, pela síndrome urémica e pela neuromiopatia urémica, provocam perda de força muscular, descondicionamento e limitações da capacidade funcional. Atendendo ao facto de a população em HD ser cada vez mais envelhecida, concordaremos com Kosmadakis et al. (2010) quando diz que os utentes em HD são mais sedentários quando comparados com indivíduos saudáveis da mesma idade, sendo que a sua atividade física diminui 3,4% cada mês após início da HD. Os autores acrescentam que pessoas sedentárias em HD têm um risco de mortalidade muito superior a indivíduos não sedentários em HD. Esta é, portanto, uma população carente de cuidados de reabilitação. Apesar disso, a grande maioria dos serviços não vê na reabilitação destes doentes uma prioridade, sendo a oferta de cuidados de reabilitação muito limitada no nosso país.

Attribute grammars are a suitable formalism to express complex software language analysis and manipulation algorithms, which rely on multiple traversals of the underlying syntax tree. Attribute grammars have been extended with mechanisms such as reference, higher order and circular attributes. Such extensions provide a powerful modular mechanism and allow the specification of complex computations. This paper studies an elegant and simple, zipper-based embedding of attribute grammars and their extensions as first class citizens. In this setting, language specifications are defined as a set of independent, off-the-shelf components that can easily be composed into a powerful, executable language processor. Techniques to describe automatic bidirectional transformations between grammars in this setting are also described. Several real examples of language specification and processing programs have been implemented. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a recurrent view of the physical technological environment, in the light of which it is expected that everyday artifacts are connected, enhancing the availability and ubiquity of “smart” services. Higher education institutions can be seen as a privileged ecosystem for the development of intelligent and smart solutions, due to its dynamic and everyday changing environment, which includes not only physical infrastructures, digital services, but also people, i.e., students, researchers, lecturers, and staff. This work introduces an Application-oriented Architecture-AoA that has been designed to streamline the design and development of “smart” solutions inside the campus, by focusing on the Application side and reshaping the concept of “service” to a piece of “functionality” with a clear and objective purpose, rather than the classic and conventional approach, more focused on the development or technical sides. The proposed approach provides the mechanism to have multiple applications interacting and sharing data and functionalities, ensuring coexistence between new and legacy systems that are in use on the campus, removing the major drawbacks that basic monolithic applications typically require. The generic AoA model is described and the procedure to create a new application is systematized. Lastly, three case studies (RnMonitor, Refill_H2O, and BiRa) are presented end elaborated using the AoA procedure designed to create a new application.

Utentes com insuficiência renal crónica terminal têm uma capacidade funcional reduzida, sendo mais sedentários do que a população saudável da mesma idade. Estudos relacionam o comprometimento da capacidade funcional, a perda de força muscular e o sedentarismo com uma elevada taxa de mortalidade. Cresce a evidência científica de que programas de exercício melhoram a força muscular, a capacidade funcional, parâmetros analíticos e a qualidade de vida desta população. Objetivos: O objetivo é avaliar os efeitos dum treino aeróbio intradialítico na capacidade funcional e na eficácia dialítica.Metodologia: Foi desenvolvido um estudo randomizado controlado na NephroCare Coimbra. O grupo de intervenção tem 25 participantes e o grupo de controlo 30. A intervenção consistiu num treino aeróbio intradialítico em cicloergómetro durante 12 semanas. A capacidade funcional foi avaliada pelos testes Sit to Stand e Up and Go. A eficácia dialítica pelo Kt/V e pela taxa de redução de ureia. Resultados: O grupo de treino apresentou uma melhoria estatisticamente significativa da capacidade funcional. No teste Sit to Stand verificou-se um aumento do número de repetições de 11,28 para 13,72 (p=0,008). No teste Up and Go observouse uma diminuição do tempo necessário de 9,87 para 7,81 segundos (p=0,001). Estes resultados não se evidenciaram no grupo de controlo (p=0,703 e p=0,426, respetivamente). A diferença de desempenho entre ambos os grupos nos testes de capacidade funcional pós intervenção é estatisticamente significativa. A eficácia dialítica não sofreu alterações estatisticamente significativas. Conclusões: A conclusão fundamental é que um protocolo de treino aeróbio intradialítico de execução simples e pouco dispendioso melhora a capacidade funcional de hemodialisados, sem prejuízo da eficácia dialítica. O enfermeiro de reabilitação deve integrar a equipa interdisciplinar que cuida destes utentes.