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Publications

2019

Analysis of Project Management Practices Within the Textile and Clothing Industry

Authors
Silva, B; Tereso, A; Amaral, A;

Publication
EDUCATION EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT THROUGH VISION 2020

Abstract
The common challenges faced by companies/industries are often related to the 'iron triangle' categories, namely: deadlines, budget, scope and quality. The Project Management knowledge area proposes a systematic approach to overcome these difficulties, with the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills, as well as by implementing methodologies, tools, processes and techniques. The textile and clothing industry, or fashion industry, is not immune to the same type of challenges. The products of the fashion chain are collections, which are developed according to market specifications, trends and market profiles. These specifications evolve very rapidly and, therefore, have their main objective in the development of new and/or innovative products. To deliver a new collection, the whole process of elaborating these products is executed based on a per project approach. Each collection is unique, having a well-defined beginning and end. The development of a fashion collection should consider the processes that, at the industrial level, will originate the final product, thus requiring a methodology that integrates the development of the project from the initial phase - conception of the product idea - until the final stage - start of production / launch to the market. By trying to identify project management approaches in the Portuguese textile and clothing industry, this study allowed us to conclude that, despite of these organizations considering as being developing or involved in projects, the approaches followed are not formal, structured and systematic. Furthermore, there is still no complete application of any of the known project management methodologies.

2019

Controlling the Optical Properties of Biological Materials

Authors
Oliveira, LMC; Tuchin, VV;

Publication
SpringerBriefs in Physics

Abstract
To overcome the high light-scattering problem that occurs in biological tissues, we present in this chapter the different clearing methods known today. Most of these methods have benefits and downsides, depending on the application for which they are used. The optical immersion method is introduced as a better, reliable, and reversible way to turn tissues clear. The major benefits and advantages of this method such as its reversibility, the lack of side effects, and application in large wavelength range will be presented. A description of the molecular diffusion of optical clearing agents is given to explain the reduction in the refractive index mismatch that natural tissues have. © 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2019

On the role of multimodal learning in the recognition of sign language

Authors
Ferreira, PM; Cardoso, JS; Rebelo, A;

Publication
MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS

Abstract
Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has become one of the most important research areas in the field of human computer interaction. SLR systems are meant to automatically translate sign language into text or speech, in order to reduce the communicational gap between deaf and hearing people. The aim of this paper is to exploit multimodal learning techniques for an accurate SLR, making use of data provided by Kinect and Leap Motion. In this regard, single-modality approaches as well as different multimodal methods, mainly based on convolutional neural networks, are proposed. Our main contribution is a novel multimodal end-to-end neural network that explicitly models private feature representations that are specific to each modality and shared feature representations that are similar between modalities. By imposing such regularization in the learning process, the underlying idea is to increase the discriminative ability of the learned features and, hence, improve the generalization capability of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that multimodal learning yields an overall improvement in the sign recognition performance. In particular, the novel neural network architecture outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods for the SLR task.

2019

REGISTRATION OF BREAST MRI AND 3D SCAN DATA BASED ON SURFACE MATCHING

Authors
Bessa, S; Carvalho, PH; Oliveira, HP;

Publication
2019 IEEE 16TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON BIOMEDICAL IMAGING (ISBI 2019)

Abstract
The creation of 3D complete models of the woman breast that aggregate radiological and surface information is a crucial step for the development of surgery planning tools in the context of breast cancer. This requires the registration of interior and surface data of the breast, which has to recover large breast deformations caused by the different poses of the patient during data acquisition and has to deal with the lack of landmarks between both modalities, apart from the nipple. In this paper, the registration of Magnetic Resonance Imaging exams and 3D surface data reconstructed from Kinect (TM) acquisitions is explored using a biomechanical modelling of breast pose transformations combined with a free form deformation to finely match the data. The results are promising, with an average euclidean distance between the matched data of 0.81 +/- 0.09 mm being achieved.

2019

Literature on Wearable Technology for Connected Health: Scoping Review of Research Trends, Advances, and Barriers

Authors
Loncar Turukalo, T; Zdravevski, E; da Silva, JM; Chouvarda, I; Trajkovik, V;

Publication
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH

Abstract
Background: Wearable sensing and information and communication technologies are key enablers driving the transformation of health care delivery toward a new model of connected health (CH) care. The advances in wearable technologies in the last decade are evidenced in a plethora of original articles, patent documentation, and focused systematic reviews. Although technological innovations continuously respond to emerging challenges and technology availability further supports the evolution of CH solutions, the widespread adoption of wearables remains hindered. Objective: This study aimed to scope the scientific literature in the field of pervasive wearable health monitoring in the time interval from January 2010 to February 2019 with respect to four important pillars: technology, safety and security, prescriptive insight, and user-related concerns. The purpose of this study was multifold: identification of (1) trends and milestones that have driven research in wearable technology in the last decade, (2) concerns and barriers from technology and user perspective, and (3) trends in the research literature addressing these issues. Methods: This study followed the scoping review methodology to identify and process the available literature. As the scope surpasses the possibilities of manual search, we relied on the natural language processing tool kit to ensure an efficient and exhaustive search of the literature corpus in three large digital libraries: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, PubMed, and Springer. The search was based on the keywords and properties to be found in articles using the search engines of the digital libraries. Results: The annual number of publications in all segments of research on wearable technology shows an increasing trend from 2010 to February 2019. The technology-related topics dominated in the number of contributions, followed by research on information delivery, safety, and security, whereas user-related concerns were the topic least addressed. The literature corpus evidences milestones in sensor technology (miniaturization and placement), communication architectures and fifth generation (5G) cellular network technology, data analytics, and evolution of cloud and edge computing architectures. The research lag in battery technology makes energy efficiency a relevant consideration in the design of both sensors and network architectures with computational offloading. The most addressed user-related concerns were (technology) acceptance and privacy, whereas research gaps indicate that more efforts should be invested into formalizing clear use cases with timely and valuable feedback and prescriptive recommendations. Conclusions: This study confirms that applications of wearable technology in the CH domain are becoming mature and established as a scientific domain The current research should bring progress to sustainable delivery of valuable recommendations, enforcement of privacy by design, energy-efficient pervasive sensing, seamless monitoring, and low-latency 5G communications. To complement technology achievements, future work involving all stakeholders providing research evidence on improved care pathways and cost-effectiveness of the CH model is needed.

2019

Residential DER Cooperative Investments

Authors
De Almansa, M; Villar, J;

Publication
2019 16TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE EUROPEAN ENERGY MARKET (EEM)

Abstract
This paper aims to model collaborative behaviours related to distributed generation investments in a residential neighbourhood, by means of Cooperative Game Theory (CGT). The main objective is to analyse the economic impact of the installation of photovoltaic solar panels and batteries, and the assessment of the potential energy savings due to the cooperation among residential households. In this regard, both the purchase of needed energy from the grid and the sale of the spare energy from the households' self-generation to the grid are considered. The comparison between cooperative and non-cooperative behaviours in the investments and energy management decisions is analysed based on the Shapley value, a cost sharing method from CGT, concluding that cooperation among prosumers to share energy in a residential energy community is in general more efficient than prosumers making individual decisions.

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