Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Languages are born, evolve and, eventually, die. During this evolution their spelling rules (and sometimes the syntactic and semantic ones) change, putting old documents out of use. In Portugal, a pair of political agreements with Brazil forced relevant changes on the way the Portuguese language is written. In this article we will detail these two Orthographic Agreements (one in the thirties and the other more recently, in the nineties), and the challenges present on the automatic migration of old documents spelling to their actual one. We will reveal Bigorna, a toolkit for the classification of language variants, their comparison and the conversion of texts in different language versions. These tools will be explained together with examples of migration issues. As Birgorna relies on a set of conversion rules we will also discuss how to infer conversion rules from a set of documents (texts with different ages). The document concludes with a brief evaluation on the conversion and classification tool results and their relevance in the current Portuguese language scenario.

Abstract
IdSay is a Question Answering system for Portuguese that participated at QA@CLEF 2008 with a baseline version (IdSayBL). Despite the encouraging results, there was still much room for improvement. The participation of six systems in the Portuguese task, with very good results either individually or in an hypothetical combination run, provided a valuable source of information. We made an analysis of all the answers submitted by all systems to identify their strengths and weaknesses. We used the conclusions of that analysis to guide our improvements, keeping in mind the two key characteristics we want for the system: efficiency in terms of response time and robustness to treat different types of data. As a result, an improved version of IdSay was developed, including as the most important enhancement the introduction of semantic information. We obtained significantly better results, from an accuracy in the first answer of 32.5% in IdSayBL to 50.5% in IdSay, without degradation of response time.

Abstract
ITC based information services are widely used for providing or accessing information on a daily basis. In exceptional or emergency situations relevant information could be sent to citizens in order to elicit improved responses. There are examples of using mobile devices to reach users, e.g., in some countries, citizens have received text messages with relevant information about H1N1, such as a list of the main symptoms and a telephone number to call in case of emergency. This paper proposes the Contemplate initial extension to the engineering CDIO process (conceive, design, implement and operate) and stresses out its iterative nature as a framework suitable for new service design, in our case for emergency or exceptional information services. Although the proposal is applicable in general, this paper uses examples from public transport in urban areas. Road works, congestion, and accidents are examples of undesirable influences on public transportation. Technologies such as GPS, mobile communication devices, databases, data mining and other approaches for profiling user activities with careful individual and social considerations could be used to improve the quality of service and quality of life in cities.

Abstract
The synthesis of carbon nanoparticles obtained by direct laser ablation [UV pulsed laser irradiation (248 nm, KrF)] of carbon targets immersed in water is described. Laser ablation features were optimized to produce carbon nanoparticles with dimensions up to about 100 nm. After functionalization with NH2-polyethylene-glycol (PEG(200)) and N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) the carbon nanoparticles become fluorescent with excitation and emission wavelengths at 340 and 450 nm, respectively. The fluorescence decay time was complex and a three-component decay time model originated a good fit (chi = 1.09) with the following lifetimes: tau(1) = 0.35 ns; tau(2) = 1.8 ns; and tau(3) = 4.39 ns. The fluorescence of the carbon dots is sensitive to pH with an apparent PKa = 4.2. The carbon dots were characterized by H-1 NMR and HSQC and the results show an interaction between PEG(200) and the carbon surface as well as a dependence of the chemical shift with the reaction time. The fluorescence intensity of the nanoparticles is quenched by the presence of Hg(II) and Cu(II) ions with a Stern-Volmer constant (pH = 6.8) of 1.3 x 10(5) and 5.6 x 10(4) M-1, respectively. As such the synthesis and application of a novel biocompatible nanosensor for measuring Hg(II) is presented.