Anacleto Correia

Empirical Studies in User Experience of an Emergency Management System

A system designed following usability principles, and considering users preferences and expectations ensures a high quality of user experience, which is particularly important when the system is used to support complex tasks. That is the case of emergency response operations’ coordination and execution. This work, conducted using an action research methodology, addresses challenges faced by the THEMIS project team during the conceptualization, design and implementation of an emergency management intelligent system, aiming to support disaster response operations and to improve the planning and execution efforts in disaster and crisis’ scenarios.

Performance Analysis of a GPS Equipment

In emerging economies the easiest way to ensure the geodetic support still is the static relative positioning (SRP) using a single reference station. This technique provides surveyors the ability to determine the 3D coordinates of a new point with centimeter-level accuracy. The objective of this work is to evaluate GPS SRP regarding accuracy, as the equivalent of a real time kinematic (RTK) network and to address the practicality of using either a continuously operating reference stations (CORS) or a passive control point for providing accurate positioning control. The precision of an observed 3D relative position between two global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) antennas, and how it depends on the distance between these antennas and on the duration of the observing session, was studied. We analyze the performance of the software for each of the six chosen ranges of length in each of the four scenarios created, considering different intervals of observation time. An intermediate inference level technique (Tamhane and Dunlop, Statistics and data analysis: from elementary to intermediate, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 2000), an analysis of variance, establishes the evidence of relation between observing time and baseline length.

Performance analysis of a GPS equipment by general linear models approach

One of the major challenges in processing high-accurate long baselines is the presence of un-modelled ionospheric and tropospheric delays. There are effective mitigation strategies for ionospheric biases, such as the ionosphere-free linear combination of L1 and L2 carrier-phase, which can remove about 98% of the first-order ionospheric biases. With few exceptions this was the solution found by LGO for the 11760 baselines processed in this research. Therefore, for successful results, the appropriated approach to the mitigation of biases due to tropospheric delays is vital. The main aim of the investigations presented in this work was to evaluate the improvements, or not, of the rate of baselines successfully produced by adopting an advanced tropospheric bias mitigation strategy as opposed to a sample tropospheric bias mitigation approach. In both cases LGO uses as a priori tropospheric model the simplified Hopfield model, improved in the first case with a zenith tropospheric scale factor per station. Being...

A Framework to Assess Information Security Quality of Service Based on a Communicative Action Way of Thinking

Several types of research suggested that the quality of service is a trade-off between customers’ expectations and concrete delivered service. However, a gap between the customer’s belief and perceived service is usually found. In order to measure the gap in quality of service, a set of activities should be implemented. This paper presents a specific method for providing guidelines for quality of service set up and assessment. This method integrates preceding work regarding measurement theory. Unlike other solutions that emerge from task oriented perspectives, this approach adopted a human-oriented perspective. For this purpose, the DEMO framework is used. DEMO provides a coherent understanding on how communication among people takes place on an organization, based on the systemic notion of enterprise ontology. This paper also reports the instantiation, in the information security domain, of the measurement inception, the first activity of a set belonging to an overall proposed method.

Augmented Reality in the Context of Naval Operations

As technology evolves, the feasibility of implementing Augmented Reality applications on mobile systems has increased significantly opening opportunities in many usage domains. For instance, in the field of education and training, systems AR provides an easy and safe mode of acquiring knowledge and gaining skills and experience in complex contexts and environments. This paper describes two AR applications built for support of naval operations. The Tactical-AR was intended for training purposes, to demonstrate the maneuvers of ships in formations, according to tactical publications. The THEMIS-AR presents the use of AR in the context of disaster relief operations, where responders receive information on the incidents, tasks to perform, navigation guidance to reach the incidents and advice on procedures to use while performing the tasks.

A Framework for Quality Measurement of BPMN Process Models

Nowadays organizations are collaborative and process-intensive. Measurement of process models have a variety of applications including process models’ quality evaluation, process improvement and task planning. The objective of this work is to propose a framework for quantifying and linking different quality characteristics of process models built with a standard process modeling language: BPMN. The framework supports the derivation of measures regarding internal quality characteristics of process models, to enable measurement of the quality perceived by process models’ users, at the end of the modeling process. To this aim, a measurement terminology for process modeling was set up in order to support process models’ measures instantiation. This was done through the specification of a set of activities to be developed in order to derive the base measures and indirect measures for prediction of process models’ quality. This work follows a product-oriented approach, by which, quality is assumed as being multi-dimensional concept, with several interrelated characteristics.

Statistical Methods for Word Association in Text Mining

Text data has been growing dramatically in the last years, mainly due to the advance of web related technologies that enable people to produce an overwhelming amount of data. Many knowledge about the world is encoded in text data available through blogs, tweets, web pages, articles, and books.

Anti-bribery Quantitative Model for Information Systems Based on Human Subjectivity.

Nowadays, one major concern is to ensure that enterprises have implemented relevant anti-bribery controls in organizations, view as an information system, without putting at risk its operation. Anti-bribery risk management has become an essential activity, allowing people to assess bribery risks and identify procedures to mitigate risks, in an efficient way. Despite the existence of a new body of knowledge, risk managers struggle to identify the most suitable management model that should be used in this kind of risk management. They are concerned how to balance between control and discretionary way of people work on organizations. The purpose of this document is to suggest a social way of thinking and establish a reference anti-bribery management model. To address this issue, we will support our work in a social framework, named activity theory to provide a high-level abstraction model that aims to facilitate the capture of deeper knowledge of how people enter and fulfil promises concerning the setup and maintain of anti-bribery model shared as the background of norms and values.

Data Protection Risk Modeling into Business Process Analysis

We present a novel way to link business process model with data protection risk management. We use established body of knowledge regarding risk manager concepts and business process towards data protections. We try to contribute to the problems that today organizations should find a suitable data protection model that could be used in as a risk framework. The purpose of this document is to define a model to describe data protection in the context of risk. Our approach including the identification of the main concepts of data protection according to the scope of the with EU directive data protection regulation. We outline data protection model as a continuous way of protection valued organization information regarding personal identifiable information. Data protection encompass the preservation of personal data information from unauthorized access, use, modification, recording or destruction. Since this kind of service is offered in a continuous way, it is important to stablish a way to measure the effectiveness of awareness of data subject discloses regrading personal identifiable information.

Suitability of BPMN Correct Usage by Users with Different Profiles: An Empirical Study

A declared purpose of the BPMN standard was to provide a business process modeling language, amenable of being used for modelers regardless of their technical background. This aim was intended to be achieved by extensive documentation of the syntax rules of the notation, as well as by proposed best practices for process modeling from practitioners. The wide acceptance of BPMN standard seems to accomplished the mentioned purpose, namely when considering its usage in business oriented process documentation and improvement scenarios, as well as in IT implementation of process diagrams supported by software tools. However, a relevant question can be raised regarding the correctness of business process diagrams produced by modelers with different profiles. This issue is important since the conformance of produced process diagrams to the syntax rules of the language determines the quality of the modeling process whatever its purpose is. Therefore, the main aim of this work was to gather statistical evidence that could validate the assertion that, BPMN diagrams, they have the same level of correctness, irrespective of the technical profile of people involved in modeling tasks. This paper reports a between-groups empirical study with business-oriented and IT-oriented profiles modelers.