Submitted by Luiz Felipe Barbosa (luiz.fbabreu2@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-10T19:41:00Z No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Vinicius Cezar Monteiro de Lira.pdf: 4006584 bytes, checksum: 5d1301329fabe34879780b3b17bb1e8a (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Daniella Sodre (daniella.sodre@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-10T19:43:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Vinicius Cezar Monteiro de Lira.pdf: 4006584 bytes, checksum: 5d1301329fabe34879780b3b17bb1e8a (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-10T19:43:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Vinicius Cezar Monteiro de Lira.pdf: 4006584 bytes, checksum: 5d1301329fabe34879780b3b17bb1e8a (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-28 / The analysis of human movements has been the subject of several studies since the 70s. In recent years, the exponential growth of location aware devices must allow the study of the behavior of the individuals’ mobility from their trajectories collected. However, a significant part of the available literature is focused on the development of techniques for analyzing trajectories of people from a purely geometric point of view, while a smaller part, but increasingly group is looking at the semantic aspects of mobility. This work presents a contribution to the latest trend, and is concerned with the definition of semantic regularity profiles and the applicability of these concepts to the practice of carpooling. We propose a semantic regularity profile based on the entropy of the spatial and temporal frequency of visits to certain categories of places. We analyze the user’s behavior with respect to regularity and irregularity, identifying users who are more or less loyal to certain locations, in contrast to the irregularity of visiting different places. In a different point of view, an analysis over the place perspective was also performed. A web tool was developed to show on map, for each place of a given category, the computed information about the loyal behavior of their visitors. From the study about regularity, we have evidences that some human activities are not strictly associated to a unique POI (Point of Interest) and neither to a specific schedule of the day. Bringing to the carpooling context, in some situations it is worth for a person to change his destination or the time to perform an activity if there is a possibility of ride for him due all the benefits involved with the carpooling practice. This dissertation also presents a novel matching method for carpooling that is oriented to the passenger’s intended activity, aiming to boost the possibilities of rides. Three algorithms for carpool matching are proposed, which manipulates differently the spatial and temporal dimensions. Using a real data set of trajectories, we conducted experiments and our results showed that the proposed matching algorithms improved the traditional carpooling approach in +46.84% when the spatial dimension was considered, in +50.89% when the temporal dimension was prioritized and in +82.30% when both dimensions were tackled.

Urban energy systems are often studied in a very similar way in the sense that the characteristics of the underlying physical infrastructure are weighted as the main determinants of energy use predictions, while the behavior of the human population in relation to this systemthe so-called ``energy consumers''in time and urban spaces is effectively neglected. The spatial and temporal variations in infrastructure-population interactivity greatly complicate urban energy systems; the unremitting growth in population and advances in technology mean that the dynamic interrelationship between the population and urban environment will continue to grow exponentially, resulting in increasing uncertainties, unreliable predictions and poor management decisions given the inadequacy of existing approaches. In this dissertation, I explore the interdependencies of spatiotemporal fluctuations of human mobility as an indicator for human activities and energy use in urban areas in three main studies. First, I show that the fluctuations of intra-urban human mobility and energy use have an underlying structure across both time and space, and that human mobility can indeed be used as a predictor for energy use in both dimensions. Second, I examine how one of the dominant drivers of this structure, namely individuals' location-based activities, influence patterns in energy supply and demand across building types (i.e. residential and commercial buildings) and show how variations in the human mobility networks of two distinct urban populations (the so-called returners and explorers) can explain fluctuations in energy use. Third, I introduce an integrated approach for predicting urban energy use across time and space by incorporating these interdependencies. Generating predictive models that capture the spatiotemporal variations in these determinants in urban settings, as suggested in this research, will contribute to our understanding of how variations in urban population activities for particular times and locations influence can be applied to estimate energy use patterns in surrounding areas. / PHD

The flexibility of future mobile networks exploiting modern technologies such as cloud-optimized radio access and software-defined networks opens a gateway to deploying dynamic strategies for live and on-demand content delivery. Traditional live broadcasting systems are spectral inefficient. It takes up a lot more radio spectrum than that of mobile networks, to cover the same size of an area. Furthermore, content caching at base stations reduces network traffic in core networks. However, numerous duplicated copies of contents are still transmitted in the unicast fashion in radio access networks. It consumes valuable radio spectrum and unnecessary energy. Finally, due to the present of numerous mobile receivers with a wide diversity of wireless channels in a base station coverage area, it is a challenge to select a proper modulation scheme for video broadcasting to optimize the quality of services for users. In this thesis, the challenges and the problems in the current strategies for content delivery are addressed. A holistic novel solution is proposed that considers user preferences, user mobility, device-to-device communication, physical-layer resource allocation, and video quality prediction. First, a system-level scheduling framework is introduced to increase the spectral efficiency on broadcasting live contents onto mobile networks. It considers the audience preferences for allocating radio resources spatially and temporally. Second, to reduce the redundant transmissions in radio access networks, a content distribution system that exploits user mobility is proposed that utilizes the urban-scale user mobility and broadcasting nature of wireless communication for delay-tolerant large size content. Third, to further reduce the energy consumption in network infrastructure, a content distribution system that relies on both user mobility, and device-to-device communication is proposed. It leverages the mobile users as content carriers to offload the heavy mobile traffic from network-level onto device-level. Fourth, to mitigate the multi-user channel diversity problem, a cross-layer approach is deployed to increase the video quality for users especially for those who have a low signal-to-noise ratio signal. Finally, data mining techniques are employed to predict video qualities of wireless transmissions over mobile networks. The holistic solution has been empirically developed and evaluated. It achieves high spectral and energy efficiency and mitigates the video quality degradation in mobile networks.

Natural disasters exert a profound impact on the world population. In 2012, natural disasters affected 106 million people, forcing over 31.7 million people to leave their homes. Climate change has intensified natural disasters, resulting in more catastrophic events and making extreme weather more difficult to predict. Understanding and predicting human movements plays a critical role in disaster evacuation, response and relief. Researchers have developed different methodologies and applied several models to study human mobility patterns, including random walks, Lévy flight, and Brownian walks. However, the extent to which these models may apply to perturbed human mobility patterns during disasters and the associated implications for improving disaster evacuation, response and relief efforts is lacking. My PhD research aims to address the limitation in human mobility research and gain a ground truth understanding of human mobility patterns under the influence of natural disasters. The research contains three interdependent projects. In the first project, I developed a novel data collecting system. The system can be used to collect large scale data of human mobility from large online social networking platforms. By analyzing both the general characteristics of the collected data and conducting a case study in NYC, I confirmed that the data collecting system is a viable venue to collect empirical data for human mobility research. My second project examined human mobility patterns in NYC under the influence of Hurricane Sandy. Using the data collecting system developed in the first project, I collected 12 days of human mobility data from NYC. The data set contains movements during and several days after the strike of Hurricane Sandy. The results showed that human mobility was strongly perturbed by Hurricane Sandy, but meanwhile inherent resilience was observed in human movements. In the third project, I extended my research to fifteen additional natural disasters from five categories. Using over 3.5 million data entries of human movement, I found that while human mobility still followed the Lévy flight model during these disaster events, extremely powerful natural disasters could break the correlation between human mobility in steady states and perturbation states and thus destroy the inherent resilience in human mobility. The overall findings have significant implications in improving understanding and predicting human mobility under the influence of natural disasters and extreme events. / Ph. D.

This thesis examines the rising phenomenon of the internationalisation of Chinese firms, and aims to shed new light on our understanding of the emergence of firms from emerging economies in the global market. It consists of two parts: the country level study and the firm level. The former identifies the domestic and locational determinants of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), while the latter examines the influence of dynamic capabilities and institutions on the post-internationalisation performance of Chinese firms, with a focus on state-owned enterprises (SOEs). To explore the domestic and locational determinants of Chinese OFDI, the thesis integrates network theory with the traditional explanations of OFDI, the investment development path and the eclectic paradigm. By doing so, a new factor, human mobility, is identified as one of the important domestic and locational determinants of Chinese OFDI. Drawing upon a time series data analysis for the period 1979-2007, this study confirms that Chinese OFDI is driven by its domestic economic development, human mobility and knowledge development and accumulation, and it has a substitute relationship with exports. By examining Chinese OFDI flows to 13 OECD countries over the period 1999-2007, it is shown that human mobility, the strategic assets of the host country, foreign direct investment to China and cultural distance have a positive impact on the locational choice of Chinese OFDI to OECD countries. To investigate the influence of dynamic capabilities and institutions on the post-internationalisation performance of Chinese firms, this study integrates the dynamic capability framework and the institution-based view, and embeds the analysis in a multi-perspective conceptual framework. It draws on four case studies of Chinese SOEs. The analysis shows the importance of internal dynamic capabilities in achieving overseas success when dealing with changing environments. The managerial mindset has a moderate effect on the impact of dynamic capabilities on post-internationalisation performance. The case analysis also shows how the external institutional environment of both host and home countries influence the performance of Chinese SOEs. ii Support from both host and home country governments, unsurprisingly, has a positive influence on performance. However, too much intervention from the home country government imposes constraints on the firms and reduces their willingness to commit to internationalisation. This thesis makes a number of contributions to the existing literature. First, it provides a better understanding of the overall picture of Chinese OFDI from the macro perspective. The findings also contribute to our understanding of the rise of OFDI from emerging economies in general and from China in particular. Second, a new factor, human mobility, is identified and proved to be significant in determining Chinese OFDI. In this era of globalisation, human mobility has become the driving force of OFDI from emerging economies. Third, a first step is taken towards exploring the influence of both internal and external factors on the post-internationalisation performance of Chinese firms. In order to achieve overseas success, not only do Chinese firms need to improve their internal dynamic capabilities, but also attention needs to be paid to the external institutional environment, which has a significant impact on the performance of Chinese firms pursuing overseas success.

Submitted by Kamila Costa (kamilavasconceloscosta@gmail.com) on 2015-06-24T20:06:17Z No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE-MÁRCIA MARIA DE OLIVEIRA.pdf: 2774285 bytes, checksum: 671b475060a4169eda3dc90120fd7c6f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2015-07-03T13:23:07Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE-MÁRCIA MARIA DE OLIVEIRA.pdf: 2774285 bytes, checksum: 671b475060a4169eda3dc90120fd7c6f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2015-07-03T13:25:59Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE-MÁRCIA MARIA DE OLIVEIRA.pdf: 2774285 bytes, checksum: 671b475060a4169eda3dc90120fd7c6f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-03T13:25:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE-MÁRCIA MARIA DE OLIVEIRA.pdf: 2774285 bytes, checksum: 671b475060a4169eda3dc90120fd7c6f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-06-24 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In this thesis, we discussed the main migration dynamics observed in the Amazon over the last decade and its importance for understanding the processes of social, political, economic and cultural changes in the region. Such changes are remarkable in all sectors of society to be almost impossible to think the Amazon without taking into account the internal and international migrations that give the region an intense human mobility. The study indicates that migration dynamics involve all dimensions of sociability and represent another possibility of reading and interpreting the Amazon inserted into the complexity of international migration in its various dimensions. The Migration Profile of the region identifies new and old phenomena of population movements that circulate new production basis, transfer of technology and knowledge. / Na presente tese, abordamos as principais dinâmicas migratórias observadas na Amazônia na última década e a sua importância para a compreensão dos processos de mudanças sociais, políticas, econômicas e culturais da região. Tais mudanças se fazem notar em todos os setores da sociedade a ponto de ser quase impossível pensar a Amazônia sem levar em consideração as migrações internas e internacionais que conferem à região uma mobilidade humana intensa. O estudo indica que as dinâmicas migratórias envolvem todas as dimensões da sociabilidadee representam mais uma possibilidade de leitura e interpretação da Amazônia inserida na complexidade da dinâmica da migração internacional em suas variadas dimensões. O Perfil Migratório da região identifica fatos novos e antigos de deslocamentos de populações que fazem circular novas bases de produção, transferências de tecnologias e conhecimentos.

A cidade de Caxias do Sul (RS), formada pela imigração italiana no final do século XIX, tornou-se desde 2011 um novo destino imigratório para fluxos compostos principalmente de haitianos e senegaleses. A presente dissertação busca compreender os processos de inclusão dos imigrantes na cidade, enfocando o seu acesso aos serviços públicos e às políticas locais. Sob a perspectiva local, estuda-se questões complexas como xenofobia, racismo e políticas migratórias, em especial sua articulação concreta dentro de um contexto histórico e cultural específico. Considerando o campo das migrações como um espaço político de disputa, são analisadas as dinâmicas de interação entre os principais atores locais, com destaque para o protagonismo da sociedade civil e da CDHCS e para a não-política do poder Executivo municipal. / The city of Caxias do Sul (RS), founded by Italian immigration in the end of the XIX century, has since 2011 become a new immigrant destination for flows mainly composed by Haitians and Senegalese. This dissertation aims to understand the immigrant inclusion processes in the city, focusing on their access to public services and to local policies. Complex issues such as xenophobia, racism and migration policies are studied from the local perspective, and especially how these issues are concretely articulated within a specific historic and cultural context. Considering the field of migrations as a political dispute arena, the interaction dynamics between the main local actors are analysed, particularly the protagonism of the civil society and of the CDHCS and the non-policy of the municipal Executive power.

Submitted by Noeme Timbo (noeme.timbo@metodista.br) on 2017-01-20T16:20:11Z No. of bitstreams: 1 SergioSantos.pdf: 3735779 bytes, checksum: fadd14df08fd5683ee6cfabaf104427c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-01-20T16:20:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 SergioSantos.pdf: 3735779 bytes, checksum: fadd14df08fd5683ee6cfabaf104427c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-11-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The research starts from the Portuguese philosopher Manuel Sérgio work, investigating the implications and resonances in educational horizons from the comprehension of “ser-motrício”. The basics research questions are: How to experience, understand and interpret the human being in his motrician nature? What is his true way of being in action, overcoming the lonely physical look, considering the experience of life, language and human complexity? Which outspreads, resonances and educational implications may arise by these comprehensions and interpretations? Understanding this projection, we studied the “ser-motrício” in its ontological roots subsidized by the life experience, interpretation and human appreciation. In the educational dimension, it was considered that the “ser-motrício”, who feels, thinks, apprehends, incorporates, wishes, interacts, wonders, expresses and potencializes all of this condition in the connection of his experience of life with multiple languages, has received a comprehensive and more influenced treatment by the paradigm of simplicity and reductionism that, somehow, resonate in fragmented educational practices. To overcome this reductionism, we defend the creative praxis as authentic dimension of “ser-motrício”, in a project called "Appreciation of Human Motricity," a constructive / A pesquisa parte da obra do filósofo português Manuel Sérgio, investigando as implicações e as ressonâncias nos horizontes educativos a partir da compreensão do ser-motrício. As questões basilares da pesquisa são: Como vivenciar, compreender e interpretar o ser humano em sua natureza motrícia? Qual seu modo autêntico de ser em ação, superando o olhar do físico tão-só, considerando a experiência da vida, a linguagem e a complexidade humana? Quais desdobramentos, ressonâncias e implicações educativas podem surgir dessas compreensões e interpretações? Para compreender essa projeção, estudamos o ser-motrício em suas raízes ontológicas subsidiados pela vivência, interpretação e apreciação humana. Na dimensão educativa, considerou-se que o ser-motrício que sente, pensa, apreende, incorpora, deseja, interage, imagina, expressa e potencializa toda essa condição no entrelaçamento da experiência vivida com as múltiplas linguagens, tem recebido um tratamento compreensivo mais influenciado pelo paradigma da simplicidade e do reducionismo que, de certo modo, ressoam em práticas educativas fragmentadas. Para superar esse reducionismo defendemos a práxis criadora como dimensão autêntica do ser-motrício, num projeto denominado “Apreciação da Motricidade Humana”, um caminho formador de realização e da vida em plenitude.

abstract: The rapid urban expansion has greatly extended the physical boundary of our living area, along with a large number of POIs (points of interest) being developed. A POI is a specific location (e.g., hotel, restaurant, theater, mall) that a user may find useful or interesting. When exploring the city and neighborhood, the increasing number of POIs could enrich people's daily life, providing them with more choices of life experience than before, while at the same time also brings the problem of "curse of choices", resulting in the difficulty for a user to make a satisfied decision on "where to go" in an efficient way. Personalized POI recommendation is a task proposed on purpose of helping users filter out uninteresting POIs and reduce time in decision making, which could also benefit virtual marketing. Developing POI recommender systems requires observation of human mobility w.r.t. real-world POIs, which is infeasible with traditional mobile data. However, the recent development of location-based social networks (LBSNs) provides such observation. Typical location-based social networking sites allow users to "check in" at POIs with smartphones, leave tips and share that experience with their online friends. The increasing number of LBSN users has generated large amounts of LBSN data, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study human mobility for personalized POI recommendation in spatial, temporal, social, and content aspects. Different from recommender systems in other categories, e.g., movie recommendation in NetFlix, friend recommendation in dating websites, item recommendation in online shopping sites, personalized POI recommendation on LBSNs has its unique challenges due to the stochastic property of human mobility and the mobile behavior indications provided by LBSN information layout. The strong correlations between geographical POI information and other LBSN information result in three major human mobile properties, i.e., geo-social correlations, geo-temporal patterns, and geo-content indications, which are neither observed in other recommender systems, nor exploited in current POI recommendation. In this dissertation, we investigate these properties on LBSNs, and propose personalized POI recommendation models accordingly. The performance evaluated on real-world LBSN datasets validates the power of these properties in capturing user mobility, and demonstrates the ability of our models for personalized POI recommendation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2014

The rapid advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) has dramatically changed the way people conduct daily activities. One of the reasons for such advances is the pervasiveness of location-aware devices, and people’s ability to publish and receive information about their surrounding environment. The organization, integration, and analysis of these crowdsensed geographic information is an important task for GIScience research, especially for better understanding place characteristics as well as human activities and movement dynamics in different spaces. In this dissertation research, a semantic modeling and analytic framework based on semantic web technologies is designed to handle information related with human space-time activities (e.g., information about human activities, movement, and surrounding places) for a smart space. Domain ontology for space-time activities and places that captures the essential entities in a spatial domain, and the relationships among them. Based on the developed domain ontology, a Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model is proposed that integrates spatial, temporal and semantic dimensions of space-time activities and places. Three different types of scheduled space-time activities (SXTF, SFTX, SXTX) and their potential spatiotemporal interactions are formalized with OWL and SWRL rules. Using a university campus as an example spatial domain, a RDF knowledgebase is created that integrates scheduled course activities and tweet activities in the campus area. Human movement dynamics for the campus area is analyzed from spatial, temporal, and people’s perspectives using semantic query approach. The ontological knowledge in RDF knowledgebase is further fused with place affordance knowledge learned through training deep learning model on place review data. The integration of place affordance knowledge with people’s intended activities allows the semantic analytic framework to make more personalized location recommendations for people’s daily activities.