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  • Changing perspectives on disability and technology: events, trends and personal choices
    Publication . Hoogerwerf, Evert-Jan; Andrich, Renzo; Bühler, Christian; Craddock, Gerald; Witte, Luc de; Encarnação, Pedro; Mavrou, Katerina; Miesenberger, Klaus
    In this chapter, eight (past-)presidents of the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE) reflect on their personal engagement with the technology and disability field. The result is a patchwork of personal contributions, reflecting aspects of the contemporary history of Assistive Technology in its broadest sense, relevant for our collective memory and for those attracted to this field for their professional career.
  • The potential of citizen science for socio-spatial studies: defining and operationalizing research pathways
    Publication . Simon, Sandrine; Duarte, Tiago; Correia, Sónia Vladimira; Fernandes, Pedro Afonso; Costa, Carlos Smaniotto; Manico, Zuinder
    The term Citizen Science has been used in various contexts, but little effort has been made to provide a vision of it in regard to socio-spatial studies, which are at the core of the research group on Citizen Science in understanding and transforming the territory (CIDATE). The authors of this chapter represent widely diverse disciplines, including environmental engineering, economics, urban planning and design, landscape architecture and education. The chapter intends to deliver a tailored and timely vision of how, with the help of Citizen Science, the democratisation of science can be promoted and, with this, more collective and sustainable decision making achieved. This chapter is the result of a reflective dialogue between researchers, their projects and experiences tackling spatial and human development from different perspectives. It gathers the conclusions that emerged in the organised debates and the research projects carried out by the researchers, towards creating a broad understanding of the key issues that could help operationalise Citizen Science in future research efforts.
  • Programming the logic of space: a new approach to space syntax
    Publication . Fernandes, Pedro Afonso
    Space syntax is a set of theories and techniques for analysing urban settlements and buildings. It is a relevant approach for spatial studies concerned with the scientific understanding of and intervention in public open spaces. It requires a previous convex/line/segment map of the area in question designed with the aid of CAD or GIS. Such preparatory task may be laborious and more difficult for social researchers than for architects or urban planners. A new approach to syntactic analyses is proposed here; it requires only setting the connections between axial lines or convex spaces in a computer program. We performed a settlement (alpha) analysis of the Areeiro neighbourhood in Lisbon by computing connectivity, control, depth, integration, ringiness and other syntactic measures, using Prolog predicates. Prolog is a logic programming language used in Artificial Intelligence and a powerful tool to describe the patterns of urban systems as socially knowable due to its declarative nature. In fact, a Prolog program represents a certain amount of knowledge, in this case, of an urban settlement such Areeiro, which is used to answer queries about the social and economic consequences of the spatial design. This approach revealed the intelligibility but also the weaknesses of Areeiro, a remarkable milestone for Portuguese urbanism from the mid-20th century.
  • The European Green Deal at the core of the EU’s and EMU’s sustainability
    Publication . Torres, Francisco
    An initial convergence of preferences made the European Green Deal (EGD) possible. However, the revision of all policy areas in line with the objectives and a conducive trajectory of the green transition is proving a major challenge, above all because member state policies and actions are not consistent with the long-term policy objectives they had subscribed to in the first place. On the upside, EU institutions, notably the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB), have been responding to the challenge by adapting rules and policies, which will have a positive effect in the long run. To deliver price stability the ECB needs to take into account all factors affecting inflation and climate change is one of them. Besides the primary objective of keeping prices stable, the ECB’s secondary objectives, notably contributing to a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment, are fundamental to ensure not only environmental sustainability but also EMU’s and the EU’s sustainability. However, those rules and policies also depend on the wider EU regulatory framework, which needs the approval of member states.
  • How humans judge machines
    Publication . Hidalgo, César A.; Orghian, Diana; Canals, Jordi Albo; Almeida, Filipa de; Martin, Natalia
    How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people's reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender? César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer to understanding the ethical consequences of AI.
  • Liderar na era da incerteza: os novos desafios da liderança na sociedade e nas organizações
    Publication . Caeiro, Luís
    A complexidade e imprevisibilidade dos tempos que vivemos confrontam-nos com um mundo de incerteza e lançam desafios sem precedentes às funções de liderança. Os líderes têm um papel determinante na gestão das crises, na redução da incerteza e da ansiedade, e na abertura dos novos caminhos que alimentam a esperança. As lideranças que estão a emergir na sociedade e nas organizações são poderosas fontes de inovação, mas também nos fazem questionar a sociedade que queremos construir e o papel que nela queremos desempenhar como profissionais e como cidadãos. Liderar na era da incerteza vai ser, para muitos de nós, o grande desafio do futuro.
  • Assistive technologies as rights enablers
    Publication . Encarnação, Pedro; Cook, Albert M.
    The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability establish the rights for all children. For some children, enjoying those rights depends on or is facilitated by assistive technology, that is, products adapted or designed for improving the functioning of disabled people and all services inherent to the selection, acquisition, and use of assistive products. This chapter reviews the definition of assistive technology and briefly describes assistive products categories to show the breadth of assistive products available. It then discusses children rights and how they can be mediated or moderated by assistive technologies. Some of the challenges and ethical issues of assistive technology provision for children are also examined.
  • Introduction of non-topological costs in syntactic analyses: the case of Gulbenkian estate
    Publication . Fernandes, Pedro Afonso
    Space syntax is a set of theories and techniques for analysing urban settlements and buildings. Focused on the study of the configuration of convex spaces, space syntax is based on the concept of topological depth, that is, in the number of steps to go from some space (or axial line) to every other space in a spatial complex. Typically, non-topological costs like stairs, ramps, accentuated slopes or walls are not considered in space syntax analyses, or are incorporated in an insufficient fashion, namely, with the arbitrary introduction of axial lines in order to increase depth. This article proposes an innovative method to deal with these costs that uses logic programming with Prolog language. In this way, it is possible to better understand the relative segregation of the Gulbenkian estate within its urban environment, the city of Odivelas near Lisbon (Portugal), noting that it was the largest public housing estate built within the scope of the resettlement plan for those displaced by the great floods of November 25-26, 1967, established by the Ministry of Public Works and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in the late 1960s.