Lista de Projetos

This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the causes of quality of government (QoG) -- here defined as an impartial and effective government -- in democracies, by focusing on the degree of decentralization as key independent variable. I argue that the current inconclusiveness in this literature stems, in large part, from employing incomplete indicators for QoG, not studying whether the impact of decentralization increases with duration, not including the tri-dimensional nature of decentralization, using mostly cross-sectional data and not considering the potential moderating roles of the levels of democracy and societal resources. In order to test thehypotheses thus derived, I will, in a first step, run a statistical analysis using a novel panel database, and, in a second step, perform a case study of countries in which the mechanisms uncovered are especially relevant, to understand the role of context and analyze other sub-dimensions of both variables. Supervisor: Tiago Fernandes (CEI-Iscte) Pedro Magalhães (ICS-UL)  

Over-medicalisation and disrespect in maternity and childbirth care have been identified by international research as an urgent global public health topic (WHO 2014, Simonovic 2019, Council of Europe 2019). The IPOV-RESPECTFUL CARE project intends to bring attention to obstetric violence and respectful maternity and childbirth care by implementing a concrete tool—the International Platform on Obstetric Violence—to bridge academic research and public policy, training for health professionals, women’s perspectives and public engagement on the matter. The Platform will be an innovative, international, interdisciplinary, intersectoral and cross-cultural digital and interactive tool for producing, sharing and transferring knowledge, systematising and exchanging good practices, acquiring skills and planning gender -based innovative training packages on respectful maternity and childbirth care among health professionals, health training managers, decision makers, researchers, women and all of society. To achieve these goals, a network of 39 breakthrough experts, from 19 participating organisations and 9 countries (universities, research centres, civil organisations and health maternity care institutions) will be established.

Connectivity is the major driver in the modern “information society”, where the range of data-driven applications is exploding, and new information-based value chains are rapidly emerging. Optical networks are the backbone of the global communication infrastructure, interconnecting billions of people and a huge number of various autonomous devices, control systems, and machines. Optical systems’ development incites the skyrocketing growth in the demand for data exchange and harnessing, fuelled by webbased services such as ultra-HD streaming, cloud services, 5G proliferation, fostering the changes in the digital world, and shaping the structure of the modern society. The demand growth is especially pronounced in the access and metro links, where data rates largely exceeding the current <1 Tb/s will be required. Moreover, the COVID-19 – with the huge number of people working from home – has intensified the pressure on the optical networks. Also, features such as the financial cost of the system elements, latency, dynamic reconfigurability, and energy consumption gain progressively more importance for the new generation of access and metro networks. The Doctorate Network NESTOR will answer the How? When? and Where? coherent optical transceiver will be deployed in metroaggregation optical networks to meet the demand for new cost-efficient solutions. NESTOR will also address the Who? by providing advanced training to 10 Fellows - from a new generation of engineers - with PhD projects significantly expanding the flexibility and capacity of access/metro networks. NESTOR harnesses the complementary expertise of the top academic groups (Aston, PoliTO, UPC, SSSA, and TU/e) and core telecom industry (Infinera, BT, Orange, SM-Optics, VPI and Ericsson). NESTOR will provide Fellows with a uniquely broad education ranging from recent advances in ML&AI to real-world telecom engineering, which will enable them to design and implement high-capacity access and metro networks.