Uveal melanoma is the most common primary intraocular malignant tumour in adults. Despite improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of the primary tumour, patients continue to have the same mortality rate as several decades ago, reflecting our poor understanding of…

Conceptualizing the locality today in the global context means to be able to consider a level of denationalisation of the actor (of a locality) participating in a networked situation with actors from other localities. This thesis introduces a new conceptualization…

Vitamin D is a precursor to a steroid hormone, 1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25(OH)2D). After its discovery and the characterization of its receptor, the vitamin D receptor (VDR), it was initially thought only to be involved in calcium homeostasis, but further…

This thesis addresses the general problem of maintaining robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance under diverse speaker populations, channel conditions, and acoustic environments. To this end, the thesis analyzes the interactions between environment compensation techniques, frequency warping based speaker normalization,…

We carried out an investigation in two stages; an exploratory one, from which we characterized the mental representations about the universe of science teachers and the elements that explain the universe included by them in their cosmological models; and the…

La investigación que hemos desarrollado ha permitido que en seis centros educativos reales de Educación Primaria de la Región Autónoma de la Madeira, en Portugal, se llevase a cabo la experimentación de un Programa Didáctico cuyo gran objetivo es enseñar…

The debate on the relationship between income, income inequality, and health of the last two decades has been based almost entirely on empirical considerations. The ideas prompting the debate are based on the concave relationship observed between health and income…

Extreme rainfall events may have catastrophic impacts on the population and infrastructures, therefore it is essential to have accurate knowledge of extreme rainfall characteristics. Moreover, both the scientific community and policymakers have recently shown a growing interest in the potential…

Montreal's cosmopolitan environment becomes richer and is modified as the years go by with the increased mobility and the arrival of new immigrants. In this context, it seems essential to know the development of the immigrants' cultural representations related to…

In this thesis, we present a strongly coupled data fusion architecture within a Bayesian framework for modeling the bi-directional influences between the scene and object classification mechanisms. A number of psychophysical studies provide experimental evidence that the object and the…