Presentation

I am a teacher, an open-source software developer and peer reviewer for JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) and project coordinator and researcher at NUCLIO.

Background:

(2022) MA Anthropology (ISCTE, Lisbon)

(2018) MSc Cognitive Sciences (University of Lisbon; 23rd International Summer School of Cognitive Science, New University of Sofia, Bulgaria)

(2015) BSc Physics (Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon; ERASMUS, University of Leipzig, Germany)

Research experience:

(2018 - 2019) Social embodied cognition and psychology – the effect of human odors produced under positive and negative odors on the perceived presence of others in the immediate environment (William James Center for Research, ISPA, Lisbon).

(2017 - 2018) Social cognition and multi-agent modelling – the co-evolution of cooperation and social cognition in primates under ecological pressure (Biosystems and Integrative Sciences Institute (BioISI), Lisbon);

(2012 - 2015) Biophysics – water diffusion in biological tissues (Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering (IBEB), Lisbon);

This website is dedicated to present my research interests, projects and research output.

Projects

SoundScapes – Sonification Environments for STEAM Learning -proposes an innovative STEAM approach with an emphasis on Arts, where students design and use a sonification environment, which converts numeric data related to school curricula into sound. This approach aims to increase student engagement and motivation and to promote an inclusive environment, where they learn through exploring the hearing sense (especially relevant for the visually impaired) and communicate and connect with each other through the universal language that is Music.

CliC-PoLiT is a project that aims at engaging students and the society in environmental and climate change activities to raise awareness and strengthen responsible citizenship. Incorporating the terms of climate change, urban sustainability and light pollution into the curriculum requires systemic thinking and interdisciplinary approaches, demanding in parallel for pedagogical innovations that provide interactive, experiential, transformative, and real-world learning. In light of these challenges, the CliC-PoLiT project aims to design, implement, and evaluate blended innovative educational approaches and digital tools that provide this learning process towards a specific issue.

LeDS project – Learning Digital Skills through Arts and Performance – aims to develop an innovative STEAM approach to demonstrate how Arts can be used as a beginning, middle, and end of a STEAM activity focused on digital skills and where all the disciplines are seamlessly integrated. Through the LeDS STEAM approach, students will develop important digital skills as well as other important academic, social, and emotional skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, tolerance, self-esteem, and self-confidence, among others. Finally, teachers will also become more skilled both in digital skills and in STEAM education.

Why do we assess our students? What added value does this assessment bring to both students and teachers? Can we use assessment to stimulate cognitive, social and emotional development? Can assessment become a powerful tool for the development of students’ skills and teachers’ practice? ASSESS is a project co-funded by the Erasmus + Agency of the European Union between 2020 and 2023 that targets these and many more questions about assessment with the goal of creating a powerful assessment framework for teachers and students.

NUCLIO and InovLabs joined hands to bring CHANGE MAKERS to schools and to the community! A space for creation, learning and innovation where imagination is the limit. Change Makers offers students, teachers, citizens and creatives the opportunity to develop projects working with cutting-edge technologies (3D printers, Laser cutter, CNC Machine, Web Studio, among others) and with the dedicated monitoring of professionals with expertise in several scientific and educational fields.

Academic output

Thesis

Sousa, D. N. (2022). Antropologia do reencantamento: A relação pessoa-animal num santuário na Galiza rural [Dissertação de mestrado, Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa]. 🔗

Sousa, D. N. (2018). A memória como condição para o sucesso da cooperação [Dissertação de mestrado, Universidade de Lisboa]. 🔗

Publications

Sousa, D. N., Correia, L., & Garcia-Marques, L. (2019). The importance of memory for the success of cooperation under ecological adversity. Adaptive Behavior. 🔗

Sousa, D. N., & Daniel, J. R, (2018). qsort R package: A New Tool for Scoring Q-sort Data. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(32), 911. 🔗

Sousa, D. N., & Ferreira, H. A., (2018). MCSD: A MATLAB Tool for Monte-Carlo Simulations of Diffusion in biological Tissues. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(30), 966. 🔗

Sousa, D. N., & Daniel, J. R, (2018). bor: An R Package for Transforming Behavioral Observation Records into Data Matrices. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(28), 909. 🔗

Sousa, D. N., & Ferreira, H. A. (2015). Diffusion kurtosis imaging: Monte Carlo simulation of diffusion processes using crowdprocess. In Bioengineering (ENBENG), 2015 IEEE 4th Portuguese Meeting on (pp. 1-4). IEEE. 🔗

Communications

Sousa, D. N., Correia, L., & Garcia-Marques, L., (2018) “A importância da memória para o sucesso da cooperação em primatas” (The importance of memory for the success of cooperation in primates) no Encontro Aberto de Primatologia (Open Meeting of Primatology). Almada, Portugal. Article

Sousa, D. N., & Ferreira H. A., (2015). “Diffusion kurtosis imaging: Monte Carlo simulation of diffusion processes using crowdprocess” na IEEE 4th Portuguese Meeting on Bioengineering (ENBENG) organized by IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Chapter of the IEEE Portugal Section. Porto, Portugal. Abstract

Sousa, D. N., & Ferreira H. A., “Study of Diffusion Kurtosis Imaging parameters using Monte Carlo simulations”, ESMRMB 2015 Congress 32th Annual Scientific Meeting of the European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology October 1-3, 2015, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Abstract

Posters

Sousa, D. N., Borlinhas, F., Ferreira, H. A., “Estimation of breast tumour tissue diffusion parameters from histological images and Monte-Carlo simulations”, ISMRM 2016 Congress 24th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine May 7-13, 2016, Singapore. Poster

Unpublished material

Apontamentos de Física I (Portuguese) (Notes on Physics). File

Software

Sonification

Sonification extension for Makecode micro:bit that facilitates the mapping of ranges of values (collected in real-time or a posteriori) onto music scales..

2024

nodelv

Node.js data logger and viewer. Useful for instance for citizen science projects that require sensor data logging for monitoring real-time measures of temperature, humidity, air quality, etc.

2024

darchbox

darchbox is an Arch Linux Post installation setup script that setups a fully functional low resource comsumption desktop environment. darchbox installs the Pacman wrapper and AUR helper yay, updates the system, and sets up a basic desktop environment including openbox, rofi, tint2 and lemonbar.

2023

pyBART

A python implementation of the BART: a task designed to assess risk-taking behavior.

2019

miniabm

miniabm is a minimalist tool for agent-based modeling in python. This package allows the user to easily create objects with prespecified attributes, group the objects according the their attributes and change them dynamically in a batch.

2019

SDGen

SDGen is a superdonor generator program for experimental research on human chemosignals communication.

2019

TMTGen

TMTGen is an automatic Trail Making Test (TMT) generator for experimental research in neuropsychology. The program offers a trail generator as well as a testing platform for measuring response speed and response accuracy in the TMT.

2019

bor

bor is an R package designed to transform focal observations’ data, referring to the occurrence of social interactions, into asymmetric data matrices.

2018

qsort

qsort is an R package that allows scoring Q-sort data, using criteria sorts and derived scales from subsets of items. This package includes descriptions and scoring procedures for four different Q-sets.

2018

MCSD

MCSD is a simple MATLAB/Octave tool designed to simulate diffusion processes in complex environments such as biological tissues.

2018

CUEPCA

CUEPCA - Cooperation under ecological pressure: Cognitive adaptations. Netlogo applet to investigate the importance of cognitive adaptations that are necessary for the success of cooperation under ecological and social pressure.

This applet was developed in the context of my master’s thesis and published with the article The importance of memory for the success of cooperation under ecological adversity .

2017

Emergence of despotic and egalitarian societies

A Netlogo applet designed to understand the relation between dominance and spatial structure and its consequence on social behavior.

2017

Spatial PD

A Netlogo applet designed to investigate the evolution and maintenance of cooperation in spatially structured populations of agents playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma with their nearest neighbors.

2016

Extinction and evolution

A Netlogo applet designed to understand the importance of mass extinction events for the evolution of biological diversity.

2016

Molecular diffusion

A Netlogo applet designed to understand molecular diffusion and the effect of physical constraints.

2016

Electronics

Attiny85 pedometer

An ATtiny85 step counter equipped with a ky-002 vibration sensor, featuring a switch button to initiate counting and a push button to display the number of steps and walked distance on the OLED screen.

2023

HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor midi instrument

C-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor midi instrument with Raspberry Pi and based on fluidsynth which mimics a theremi but plays dozens of instruments including different types of pianos, guitars, percussion instruments and a variety of uncommon instruments and non musical sounds.

2023

Raspberry Pi pico Alarm Clock

Time, date and alarm clock based on Raspberry Pi Pico.

2023

Raspberry Pi Weather Station Webserver

A minimal rpi weather station that measures the atmospheric temperature and humidity using a rpi 3 microcomputer and a DHT11 module. A flask webserver is implemented to display data locally.

2023

Arduino Weather Station

A minimal arduino weather station that measures the atmospheric temperature and humidity using an arduino nano every microcontroller, a DHT11 module and an LCD 16x2 I2C display.

2023