ZoomAzores project: implementation of a WebGIS for Nature and Adventure Tourism.

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Estatística e Gestão de InformaçãoNowadays, the Web offers new ways to make available information to users. This creates new ways and tools that can be used to make available tourist information and promotion of these destinations. The main objective this work is to develop a Web application for the ZoomAzores project. This web application uses dynamic maps and user-generated content features, which are focused on make available useful information for the tourist and the promotion of Nature and Adventure Tourism (NAT) in the archipelago of Azores. The solutions encountered were always determined by the technologies used and from the point of view of tourists visiting the Azores, which frequently doesn’t know about the Azores territory. The ZoomAzores Web application has Geographic Information System (GIS) visualization and navigation capabilities on the Internet, turning it into a WebGIS. It also encompasses the principles of Web 2.0 providing functionalities such as the generation of contents by users. The existing link between the use of dynamic maps and Web 2.0 in the tourism promotion and travel planning tasks seems to be a solid reality putting up new opportunities for the business in tourism.In this work, the development of the ZoomAzores WebGIS is based on the use of Open Standards (OS) and Free Open Source Software (FOSS). The use of OS is a key to the development of a WebGIS application able to interoperate with other systems and then use and consume Web Services (WS) that other systems can offer, concurrently enriching the data sources used. The FOSS technologies allow creates a more low cost solution without licensing cost software. This document exposes some design aspects in the system development and describes some functional and architectural features about the WebGIS ZoomAzores

Using blogs, podcasts and google sites as educational tools in a teacher education program

Recent research shows that teachers´ familiarity, confidence and skills in integrating technology into the curriculum are dependent on the quality of training programs they attend. Aware of this context and responsible for preparing digitally wise teachers an ICT (Information Communication Technology) training program was implemented with a groups of 81 in-service teachers, who used different Web 2.0 tools - blogs, podcasts and GoogleSites - to design and create digital resources to use in the real classroom. In this article we describe the training experience, present and reflect on teachers´ feedback and discuss implications for the design of education programs.Universidade do Minho. Centro de Investigação em Educação (CIEd-UMINHO

Elimination of Cybercrimes in Tanzania: Law and Practice

The focus of this research was to examine how the existing penal laws can be used to combat cyber crimes in Tanzania. It sought to examine the efficacy of the legal framework in combating cybercrimes in Tanzania. In the course of conducting this research, various methods were used. The main ones were library research and field work. Various individuals were interviewed as reflected in the text. The aim was to get data, cases, and views in relation to the subject of this study. It was observed that today's society has been dependent on computer and computer networks – the Internet. In other words, nothing so far can be done without computers. Criminals on the other hand have made use of the technology to perpetrate their ill motives. In other words, dependence upon technology has made electronic offences to increase. The analysis made in so far as the Penal Code of Tanzania is concerned is that it is not keeping pace with technology. Its provisions as discussed show that they are paper and physically based. It is argued that, endeavor of law making machinery of the nation should be in accordance with mile compared to the fraudsters, to keep the crimes lowest. Hence, it should be the persistent efforts of rulers and law makers to ensure that governing laws of technology contains every aspect and issues of cyber crime and further grow in continuous and healthy manner to keep constant vigil and check over the related crimes. It is for this reason that the Penal Code should be amended to provide for criminal activities conducted using computers and computer networks. The offences that should be introduced in the Penal Code are hacking, illegal access to computers and computer networks, fraud committed using computers and computer networks, money laundering and related crimes, identity theft, and many others in this respect

Nutritional management and recommendations for hospital users and medical inpatients

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaNutrition is fundamental to human well-being and health, especially when applied to patients who need special health care. In these cases, it is crucial that each patient has adequate nutrition to meet their needs, in order to accelerate their recovery process. Recommender systems make it possible to offer suggestions to users, adapted to their preferences and to previously obtained information about them. Food recommender systems are recommender systems applied to nutrition and diet. They are usually implemented feeding plans recommendation platforms based on food and the person using it. In this sense, the existing gap in the use of these recommendation systems applied to nutrition in health care is notorious. This is mainly due to the difficulty in associating the nutritional value of each food with the needs of patients. The main objective of this project is to fill the existing void, through the development and implementation of a platform that will allow the planning of meals taking into account the nutritional plan of the food and the specific needs associated with the users of the Vila Verde Social Canteen. The use of machine learning algorithms will allow us to identify how the connection between food and patient requirements can be made, making this task possible, which is complex due to the wide domain associated with it. This platform will be used for the generation of kitchen meal plans, which shall be produced using the algorithms developed after a bibliographic study and an investigation of the existing work, in order to understand how they can be implemented and which are the most adequate to the nutritional recommendations system.A nutrição é fundamental no bem-estar e na saúde do ser humano, principalmente quando aplicada a pacientes que necessitam de cuidados de saúde especiais. Nestes casos, é fulcral que cada paciente tenha uma nutrição adequada às suas necessidades, de forma a acelerar o seu processo de recuperação. Os sistemas de recomendação permitem oferecer sugestões aos utilizadores, adequados às suas preferências e às informações previamente obtidas acerca dos mesmos. Os sis-temas de recomendação de alimentos são sistemas de recomendação aplicados à nutrição e alimentação. Estes são usualmente implementados em plataformas de recomendações de receitas e planos de alimentação tendo como base a comida e a pessoa. Neste sentido, é notória a falha atual no que diz respeito à utilização destes sistemas de recomendação aplicados à nutrição em cuidados de saúde. Isto deve-se maioritariamente à dificuldade na associação entre o valor nutricional de cada alimento e as necessidades dos pacientes. Este projeto tem como principal objetivo preencher a lacuna existente, através do desen-volvimento e implementação de uma plataforma que irá permitir o planeamento de refeições tendo em conta o plano nutricional dos alimentos e as necessidades específicas associadas aos utentes da Cantina Social de Vila Verde. A utilização de algoritmos de machine learning permitirá perceber como pode ser feita a conexão entre os alimentos e os requisitos dos pacientes, tornando possível esta tarefa, que é complexa devido ao largo domínio associado à mesma. Esta plataforma será utilizada para a geração de planos de refeições da cozinha, sendo estes produzidos utilizando os algoritmos desenvolvidos após um estudo bibliográfico e uma investigação ao trabalho existente com o objetivo de perceber como poderão ser implementados e quais os mais adequados ao sistema de recomendações nutricional

Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di richerca archeologica. Atti del II workshop (Genova, 11 maggio 2007)

IOSA is a working group that has been often called a project, started in 2004 within grupporicerche, with the aim of evaluating if and how free and open source software could be used in everyday archaeological practice. The activity of IOSA has been going through several phases, from the initial cataloguing of software programs on the http://www.iosa.it/ website, to the development of dedicated software tools, advanced documentation and the involvement in international initiatives. In 2007 IOSA was in a moment of passage between the first “explorative” phase and the following phase, with the first applications in our respective fields of studies, some experiments in programming with high-level languages (Python), the management of web-based information systems and the never ending cataloguing of cultural heritage. The 2007 workshop is to date the only one organised by neither a university nor another public institution. Together with the 2008 meeting, this workshop has been the only one not organised by employed staff. Although this exceptional situation is no justification, it is useful to understand both the delay of this publication and the great freedom we enjoyed in making choices on our own. This book presents the fruits of our researches and collaborations realised at the 2007 workshop

Performance assessment of real-time data management on wireless sensor networks

Technological advances in recent years have allowed the maturity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which aim at performing environmental monitoring and data collection. This sort of network is composed of hundreds, thousands or probably even millions of tiny smart computers known as wireless sensor nodes, which may be battery powered, equipped with sensors, a radio transceiver, a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and some memory. However due to the small size and the requirements of low-cost nodes, these sensor node resources such as processing power, storage and especially energy are very limited. Once the sensors perform their measurements from the environment, the problem of data storing and querying arises. In fact, the sensors have restricted storage capacity and the on-going interaction between sensors and environment results huge amounts of data. Techniques for data storage and query in WSN can be based on either external storage or local storage. The external storage, called warehousing approach, is a centralized system on which the data gathered by the sensors are periodically sent to a central database server where user queries are processed. The local storage, in the other hand called distributed approach, exploits the capabilities of sensors calculation and the sensors act as local databases. The data is stored in a central database server and in the devices themselves, enabling one to query both. The WSNs are used in a wide variety of applications, which may perform certain operations on collected sensor data. However, for certain applications, such as real-time applications, the sensor data must closely reflect the current state of the targeted environment. However, the environment changes constantly and the data is collected in discreet moments of time. As such, the collected data has a temporal validity, and as time advances, it becomes less accurate, until it does not reflect the state of the environment any longer. Thus, these applications must query and analyze the data in a bounded time in order to make decisions and to react efficiently, such as industrial automation, aviation, sensors network, and so on. In this context, the design of efficient real-time data management solutions is necessary to deal with both time constraints and energy consumption. This thesis studies the real-time data management techniques for WSNs. It particularly it focuses on the study of the challenges in handling real-time data storage and query for WSNs and on the efficient real-time data management solutions for WSNs. First, the main specifications of real-time data management are identified and the available real-time data management solutions for WSNs in the literature are presented. Secondly, in order to provide an energy-efficient real-time data management solution, the techniques used to manage data and queries in WSNs based on the distributed paradigm are deeply studied. In fact, many research works argue that the distributed approach is the most energy-efficient way of managing data and queries in WSNs, instead of performing the warehousing. In addition, this approach can provide quasi real-time query processing because the most current data will be retrieved from the network. Thirdly, based on these two studies and considering the complexity of developing, testing, and debugging this kind of complex system, a model for a simulation framework of the real-time databases management on WSN that uses a distributed approach and its implementation are proposed. This will help to explore various solutions of real-time database techniques on WSNs before deployment for economizing money and time. Moreover, one may improve the proposed model by adding the simulation of protocols or place part of this simulator on another available simulator. For validating the model, a case study considering real-time constraints as well as energy constraints is discussed. Fourth, a new architecture that combines statistical modeling techniques with the distributed approach and a query processing algorithm to optimize the real-time user query processing are proposed. This combination allows performing a query processing algorithm based on admission control that uses the error tolerance and the probabilistic confidence interval as admission parameters. The experiments based on real world data sets as well as synthetic data sets demonstrate that the proposed solution optimizes the real-time query processing to save more energy while meeting low latency.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

Maine Perspective, v 8, i 2

The Maine Perspective, a publication for the University of Maine, was a campus newsletter produced by the Department of Public Affairs which eventually transformed into the Division of Marketing and Communication. Regular columns included the UM Calendar, Ongoing Events, People in Perspective, Look Who\u27s on Campus, In Focus, and Along the Mall. The weekly newsletter also included position openings on campus as well as classified ads. Articles in this issue focus on UMaine being seen as a leader in the integration and application of information technology in the state of Maine; the inaugural year of the School of Marine Sciences; and a personal profile of Steve Carignan

Simulador de operações de guerra cibernética: ferramenta de treinamento e preparo de recursos humanos para atuarem no ciberespaço

A revolução tecnológica transformou e ainda transforma, cada dia mais, a vida de pessoas, estados e nações. Dentro deste cenário, a cibernética ganha espaço em reportagens de revistas e jornais, programas de televisão, nas mídias sociais e até mesmo em filmes de Hollywood. Os acontecimentos no ciberespaço envolvem e atingem a todos, pois estamos conectados em uma grande rede virtual. Neste contexto, a preocupação de defender as fronteiras virtuais e formar soldados digitais, ganha foco nos governos de todo o mundo. A preocupação brasileira de formar recursos humanos aptos a combater no espaço cibernético está registrada em diversos documentos nacionais. Desta forma, este trabalho buscou apresentar uma ferramenta de simulação voltada para o treinamento de militares brasileiros que atuarão no espaço cibernético. Com este objetivo geral, realizamos pesquisas bibliográficas em diversas fontes militares (manuais ostensivos), artigos acadêmicos (nacionais e internacionais), materiais didáticos utilizados em cursos específicos da área cibernética e livros da ciência da computação. Um estudo de caso foi apresentado, assim como o desenvolvimento de um exercício de ataque cibernético realizado com um simulador cibernético. Por meio deste estudo, foi possível identificar vantagens e desvantagens da ferramenta em questão, bem como salientar a importância do assunto e a dificuldade da formação de recursos humanos aptos a operarem em ambientes virtuais, com segurança e eficiência