Virtual built realities: the case of geographical research induced knowledge

Peer Reviewe

Dialectical polyptych: an interactive movie

Most of the known video games developed by big software companies usually establish an approach to the cinematic language in an attempt to create a perfect combination of narrative, visual technique and interaction. Unlike most video games, interactive film narratives normally involve an interruption in time whenever the spectator has to make choices. “Dialectical Polyptych” is an interactive movie included in a project called “Characters looking for a spect-actor”, which aims to give the spectator on-the-fly control over film editing, thus exploiting the role of the spectator as an active subject in the presented narrative. This paper presents a system based on a 3D sensor for tracking the spectator's movements and positions, which allows seamless real-timeinteractivity with the movie. Different positions of the body prompt a change in the angle or shot within each narrative, and hand swipes allow the spectator to alternate between the two parallel narratives, both producing a complementary narrative.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Structural MRI texture analysis for detecting Alzheimer's disease

Purpose:: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has the highest worldwide prevalence of all neurodegenerative disorders, no cure, and low ratios of diagnosis accuracy at its early stage where treatments have some effect and can give some years of life quality to patients. This work aims to develop an automatic method to detect AD in 3 different stages, namely, control (CN), mild-cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD itself, using structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI). Methods:: A set of co-occurrence matrix and texture statistical measures (contrast, correlation, energy, homogeneity, entropy, variance, and standard deviation) were extracted from a two-level discrete wavelet transform decomposition of sMRI images. The discriminant capacity of the measures was analyzed and the most discriminant ones were selected to be used as features for feeding classical machine learning (cML) algorithms and a convolution neural network (CNN). Results:: The cML algorithms achieved the following classification accuracies: 93.3% for AD vs CN, 87.7% for AD vs MCI, 88.2% for CN vs MCI, and 75.3% for All vs All. The CNN achieved the following classification accuracies: 82.2% for AD vs CN, 75.4% for AD vs MCI, 83.8% for CN vs MCI, and 64% for All vs All. Conclusion:: In the evaluated cases, cML provided higher discrimination results than CNN. For the All vs All comparison, the proposedmethod surpasses by 4% the discrimination accuracy of the state-of-the-art methods that use structural MRI.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A systematic comparison of supervised classifiers

Pattern recognition techniques have been employed in a myriad of industrial, medical, commercial and academic applications. To tackle such a diversity of data, many techniques have been devised. However, despite the long tradition of pattern recognition research, there is no technique that yields the best classification in all scenarios. Therefore, the consideration of as many as possible techniques presents itself as an fundamental practice in applications aiming at high accuracy. Typical works comparing methods either emphasize the performance of a given algorithm in validation tests or systematically compare various algorithms, assuming that the practical use of these methods is done by experts. In many occasions, however, researchers have to deal with their practical classification tasks without an in-depth knowledge about the underlying mechanisms behind parameters. Actually, the adequate choice of classifiers and parameters alike in such practical circumstances constitutes a long-standing problem and is the subject of the current paper. We carried out a study on the performance of nine well-known classifiers implemented by the Weka framework and compared the dependence of the accuracy with their configuration parameter configurations. The analysis of performance with default parameters revealed that the k-nearest neighbors method exceeds by a large margin the other methods when high dimensional datasets are considered. When other configuration of parameters were allowed, we found that it is possible to improve the quality of SVM in more than 20% even if parameters are set randomly. Taken together, the investigation conducted in this paper suggests that, apart from the SVM implementation, Weka's default configuration of parameters provides an performance close the one achieved with the optimal configuration

A computer vision based web application for tracking soccer players

Soccer is a sport where everyone that is involved with it make all the efforts aiming for excellence. Not only the players need to show their skills on the pitch but also the coach, and the remaining staff, need to have their own tools so that they can perform at higher levels. Footdata is a project to build a new web application product for soccer (football), which integrates two fundamental components of this sport's world: the social and the professional. While the former is an enhanced social platform for soccer professionals and fans, the later can be considered as a Soccer Resource Planning, featuring a system for acquisition and processing information to meet all the soccer management needs. In this paper we focus only in a specific module of the professional component. We will describe the section of the web application that allows to analyse movements and tactics of the players using images directly taken from the pitch or from videos, we will show that it is possible to draw players and ball movements in a web application and detect if those movements occur during a game. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

Development of an electrochemical biosensor for Machado-Joseph disease biomarker detection

[Excerpt] Machado-Joseph disease (MJD) or spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) is a neurodegenerative disease with an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern. Nowadays, it is the most common form of spinocerebellar ataxia and an incurable disorder, which leads to death1. MJD is caused by the expansion of CAG trinucleotide repeat in the coding region of the gene ATXN3 and the aggregation of the resulting product. This polyQ expansion is thought to be the key of the disease, in which the length of this polyQ extension is linked to earlier and more severe symptons2. This mutant protein disturbs the normal neuronal function and leads to its degeneration, with subsequent formation of neuronal intranuclear inclusions. Although there is no treatment available, a more accurate diagnosis of MJD may lead to relieved symptoms2. Research activities targeting such possibility include the identification of biomarkers in several biological fluids that may turn out an important means to early diagnosis or even potential therapy biomarkers within future3,4. [...]Funding of project IBEROS, Instituto de Bioingeniería en Red para el Envejecimiento Saludable, POCTEP/0245-BEROS-1-E, PROGRAMA INTERREG 2014-2020, to FEDER within the cooperation region of Galiza/Spain and North of Portugalinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Association between motor competence and functional movement screen scores

Background. Motor competence (MC) is generally used to describe a person?s proficiency in a variety of motor skills and is the basis for one?s performance in sports and recreational activities. Functional Movement Screen (FMSTM) is one of the most used screening systems to provide interpretable measure of movement quality. Both FMSTM and MC constructs share three components: locomotor, manipulative and stabilizing movements. In the present study, it was hypothesized that MC scores can explain FMSTM variables. It was also predicted that better MC leads to better functional movement patterns in young adults. Methods. A sample of 92 young adults (73.9% men) with a mean age of 21.2 years participated in this study. All participants were evaluated on anthropometric measurements, dual x-ray absorptiometry; FMSTM and MC. Results. Men showed better MC scores and fat mass composition than women. Regarding specific tests, women scored higher in the FMSTM active straight leg raise test, whereas men performed better in the FMSTM trunk stability push-up (TSP) test. Manipulative tasks and construct presents? significant and positive associations with FMSTM composite score (r ? 0.303). The significant negative correlation were more related to FMSTM TSP and MC shuttle run and FMSTM in-line lunge and MC manipulative. The FMSTM TSP presents significant associations with all MC constructs and tasks. Meanwhile, the FMSTM composite score is associated with all components of MC Stability (p < 0.05). In young adults, and independent of gender, the FMSTM explains fundamental movements based on motor control according to the stability construct. Moreover, the FMSTM TSP is associated with better performance in the all MC constructs and MC tasks. The FMSTM, on its own, is linked to objective MC stability measures.4811-99FE-2ECD | Luis Paulo RodriguesN/

Assessing the compressive and impact behavior of plastic safety toe caps through computational modelling

Toe caps are one of the most important components in safety footwear, but have a significant contribution to the weight of the shoe. Efforts have been made to replace steel toe caps by polymeric ones, since they are lighter, insulated and insensitive to magnetic fields. Nevertheless, polymeric solutions require larger volumes, which has a negative impact on the shoe’s aesthetics. Therefore, safety footwear manufacturers are pursuing the development of an easy, low-cost and reliable solution to optimize this component. In this work, a solid mechanics toolbox built in the open-source computational library, OpenFOAM®, was used to simulate two laboratory standard tests (15 kN compression and 200 J impact tests). To model the polymeric material behavior, a neo-Hookean hyper-elasto-plastic material law with J2 plastic criteria was employed. A commercially available plastic toe cap was characterized, and the collected data was used for assessment purposes. Close agreements, between experimental and simulated values, were achieved for both tests, with an approximate error of 5.4% and 6.8% for the displacement value in compression and impact test simulations, respectively. The results clearly demonstrate that the employed open-source finite volume computational models offer reliable results and can support the design of toe caps for the R&D footwear industry.This work was funded by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 Programme and National Funds through FCT-Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the projects UIDB/05256/2020; UIDP/05256/2020 and FAMEST-Footwear, Advanced Materials, Equipment’s and Software Technologies (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-024529)