HvZ Website: The Re-Engineering

As part of our Software Design and Development class, we were given a customer and tasked with providing them a product that they specifically request. Our customer was the Humans vs Zombies (HvZ) student group here on campus. They are a group that periodically plays a campus-wide game of tag using their own online resources, and they requested that we provide them a new, updated website. Their problem was that they needed to both update their site and acquire a more maintable version. The current site that they own now is three years old with code that is difficult to decipher

O JOGO DIGITAL ´RECICLAPPSM´ NA EDUCAÇÃO AMBIENTAL E TECNOLÓGICA DAS CRIANÇAS

Objetiva-se com este artigo relatar os resultados da construção e aplicação do jogo RECICLAPPSM. O jogo possui fins educacionais para o letramento científico, ambiental e tecnológico das crianças dos anos iniciais do Ensino Fundamental. Foi desenvolvido por um Projeto de Bolsa Iniciação Tecnológica financiado pela Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Rio Grande do Sul (RS) vinculado ao Programa de Pós-graduação em Ensino de Ciências e Matemática, em cooperação com o curso de graduação em Jogos Digitais da Universidade Franciscana, Santa Maria, RS. O jogo foi desenvolvido a partir do software Construct 2 e pertence ao gênero “draganddrop”; em tradução livre, o termo significa arrastar e largar. A intenção do jogo é a de conscientizar as crianças acerca do destino ideal de resíduos, considerando também sua toxicidade, periculosidade. O jogo foi testado junto a um grupo de estudantes dos anos iniciais de uma escola pública municipal. Constatou-se que este tem potencial de viabilizar a alfabetização científica, ambiental e tecnológica das crianças nas escolas, com enfoque no destino e tratamento ideal de resíduos produzidos pela sociedade.

DGPose: Deep Generative Models for Human Body Analysis

Deep generative modelling for human body analysis is an emerging problem with many interesting applications. However, the latent space learned by such approaches is typically not interpretable, resulting in less flexibility. In this work, we present deep generative models for human body analysis in which the body pose and the visual appearance are disentangled. Such a disentanglement allows independent manipulation of pose and appearance, and hence enables applications such as pose-transfer without specific training for such a task. Our proposed models, the Conditional-DGPose and the Semi-DGPose, have different characteristics. In the first, body pose labels are taken as conditioners, from a fully-supervised training set. In the second, our structured semi-supervised approach allows for pose estimation to be performed by the model itself and relaxes the need for labelled data. Therefore, the Semi-DGPose aims for the joint understanding and generation of people in images. It is not only capable of mapping images to interpretable latent representations but also able to map these representations back to the image space. We compare our models with relevant baselines, the ClothNet-Body and the Pose Guided Person Generation networks, demonstrating their merits on the Human3.6M, ChictopiaPlus and DeepFashion benchmarks.Comment: IJCV 2020 special issue on 'Generating Realistic Visual Data of Human Behavior' preprint. Keywords: deep generative models, semi-supervised learning, human pose estimation, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial network

Utilizando visão computacional para reconstrução probabilística 3D e rastreamento de movimento

This paper presents an approach to the 3D visual tracking problem into multi-camera environments. This proposal executes the markerless visual tracking observing the environment through a model based in a volumetric reconstruction technique, called 3D Probabilistic Occupancy Grid, which is still seldom used for this purpose. The target is tracked by the use of Expectation-Maximization algorithm with an object representation model constructed with Gaussians blobs representing the object body parts.Este artigo apresenta um método não intrusivo para rastreamento de movimento 3D em ambientes monitorados por múltiplas câmeras. Primeiramente, se obtém uma reconstrução volumétrica 3D, através da técnica de Grid de Ocupação Probabilístico, tal técnica ainda foi pouco explorada no contexto de rastreamento de movimento. Então, utiliza-se o algoritmo Expectation-Maximization em conjunto com um modelo de representação do corpo do objeto de interesse baseado em blobs Gaussianas, para identificar e rastrear o movimento das partes do corpo do objeto de interesse

Adenosine A2A and dopamine D2 receptor interaction controls fatigue resistance

Introduction: Caffeine and the selective A2A receptor antagonist SCH58261 both have ergogenic properties, effectively reducing fatigue and enhancing exercise capacity. This study investigates in male Swiss mice the interaction between adenosine A2A receptors and dopamine D2 receptors controlling central fatigue, with a focus on the striatum where these receptors are most abundant.Methods: We employed DPCPX and SCH58261 to antagonize A1 and A2A receptors, caffeine as a non-competitive antagonist for both receptors, and haloperidol as a D2 receptor antagonist; all compounds were tested upon systemic application and caffeine and SCH58261 were also directly applied in the striatum. Behavioral assessments using the open field, grip strength, and treadmill tests allowed estimating the effect of treatments on fatigue.Results and discussion: The results suggested a complex interplay between the dopamine and adenosine systems. While systemic DPCPX had little effect on motor performance or fatigue, the application of either caffeine or SCH58261 was ergogenic, and these effects were attenuated by haloperidol. The intra-striatal administration of caffeine or SCH58261 was also ergogenic, but these effects were unaffected by haloperidol. These findings confirm a role of striatal A2A receptors in the control of central fatigue but suggest that the D2 receptor-mediated control of the ergogenic effects of caffeine and of A2A receptor antagonists might occur outside the striatum. This prompts the need of additional efforts to unveil the role of different brain regions in the control of fatigue