Eco-Friendly Wind Energy: Improving Radar Tracking Systems for Bird Monitoring

openThe escalating global shift towards sustainable energy sources, particularly wind energy, has accentuated the need for effective measures to mitigate avian fatalities due to the operation of wind turbines. This thesis addresses this pressing ecological issue by enhancing bird tracking in radar systems - a case study on the Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered} radar system, used in wind farms for avian monitoring and collision prevention. The research presents a novel intersection of technology and ecology, significantly contributing to sustainable energy and wildlife conservation efforts. Central to this research is identifying the existing limitations of the currently adopted Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered} system in differentiating birds from environmental clutter and accurately tracking multiple birds under dynamic conditions. The methodology employed integrates raw radar data preprocessing, visualization techniques, and the development of robust bird detection and tracking algorithms. Notably, incorporating the Observation-Centric SORT (OC-SORT) algorithm for multi-bird tracking and enhanced radar data processing techniques markedly improves the system detection and tracking precision and efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is quantified evaluated through case studies in various wind farm environments. Performance metrics such as track velocity, angular trajectory changes, track duration, and quality assessment scores affirm the system superiority over Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered}. The results demonstrate a significant advancement in tracking accuracy, reduced track fragmentation, and increased detection reliability. The work in this thesis contributes to the improved operation of wind farm systems, while benefiting avian conservation. It addresses the challenges of radar-based bird monitoring and sets a foundation for future research. The successful enhancement of the Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered} system represents a crucial step in mitigating the environmental impact of wind energy operations, thus aligning sustainable energy production with ecological preservation objectives.The escalating global shift towards sustainable energy sources, particularly wind energy, has accentuated the need for effective measures to mitigate avian fatalities due to the operation of wind turbines. This thesis addresses this pressing ecological issue by enhancing bird tracking in radar systems - a case study on the Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered} radar system, used in wind farms for avian monitoring and collision prevention. The research presents a novel intersection of technology and ecology, significantly contributing to sustainable energy and wildlife conservation efforts. Central to this research is identifying the existing limitations of the currently adopted Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered} system in differentiating birds from environmental clutter and accurately tracking multiple birds under dynamic conditions. The methodology employed integrates raw radar data preprocessing, visualization techniques, and the development of robust bird detection and tracking algorithms. Notably, incorporating the Observation-Centric SORT (OC-SORT) algorithm for multi-bird tracking and enhanced radar data processing techniques markedly improves the system detection and tracking precision and efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is quantified evaluated through case studies in various wind farm environments. Performance metrics such as track velocity, angular trajectory changes, track duration, and quality assessment scores affirm the system superiority over Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered}. The results demonstrate a significant advancement in tracking accuracy, reduced track fragmentation, and increased detection reliability. The work in this thesis contributes to the improved operation of wind farm systems, while benefiting avian conservation. It addresses the challenges of radar-based bird monitoring and sets a foundation for future research. The successful enhancement of the Birdtrack\textsuperscript{\textregistered} system represents a crucial step in mitigating the environmental impact of wind energy operations, thus aligning sustainable energy production with ecological preservation objectives

TRAJETORIA DO DESENVOLVIMENTO:REVISITANDO O PASSADO PARA REPENSAR O FUTURO

Este artigo tem como objetivo analisar em que medida os problemas da pobreza e da degradação ambiental da região de São Joaquim, em Santa Catarina, vêm sendo historicamente gerenciados pelos agentes de planejamento e gestão do desenvolvimento regional. Para tanto, recuperamos a trajetória do desenvolvimento desde a colonização até hoje. A partir desta trajetória, investigamos os recursos (naturais e humanos) mobilizados para impulsionar as estratégias de desenvolvimento adotadas ao longo do tempo. As reflexões sobre o histórico e cenário atual da região levaram à conclusão de que os problemas destacados não representam uma prioridade nas agendas de planejamento do desenvolvimento regional. As conseqüências socioambientais do desenvolvimento regional são pouco estudadas e por esse motivo seus impactos negativos são poucos conhecidos. Ao longo da história foram baixas a valorização e a gestão do patrimônio sócio-cultural e natural como recurso específico do território. As demandas sociais e ambientais ficaram em segundo plano. Além disso, existem várias ações ligadas à problemática socioambiental na região, que não se articulam ora por entraves logísticos e operacionais, ora por interesses políticos partidários divergentes. ---------------------------------------------The aim of this article is to investigate how poverty and environmental degradation in the region of São Joaquim, State of Santa Catarina, have been historically managed by the local authorities and concerned organizations responsible for developing planning and management. For that, the course of the regional development has been reviewed since the time of colonization until now. From that, we have investigated the natural and social resources used to give impulse to the developing strategies historically adopted. Looking at the reality of the current situation and its historical background we have been able to conclude that the diminishing poverty and environmental degradation are not priorities of the regional planning development agenda. We can also say that the problems are not very known and the authorities show little interest in that issue. The history has shown little attention to the management of the cultural and natural resourses as specific characteristics of the region. The social and environmental demands have been placed in second plan. From one side the political interests don’t focus those problems, and by the other side the social and environmental impacts of the development are not deeply known. Besides that, we have seen several actions running involved with the social and natural demands separated from each other by logistic constrains or divergent political interests that take the place of social and environmental needs.desenvolvimento, gestão, ecossistemas, socioambiental, development, management, ecosystems, nature-society, Food Security and Poverty, International Development,

Interoperability enablers for cyber-physical enterprise systems

BG05М2ОР001-1.002-0002publishersversionpublishe

Interpersonal Behavior, Basic Psychological Needs, Motivation, Eating Behavior, and Body Image in Gym/Fitness Exercisers: A Systematic Review

Background: Body image seems to be a determining factor in the behavior and satisfaction of the basic psychological needs of exercise practitioners in gyms and fitness centers, and may influence motivation, interpersonal behavior, and eating behavior. This review aims to examine possible patterns between the variables under study in a gym/fitness context, specifically considering if body image perception has a determinant factor. Methods: Web of Science, PubMed, SCOPUS, and Psycnet were consulted and only data published between 2007 and 2021 were considered in the present review. After an initial search of 1373 records, a total of 6 were considered eligible for a detailed analysis after checking for the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: There is a positive relationship between body image dissatisfaction and less self-determined forms of motivation, as well as the adoption of less healthy eating behaviors. Younger participants have higher levels of body image dissatisfaction and unhealthy eating behaviors. Conclusions: Body image dissatisfaction leads to less self-determined forms of motivation for exercise in the context of gyms and fitness centers. On the other hand, a negative perception of body image can also lead to sustained patterns of less regulated forms of exercise and less healthy eating behaviors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Framework for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-Based IoT Application Development

Funding: This research was partially supported by funds provided by the European Commission in the scope of FoF/H2020-723710 vf-OS, ICT/H2020-825631 ZDMP projects, and by the FCT— Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia in the scope of UIDB/00066/2020 related to CTS—Centro de Tecnologia e Sistemas research unit.In the last decades, the increasing complexity of industrial information technology has led to the emergence of new trends in manufacturing. Factories are using multiple Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to harvest sensor information to improve production. Such a transformation contributes to efficiency growth and reduced production costs. To deal with the heterogeneity of the services within an IoT system, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is referred to in the literature as being advantageous for the design and development of software to support IoT-based production processes.The aim of SOA-based design is to provide the leverage to use and reuse loosely coupled IoT services at the middleware layer to minimise system integration problems. We propose a system architecture that follows the SOA architectural pattern and enables developers and business process designers to dynamically add, query or use instances of existing modular software in the IoT context. Furthermore, an analysis of utilization of modular software that presents some challenges and limitations of this approach is also in the scope of this workpublishersversionpublishe

FashionCLIP: Connecting Language and Images for Product Representations

The steady rise of online shopping goes hand in hand with the development of increasingly complex ML and NLP models. While most use cases are cast as specialized supervised learning problems, we argue that practitioners would greatly benefit from more transferable representations of products. In this work, we build on recent developments in contrastive learning to train FashionCLIP, a CLIP-like model for the fashion industry. We showcase its capabilities for retrieval, classification and grounding, and release our model and code to the community.Comment: Code will soon be available at https://github.com/patrickjohncyh, dataset at https://github.com/Farfetc