Hierarchical fuzzy logic based approach for object tracking

In this paper a novel tracking approach based on fuzzy concepts is introduced. A methodology for both single and multiple object tracking is presented. The aim of this methodology is to use these concepts as a tool to, while maintaining the needed accuracy, reduce the complexity usually involved in object tracking problems. Several dynamic fuzzy sets are constructed according to both kinematic and non-kinematic properties that distinguish the object to be tracked. Meanwhile kinematic related fuzzy sets model the object's motion pattern, the non-kinematic fuzzy sets model the object's appearance. The tracking task is performed through the fusion of these fuzzy models by means of an inference engine. This way, object detection and matching steps are performed exclusively using inference rules on fuzzy sets. In the multiple object methodology, each object is associated with a confidence degree and a hierarchical implementation is performed based on that confidence degree.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Automatic histogram threshold using fuzzy measures

In this paper, an automatic histogram threshold approach based on a fuzziness measure is presented. This work is an improvement of an existing method. Using fuzzy logic concepts, the problems involved in finding the minimum of a criterion function are avoided. Similarity between gray levels is the key to find an optimal threshold. Two initial regions of gray levels, located at the boundaries of the histogram, are defined. Then, using an index of fuzziness, a similarity process is started to find the threshold point. A significant contrast between objects and background is assumed. Previous histogram equalization is used in small contrast images. No prior knowledge of the image is required.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

META-AVALIAÇÃO DAS UNIVERSIDADES BRASILEIRAS: O SINAES À LUZ DOS INDICADORES DO JCSEE

A meta-avaliação é uma maneira de assegurar e comprovar a qualidade da avaliação por meio do acompanhamento, da revisão e do aperfeiçoamento do processo avaliativo. O objetivo geral desta pesquisa é Meta-avaliar o Processo de Avaliação Institucional das Universidades Brasileiras, promovido pelo SINAES, no período de 2004 à 2014. A motivação se deu em virtude do atual Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Supeiror ter completado uma década de vigência, o que justifica a necessidade e a importância de se realizar uma meta-avaliação. De um total de 158 Universidades, 66 fizeram parte da amostra desta pesquisa, sendo 25 Públicas e 41 Privadas. Os resultados indicaram que as Universidades Privadas foram melhores avaliadas em quase todas as Dimensões Institucionais, além de não terem obtitdo média conceitual abaixo do nível satisfatório de qualidade em nenhuma Dimensão. Apenas na Dimensão 2 – Políticas para Ensino, Pesquisa e Extensão, e na Dimensão 5 – Políticas de Pessoal, as Univesridades Públicas tiveram um desempenho melhor; por outro lado, obtiveram média conceitual insatisfatória na Dimensão 1 – Missão e PDI e na Dimensão 8 – Planejamento e Auto-avaliação. Por fim, para o julgamento do mérito e do valor do Processo de Avaliação Institucional do SINAES, utilizaram-se os Padrões de Avaliação do Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, os quais indicaram que, em geral, o Processo atende aos requisitos para os quais foi destinado e satisfaz as necessidades dos stakeholders

Differentiator factors in the implementation of social network sites

Estágio realizado na Business Analyst da Documento Crítico - Desenvolvimento de Software, S. A. (Cardmobili) e orientado pelo Eng.ª Catarina MaiaTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Adaptive Penalty and Barrier function based on Fuzzy Logic

Optimization methods have been used in many areas of knowledge, such as Engineering, Statistics, Chemistry, among others, to solve optimization problems. In many cases it is not possible to use derivative methods, due to the characteristics of the problem to be solved and/or its constraints, for example if the involved functions are non-smooth and/or their derivatives are not know. To solve this type of problems a Java based API has been implemented, which includes only derivative-free optimization methods, and that can be used to solve both constrained and unconstrained problems. For solving constrained problems, the classic Penalty and Barrier functions were included in the API. In this paper a new approach to Penalty and Barrier functions, based on Fuzzy Logic, is proposed. Two penalty functions, that impose a progressive penalization to solutions that violate the constraints, are discussed. The implemented functions impose a low penalization when the violation of the constraints is low and a heavy penalty when the violation is high. Numerical results, obtained using twenty-eight test problems, comparing the proposed Fuzzy Logic based functions to six of the classic Penalty and Barrier functions are presented. Considering the achieved results, it can be concluded that the proposed penalty functions besides being very robust also have a very good performance

Exploring Hybrid Parallel Systems for Probabilistic Record Linkage

[EN] Record linkage is a technique widely used to gather data stored in disparate data sources that presumably pertain to the same real world entity. This integration can be done deterministically or probabilistically, depending on the existence of common key attributes among all data sources involved. The probabilistic approach is very time-consuming due to the amount of records that must be compared, specifically in big data scenarios. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a methodology that simultaneously exploits multicore and multi-GPU architectures in order to perform the probabilistic linkage of large-scale Brazilian governmental databases. We present some algorithmic optimizations that provide high accuracy and improve performance by defining the best algorithm-architecture combination for a problem given its input size. We also discuss performance results obtained with different data samples, showing that a hybrid approach outperforms other configurations, providing an average speedup of 7.9 when linking up to 20.000 million records.This work has been partially supported by CNPq, FAPESB, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Royal Society (UK), Medical Research Council (UK), NVIDIA Hardware Grant Program, Generalitat Valenciana (Grant PROMETEOII/2014/003), Spanish Government and European Commission through TEC2015-67387-C4-1-R (MINECO/FEDER), and network CAPAP-H. We have also worked in cooperation with the EU-COST Programme Action IC1305, "Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS)Boratto, M.; Alonso-Jordá, P.; Pinto, C.; Melo, P.; Barreto, M.; Denaxas, S. (2019). Exploring Hybrid Parallel Systems for Probabilistic Record Linkage. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75:1137-1149. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2328-3S1137114975Andrade G, Viegas F, Ramos GS, Almeida J, Rocha L, Gonçalves M, Ferreira R (2013) GPU-NB: a fast CUDA-based implementation of Naïve Bayes. In: 2013 25th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, pp 168–175Bloom BH (1970) Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errors. Commun ACM 13(7):422–426Cook S (2013) CUDA Programming: A Developer’s Guide to Parallel Computing with GPUs, 1st edn. Morgan Kaufmann, San FranciscoDoan A, Halevy A, Ives Z (2012) Principles of Data Integration. Elsevier, AmsterdamÉtienne EY (2012) Hyper-threading. TurbsPublishing, SaarbrückenFellegi IP, Sunter AB (1969) A theory for record linkage. J Am Stat Assoc 64:1183–1210Feng X, Jin H, Zheng R, Zhu L (2014) Near-duplicate detection using GPU-based simhash scheme. In: 2014 International Conference on Smart Computing, pp 223–228Forchhammer B, Papenbrock T, Stening T, Viehmeier S, Naumann U.D.F (2013) Duplicate detection on GPUs. In: BTW. Köllen-Verlag, pp 165–184Kim H.s, Lee D (2007) Parallel linkage. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2007. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 283–292Mamun AA, Aseltine R, Rajasekaran S (2015) RLT-S: a web system for record linkage. PLoS ONE 10(5):1–9Mamun AA, Aseltine R, Rajasekaran S (2016) Efficient record linkage algorithms using complete linkage clustering. PLoS ONE 11(4):1–21Mamun AA, Mi T, Aseltine R, Rajasekaran S (2014) Efficient sequential and parallel algorithms for record linkage. J Am Med Inform Assoc 21(2):252–262Mizell E, Biery R (2017) How GPUs are defining the future of data analyticsMunshi A, Gaster B, Mattson TG, Fung J, Ginsburg D (2011) OpenCL Programming Guide, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley, ReadingNVIDIA Corporation: NVIDIA CUDA C programming guide (2010). Version 3.2OpenMP Architecture Review Board: OpenMP application program interface version 4.0 (2013)Pokorny J (2011) NoSQL databases: a step to database scalability in web environment. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications and Services, iiWAS ’11. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 278–283Rendle S, Schmidt-Thieme L (2008) Scaling Record Linkage to Non-uniform Distributed Class Sizes. Springer, Berlin, pp 308–319Sehili Z, Kolb L, Borgs C, Schnell R, Rahm E (2015) Privacy preserving record linkage with ppjoin. In: Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web (BTW), pp 85–104Winkler WE (1999) The state of record linkage and current research problemsZhong Z, Rychkov V, Lastovetsky A (2015) Data partitioning on multicore and multi-GPU platforms using functional performance models. IEEE Trans Comput 64(9):2506–251

Customizable FPGA-based hardware accelerator for standard convolution processes empowered with quantization applied to LiDAR data

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of research and developments in deep learning solutions for object detection applied to driverless vehicles. This application benefited from the growing trend felt in innovative perception solutions, such as LiDAR sensors. Currently, this is the preferred device to accomplish those tasks in autonomous vehicles. There is a broad variety of research works on models based on point clouds, standing out for being efficient and robust in their intended tasks, but they are also characterized by requiring point cloud processing times greater than the minimum required, given the risky nature of the application. This research work aims to provide a design and implementation of a hardware IP optimized for computing convolutions, rectified linear unit (ReLU), padding, and max pooling. This engine was designed to enable the configuration of features such as varying the size of the feature map, filter size, stride, number of inputs, number of filters, and the number of hardware resources required for a specific convolution. Performance results show that by resorting to parallelism and quantization approach, the proposed solution could reduce the amount of logical FPGA resources by 40 to 50%, enhancing the processing time by 50% while maintaining the deep learning operation accuracy.European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) (Project no. 037902; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-037902

Arbitragem voluntária desportiva ou outra forma de arbitragem necessária?

Atenta a preconização da legislação desportiva a nível interno, bem como a nível internacional, aliada ao usual recurso aos meios alternativos de resolução de litígios – arbitragem voluntária – por imposição das Federações Desportivas aos atletas, o ponto de ordem do presente estudo é aferir se a voluntariedade preconizada pela denominada arbitragem voluntária existe, é efectiva, ou meramente aparente. Este trabalho tem, assim, por objecto de estudo determinados aspectos das cláusulas de resolução de litígios e das convenções de arbitragem celebradas no seio desportivo e a sua efectiva voluntariedade, ou seja, a liberdade contratual e submissão voluntária a tal resolução alternativa de litígios com preterição do recurso aos tribunais judiciais

ANÁLISE DAS DESPESAS DOS CENTROS DA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA: IMPLICAÇÕES PARA A GESTÃO DO ENSINO SUPERIOR

Essa pesquisa tem por objetivo analisar a relação entre o custo e o número de alunos em cada Centro de ensino superior da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Como método de pesquisa, utilizou-se uma abordagem quantitativa para analisar os dados de toda a população da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Os resultados da pesquisa demonstram um grande gasto com aluguel vindo dos Campi não localizados em Florianópolis. Além disso, a análise dos coeficientes de correlação demonstrou que a Universidade trabalha bem a quantidade de funcionário/aluno e a quantidade de material/aluno de cada Centro. Esse trabalho teve como objetivo analisar os gastos efetuados pelos Centros da UFSC, buscar a correlação entre eles e sugerir uma forma de reduzir tais gastos. Dentre os principais achados da pesquisa, consta o elevado gasto com aluguel que a instituição sofre por conta dos quatro Campi externos a Florianópolis. Além disso, há um alto custo com vagas sem ocupação, estimado em R$ 31.898.066,48

Assessing community empowerment for an innovative epidemiologic approach

Community empowerment can be a process, but also the result of nursing care. To analyze it as a result there is an instrument that allows to quantify its level in nine domains. According to Melo (2020), health centers can be considered communities, becoming the potential target of community and public health nurses care, especially in the public health unit. One of the main functions of a public health unit is the epidemiological surveillance of the population’s health state. However, traditional epidemiological surveillance is focused on diseases and Melo (2020) proposes a new approach for epidemiology focused on people in what concerns nursing diagnosis. The aim of this research is to identify the level of empowerment of four Portuguese primary healthcare structures, named as ACeS, so as to improve the epidemiological surveillance of nursing diagnoses. As methodology, we developed four focus group with all nursing leaders from all primary care units of the four ACeS, using the Portuguese version of the empowerment assessment rating scale. The results present the level of community empowerment of each ACeS according to the nine domains of the scale. The needs of intervention to improve the ACeS empowerment were also identified in order to develop the epidemiological surveillance of nursinginfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio