Soft and transferable skills acquisition through organizing a doctoral conference

UIDB/00066/2020.This article presents a 10-year experience of soft and transferable skills acquisition through the involvement of PhD students in the organization of an international conference. Soft and transferable skills acquisition is currently perceived as a core component of doctoral studies. Examples include writing and communication, teamwork, time management, leadership, resource management, negotiation, problem solving, listening, planning, entrepreneurial spirit, mastering ethics awareness, etc. The need for such skills is due to the leading role that doctoral students are expected to play in society. As such, various organizations have issued recommendations for doctoral programs to include a formal component of soft skills training. In this article, an effective way of introducing soft and transferable skills acquisition in doctoral engineering education is introduced. Namely, a form of collaborative project-based learning is designed as a compulsory course. This includes a set of base lectures, a long period of parallel working groups focusing on the various aspects of organizing an international conference, running the actual conference, and performing a post-conference assessment. Results and lessons learned demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.publishersversionpublishe

Optimization of a p-persistent Network Diversity Multiple Access Protocol for a SC-FDE System

This paper presents a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol solution designed to properly handle collisions when in the presence of a multi-packet detection receiver for Single-Carrier (SC) modulations with Frequency-Domain Equalization (FDE). It is considered an iterative frequency-domain receiver that jointly performs equalization, multi-packet separation and channel decoding operations, for up to Qmax mobile terminals transmitting in one slot. In this work, it is proposed and evaluated a p-persistent Network Diversity Multiple Access (NDMA) random MAC protocol designed to cope with a total number of mobile terminals J, for a maximum decoding capability of Qmax simultaneous packets. An accurate analytical model is presented to optimize two different scenarios: in the first one, a saturated network is considered and it is determined the packet transmission probability that maximizes the uplink throughput; the second represents a non-saturated network and the goal is to compute the optimal transmission probability associated to each mobile terminal that minimizes the packet transmission delay. In the end, analytical results obtained through physical and MAC layer simulations are discussed

Performance of Reference Evapotranspiration Estimation Methods at the Southern Paraná, Brazil

Knowing the atmospheric potential demand (ETo) implies in quantifying the ability of vegetated surfaces in absorbing water from the soil aiming at irrigation scheduling, crop yield prediction and water balance studies at a given site. Such information is extremely useful even under non-irrigated systems, for it makes possible to adjust sowing date within the crop growing season as a function of the local soil water availability, conditioning therefore a better reclamation of rainfall regime. Crop yield is significantly affected by the atmospheric conditions in order to galvanize researchers to scrutinize the regime of physical environment variables which directly interfere into the consumption of natural resources of crops in production fields. The aim of the current work was to investigate which of the atmospheric evaporative demand estimation methods are more suitable to depict physical reality of the water loss process in order to maximize crop yield and optimize irrigation scheduling under the climatic conditions of Southern Paraná, Brazil. The following methods were tested at two distinct sites of the studied region concerning its performance, taking into account the Penman-Monteith (FAO-56) approach as a standard reference for comparison purposes: simplified Penman, modified Bowen, Hargreaves-Samani, Camargo, and Linacre. The meteorological elements used for the calculation of ETo were monitored by an automatic weather station from Campbell Scientific Inc. throughout the years of 2008 through 2013. We concluded that empirical methods showed an unsatisfactory performance, whereas those methods that took into consideration net radiation as an input variable performed better, being the latter hence to be considered for agricultural planning and also for agrometeorological studies aiming at sustainability of the regional agriculture. The simplified Penman and modified Bowen methods were more accurate for estimating ETo in order to provide irrigation scheduling and indicate local soil water status at the region in study, because dismiss information on wind regimes that govern evapotranspiration rates

Performance of Different Models for Estimating the Global Solar Radiation in Brazil

Global solar irradiance (Qg) is an important variable of the physical environment that has been constantly used in agrometeorological models, either for climatic characterization or to give support to radiometric studies developed for irrigation planning and crop weather modeling approaches. The current study aimed to compare measured daily values of Qg with estimates of this variable by means of four different methods. For that throughout the period comprised between March 28th of 2008 and August 8th of 2011 at Ponta Grossa, PR, Brazil, a simple linear regression study confronting radiometric data measured by a pyranometer and estimates of Qg was proposed herein. Global transmittance was conditioned by atmospheric cloudiness. The models based on mean global transmittance in daily basis performed more satisfactorily and generated values of Qg with accuracy and exactness at the site in study, as confirmed by the statistical parameters employed to validate the USAge of models proposed by Angström-Prescott. However, the performance of the methodologies based on the determination of mean global transmittance under extreme atmospheric conditions, showed the highest Willmott coefficients, which was to be close to 1, reflecting then precision and reliability for the calculated values of Qg, when compared to observed values monitored at an automatic weather station

Automatic Parallelization of Software Network Functions

Software network functions (NFs) trade-off flexibility and ease of deployment for an increased challenge of performance. The traditional way to increase NF performance is by distributing traffic to multiple CPU cores, but this poses a significant challenge: how to parallelize an NF without breaking its semantics? We propose Maestro, a tool that analyzes a sequential implementation of an NF and automatically generates an enhanced parallel version that carefully configures the NIC's Receive Side Scaling mechanism to distribute traffic across cores, while preserving semantics. When possible, Maestro orchestrates a shared-nothing architecture, with each core operating independently without shared memory coordination, maximizing performance. Otherwise, Maestro choreographs a fine-grained read-write locking mechanism that optimizes operation for typical Internet traffic. We parallelized 8 software NFs and show that they generally scale-up linearly until bottlenecked by PCIe when using small packets or by 100Gbps line-rate with typical Internet traffic. Maestro further outperforms modern hardware-based transactional memory mechanisms, even for challenging parallel-unfriendly workloads.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, to be published in NSDI2

Atmosphere assisted FLASH sintering of KNN

The use of FLASH alternative sintering technique allows a significant decrease in sintering time and temperature, contributing to the sustainable processing of high sintering temperature piezoelectrics. This is the case of potassium sodium niobate, K0.5Na0.5NbO3 (KNN), a relevant lead-free piezoelectric, which, due to alkali evaporation, is difficult to produce by conventional sintering, at T \u3e 1100 ºC. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Variscan deformation of the Hesperian massif in the Lousã mountain range (central Portugal)

[Abstract] The occidental region of the Central-Iberian Zone of the Variscan Iberian massif, in the central part of Portugal (Lousã mountain range), has a Variscan tectonostructural organization as the one recognized in the occidental border of the massif, in the Porto-Coimbra-Tomar shear zone. In the Iberian massif we can observe neo-proterozoic metasediments of the “Complexo Xisto-Grauváquico”, and important metasedimentary outcrops of Late Palaeozoic (Ordovician, Silurian and lower Devonian) rocks. Both are affected by the first regional variscan deformation phase (FH1), and later refolded by the second variscan deformation phase (FH2). This second regional variscan phase has a penetrative effect in the massif and develops a dextral, north-south, strike-slip faulting, associated with transpressive kinematic deformation (like a Riedel model) similar to the Porto-Coimbra-Tomar shear zone. Some geological examples observed and studied in the Lousã region are showed and discussed