Agent-oriented approach to develop context-aware applications : a case study on communities of practice

This paper presents and discusses the use of an agent-oriented context-aware platform to support the interactions of the participating actors of communities of practice in the health care domain. Our work is based on a scenario where communities of practice are applied in a hospital to enhance the knowledge sharing among the hospital staff members who share interests and goals. An agent-oriented modeling language (AORML) is used to support the analysis of contextual information and interaction between participating actors in the context-aware services platform. The chosen supporting platform is a context-aware services platform that uses semantic web services and runs on top of 3G networks

O benefício da terapia nutrológica parenteral intradialítica

Protein-calorie malnutrition affects 20 to 70% of patients with chronic renal failure (CRF) in hemodialysis treatment (HD), contributing to the high morbidity and mortality rates. The intradialytic parenteral nutrition (IPN) is a therapeutic option for the improvement of nutritional status. Objective: To review the role of intradialytic parenteral nutrition (NPID) as a form of nutritional supplementation for patients with chronic kidney disease on hemodialysis. Conclusion: Malnutrition is common in chronic renal failure patients on hemodialysis and negatively affects prognosis. Most of these patients have low energy and protein in the diet, thus, specific nutritional supplements for kidney disease are needed to meet the energy requirements and protein. The NPID seems to be favorable for long-term improvement of the HD patient’s nutritional status, showing effective in reversing the protein hypercatabolism and increased energy expenditure that occurs during HD. However, it is worth mentioning that NPID presents higher cost to oral nutritional therapy and enteral. Thus, the cost-effectiveness of this access route should be further investigated

O Cabri-Géomètre ao serviço da avaliação para as aprendizagens

Cada vez mais, as ‘novas’ tecnologias têm-se assumido como potenciais instrumentos de trabalho, constituindo uma fonte de ideias e de inspiração e permitindo realizar actividades didácticas de uma amplitude e de uma riqueza inexcedíveis. Os A(D)GD’s, mais concretamente o Cabri-Géomètre, são utilizados na abordagem dos conteúdos matemáticos, em geral, e geométricos, em particular, pois permitem uma aprendizagem mais dinâmica, assente em experiências, tentativas, descobertas, formulação e testagem de conjecturas, estabelecimento de propriedades, envolvendo-se, o aluno, activamente na construção do seu conhecimento e assumindo, o professor, o papel de facilitador. Estudos vários têm concluído que aquele A(D)GD tem-se revelado essencial na resolução de problemas que permitem o desenvolvimento no aluno, de capacidades de visualização, de manipulação, de exploração, de raciocínio e de discussão, bem como numa aprendizagem centrada no aluno, tornando-o autónomo, crítico e responsável pela mesma. No entanto, apesar de já poder estar, em muitos casos, ao serviço do processo de ensino e aprendizagem, raramente tem sido utilizado como instrumento de trabalho em momentos mais formais de avaliação das e para as aprendizagens. Neste contexto, pretende-se denunciar o resultado de uma investigação na qual o Cabri se constituiu uma mais valia num teste de avaliação das aprendizagens realizadas por alunos do 9º ano de escolaridade

Avaliação da perda de solos na Microbacia Hidrográfica Lajeado dos Fragosos – Município de Concórdia – SC

TCC (graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Ciências Agrárias. Curso de Agronomia.O presente trabalho teve como objetivo avaliar a perda de solos, a partir da modelagem geoambiental, utilizando o InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Environmetal Services and Tradeoffs), em uma Microbacia com produção intensiva de animais. O modelo InVEST estima a perda de solos a partir da aplicação da Equação Universal de Perda de Solos - EUPS. Os dados de entrada requeridos pelo sistema são: a) modelo digital do terreno; b) fator de erosividade da chuva; c) fator de erodibilidade do solo; d) mapa de uso e ocupação do solo; e) delimitação da bacia; f) delimitação das sub-bacias e; g) tabela biofísica com os fatores C e P. Foi utilizada a base cartográfica da Mapoteca Topográfica Digital de Santa Catarina (2003). O mapa de uso e ocupação do solo foi elaborado em escala 1:5.000,contemplando 9 classes. Para elaboração do Modelo digital do terreno (MDT), foram utilizadas as folhas do aerolevantamento de Santa Catarina (2013). O uso da ferramenta InVEST, para cálculo da EUPS, resultou em 5 classes de perdas de solos, as quais indicam a vulnerabilidade aos processos erosivos, indicando áreas prioritárias para ações voltadas ao manejo conservacionista, destacadamente as sub-bacias 35, 9, 34 e 2, que correspondem a uma área de 600,3 ha da microbacia.This paper presents the evaluation of the soil losses, from geo-environmental modeling, through the usage of InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Environmetal Services and Tradeoffs), in a Micro-basin with intensive use of animals. The InVEST model estimates the soil loss from the application of Universal Soil Loss Equation - USLE. The input data required for the system are: a) digital model from the terrain; b) rainfall erosivity factor; c) soil erodibilty factor; d) map of usage and soil occupation; e) basin delimitation; f) sub-basins delimitation; e g) biophysical table with the factors C and P. The cartographic base that was employed is from Mapoteca Topográfica Digital de Santa Catarina (2003). The map of usage and soil occupation was developed in 1:5.000 scale, contemplating nine classes. The aerial survey sheets of Santa Catarina (2013) were utilized to elaborate the Digital Terrain Model. The InVEST tool usage, to calculate the USLE, resulted in 5 classes of soil loss, which indicates vulnerability to the erosive processes, indicating priority areas for actions that focus conservative management, markedly the sub-basins 35, 9, 34 and 2, that correspond to an area of 600,3 ha of the micro-basin

PI-Expoente de álgebras associativas

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Matemática, 2013.Sejam A uma PI-álgebra associativa sobre um corpo F de característica zero e {cn(A)} a sequência de codimensões de A. Neste trabalho vamos estudar o comportamento destas sequências. Regev mostrou que a sequência de codimensões é exponencialmente limitada. O nosso objetivo principal é apresentar os resultados obtidos por A. Giambruno e M. Zaicev em |4|, onde demonstram que o PI-expoente de A, denotado por ?, sempre existe e é um inteiro. Daremos uma maneira explícita de calcular este expoente. Usaremos a teoria de representações do grupo simétrico para obtermos os resultados. _______________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTLet A be an associative algebra over a eld F of characteristic zero satisfying a polynomial identity (PI-algebra), and {cn(A)} be the sequence of codimensions of the A. In this paper we study the behavior of these sequences. Regev showed that a sequence is exponentially codimensions limited. Our main goal is to show the results obtained by A. Giambruno and M. Zaicev in |4|, where they prove that the PI-exponent of A, denoted by ?, exists and is an integer. We will give an explicit way to calculate this exponent. We use the representation theory of the symetric group to obtain the results

Avaliação do Cabri-Géomètre: um estudo no 9º ano de escolaridade

A importância duma sólida educação geométrica e tecnológica tem obrigado à proliferação de inúmero software ‘educativo’, com todas as consequências nefastas que daí podem advir, algum do qual de duvidosas qualidades científicas e didácticas. Por outro lado, grande parte dos instrumentos de avaliação de software, existentes no mercado, também apresentam limitações várias – valorizam, eles próprios, as dimensões técnicas e estéticas; só são adaptados a determinado tipo de software; são, habitualmente, demasiado extensos e atribuem o mesmo peso (quantitativo) a todos os parâmetros. Nesta perspectiva, um grupo multidisciplinar de investigadores desenvolveu um Ambiente Dinâmico de Geometria Dinâmica – Cabri-Géomètre – que parece adequar-se às mais exigentes orientações curriculares para o ensino e a aprendizagem da geometria e Squires & McDougall propõem um novo paradigma que distingue o processo de análise do processo de avaliação de software assente na interacção das perspectivas do designer, do professor e dos alunos. Dada a exígua investigação sobre aquele software no 9º ano de escolaridade segundo a proposta enunciada, desenvolveu-se um estudo de caso com o propósito de analisar e avaliar a exploração do Cabri à luz do paradigma enunciado, e de inferir da resistência de tal proposta ao Cabri. Os principais resultados obtidos parecem permitir concluir que, não obstante a sua complexidade, o paradigma proposto é resistente à análise de Cabri e que o processo de avaliação confirma as hipóteses levantadas aquando do processo de análise. As situações de menor sucesso devemse mais à forma como a professora conduziu as sessões do que ao ADGD em si

Overview of retirement in Brazil

Este artículo tiene el objetivo de analizar la estructura actual de los regímenes de jubilación en Brasil y de la efectividad de la propuesta de reforma contenida en la PEC nº 287/2016. Para cumplir estos objetivos será hecha un análisis de los regímenes de jubilación vigentes en Brasil, sino también de los puntos clave de la dicha reforma, en su última redacción, para que sea posible verificar la efectividad de los cambios propuestos. Al final serán apuntadas algunas sugerencias con la finalidad de contribuir para el debate sobre la modificación de los regímenes de jubilación de Brasil.Este artigo pretende analisar a estrutura atual dos regimes de aposentadoria no Brasil e a efetividade da proposta de reforma contida na PEC nº 287/2016. Para atingir estes objetivos, será feita uma análise dos regimes de aposentadoria em vigor no Brasil, como também dos pontos-chave da citada reforma, em sua última redação, para que seja possível verificar a eficácia das propostas de mudanças. Ao final, algumas sugestões serão apontadas com a finalidade de contribuir para o debate sobre as alterações dos regimes de aposentadorias do Brasil.This article intends to analyze the current structure of Brazilian retirement schemes and the effectiveness of the proposal contained in PEC 287/2016. In order to achieve these objectives, it will be done an analysis of the Brazilian pension schemes and the key points of the aforementioned reform, in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed changes. In the end, some suggestions will be pointed out with the purpose of contributing to the debate about the changes in the Brazilian pension systems

O Cabri-Géomètre: um ambiente de aprendizagem significativa da geometria

O ensino e a aprendizagem da matemática, nomeadamente da geometria, têm sido considerados muito desmotivantes, não havendo lugar para a observação, experimentação, construção, criatividade, reflexão, intuição e autonomia dando-se ênfase à repetição e mecanização de exercícios após o debitar, pelo professor, da matéria estipulada programaticamente. A introdução dos Ambientes (Dinâmicos) de Geometria Dinâmica pode alterar, por completo, esta situação permitindo que os alunos explorem, por si próprios, elementos da Geometria colocando problemas e descobrindo resultados relevantes, investigando propriedades, elaborando e testando conjecturas, justificando e argumentando raciocínios. Neste estudo elege-se o Cabri-Géomètre enquanto eventual proporcionador de uma aprendizagem mais dinâmica, mais motivadora, mais eficaz e eficiente fomentando interacções entre aluno(s) e professor e a assumpção de novos papéis para ambos

Agent-oriented constructivist knowledge management

In Ancient Times, when written language was introduced, books and manuscripts were often considered sacred. During these times, only a few persons were able to read and interpret them, while most people were limited in accepting these interpretations. Then, along with the industrial revolution of the XVIII and XIX centuries and especially boosted by the development of the press, knowledge slowly became available to all people. Simultaneously, people were starting to apply machines in the development of their work, usually characterized by repetitive processes, and especially focused in the production of consuming goods, such as furniture, clocks, clothes and so on. Following the needs of this new society, it was finally through science that new processes emerged to enable the transmission of knowledge from books and instructors to learners. Still today, people gain knowledge based on these processes, created to fulfill the needs of a society in its early stages of industrialization, thus not being compatible with the needs of the information society. In the information society, people must deal with an overloading amount of information, by the means of the media, books, besides different telecommunication and information systems technology. Furthermore, people’s relation to work has been influenced by profound changes, for instance, knowledge itself is now regarded as a valuable work product and, thus, the workplace has become an environment of knowledge creation and learning. Modifications in the world economical, political and social scenarios led to the conclusion that knowledge is the differential that can lead to innovation and, consequently, save organizations, societies, and even countries from failing in achieving their main goals. Focusing on these matters is the Knowledge Management (KM) research area, which deals with the creation, integration and use of knowledge, aiming at improving the performance of individuals and organizations. Advances in this field are mainly motivated by the assumption that organizations should focus on knowledge assets (generally maintained by the members of an organization) to remain competitive in the information society’s market. This thesis argues that KM initiatives should be targeted based on a constructivist perspective. In general, a constructivist view on KM focuses on how knowledge emerges, giving great importance to the knowledge holders and their natural practices. With the paragraph above, the reader may already have an intuition of how this work faces and targets Knowledge Management, however, let us be more precise. Research in Knowledge Management has evolved substantially in the past 30 years, coming from a centralized view of KM processes to a distributed view, grounded in organizational and cognitive sciences studies that point out the social, distributed, and subjective nature of knowledge. The first Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) were centrally based and followed a top-down design approach. The organization managers, supported by knowledge engineers, collected and structured the contents of an organizational memory as a finished product at design time (before the organizational memory was deployed) and then disseminated the product, expecting employees to use it and update it. However, employees often claimed that the knowledge stored in the repository was detached from their real working practices. This led to the development of evolutionary methods, which prescribe that the basic KM system is initially developed and evolves proactively in an on-going fashion. However, most of the initiatives are still based on building central repositories and portals, which assume standardized vocabularies, languages, and classification schemes. Consequently, employees’ lack of trust and motivation often lead to dissatisfaction. In other words, workers resist on sharing knowledge, since they do not know who is going to access it and what is going to be done with it. Moreover, the importance attributed to knowledge may give an impression that these central systems take away a valuable asset from his or her owner, without giving appreciable benefits in return. The problems highlighted in the previous paragraph may be attenuated or even solved if a top-down/bottom-up strategy is applied when proposing a KM solution. This means that the solution should be sought with aim at organizational goals (top-down) but at the same time, more attention should be given to the knowledge holders and on the natural processes they already use to share knowledge (bottom-up). Being active agency such an important principle of Constructivism, this work recognizes that the Agent Paradigm (first defined by Artificial Intelligence and more recently adopted by Software Engineering) is the best approach to target Knowledge Management, taking a technological and social perspective. Capable of modeling and supporting social environments, agents is here recognized as a suitable solution for Knowledge Management especially by providing a suitable metaphor used for modeling KM domains (i.e. representing humans and organizations) and systems. Applying agents as metaphors on KM is mainly motivated by the definition of agents as cognitive beings having characteristics that resemble human cognition, such as autonomy, reactivity, goals, beliefs, desires, and social-ability. Using agents as human abstractions is motivated by the fact that, for specific problems, such as software engineering and knowledge management process modeling, agents may aid the analyst to abstract away from some of the problems related to human complexity, and focus on the important issues that impact the specific goals, beliefs and tasks of agents of the domain. This often leads to a clear understanding of the current situation, which is essential for the proposal of an appropriate solution. The current situation may be understood by modeling at the same time the overall goals of the organization, and the needs and wants of knowledge holders. Towards facilitating the analysis of KM scenarios and the development of adequate solutions, this work proposes ARKnowD (Agent-oriented Recipe for Knowledge Management Systems Development). Systems here have a broad definition, comprehending both technology-based systems (e.g. information system, groupware, repositories) and/or human systems, i.e. human processes supporting KM using non-computational artifacts (e.g. brain stormings, creativity workshops). The basic philosophical assumptions behind ARKnowD are: a) the interactions between human and system should be understood according to the constructivist principle of self-construction, claiming that humans and communities are self-organizing entities that constantly construct their identities and evolve throughout endless interaction cycles. As a result of such interactions, humans shape systems and, at the same time, systems constrain the ways humans act and change; b) KM enabling systems should be built in a bottom-up approach, aiming at the organizational goals, but understanding that in order to fulfill these goals, some personal needs and wants of the knowledge holders (i.e. the organizational members) need to be targeted; and c) there is no “silver bullet��? when pursuing a KM tailoring methodology and the best approach is combining existing agent-oriented approaches according to the given domain or situation. This work shows how the principles above may be achieved by the integration of two existing work on agent-oriented software engineering, which are combined to guide KM analysts and system developers when conceiving KM solutions. Innovation in our work is achieved by supporting topdown/bottom-up approaches to KM as mentioned above. The proposed methodology does that by strongly emphasizing the earlier phases of software development, the so-called requirement analysis activity. In this way, we consider all stakeholders (organizations and humans) as agents in our analysis model, and start by understanding their relations before actually thinking of developing a system. Perhaps the problem may be more effectively solved by proposing changes in the business processes, rather than by making use of new technology. And besides, in addition to humans and organizations, existing systems are also included in the model from start, helping the analyst and designer to understand which functionalities are delegated to these so-called artificial agents. In addition to that, benefits as a result of the application of ARKnowD may be also attributed to our choice of using the proper agent cognitive characteristics in the different phases of the development cycle. With the main purpose of exemplifying the use of the proposed methodology, this work presents a socially-aware recommender agent named KARe (Knowledgeable Agent for Recommendations). Recommender Systems may be defined by those that support users in selecting items of their need from a big set of items, helping users to overcome the overwhelming feeling when facing a vast information source, such as the web, an organizational repository or the like. Besides serving as a case for our methodology, this work also aims at exploring the suitability of the KARe system to support KM processes. Our choice for supporting knowledge sharing through questioning and answering processes is again supported by Constructivism proponents, who understand that social interaction is vital for active knowledge building. This assumption is also defended by some KM theories, claiming that knowledge is created through cycles of transformation between two types of knowledge: tacit and explicit knowledge. Up to now, research on KM has paid much attention to the formalization and exchange of explicit knowledge, in the form of documents or other physical artifacts, often annotated with metadata, and classified by taxonomies or ontologies. Investigations surrounding tacit knowledge have been so far scarce, perhaps by the complexity of the tasks of capturing and integrating such kind of knowledge, defined as knowledge about personal experience and values, usually confined on people’s mind. Taking a flexible approach on supporting this kind of knowledge conversion, KARe relies on the potential of social interaction underlying organizational practices to support knowledge creation and sharing. The global objective of this work is to support knowledge creation and sharing within an organization, according to its own natural processes and social behaviors. In other words, this work is based on the assumption that KM is better supported if knowledge is looked at from a constructivist perspective. To sum up, this thesis aims at: 1) Providing an agent-oriented approach to guide the creation and evolvement of KM initiatives, by analyzing the organizational potentials, behaviors and processes concerning knowledge sharing; 2) Developing the KARe recommender system, based on a semantically enriched Information Retrieval technique for recommending knowledge artifacts, supporting users to ask and answer to each others’ questions. These objectives are achieved as follows: - Defining the principles that characterize a Constructivist KM supporting environment and understanding how they may be used to support the creation of more effective KM solutions; - Providing an agent-oriented approach to develop KM systems. This approach is based on the integration of two different agent-oriented software engineering works, profiting from their strengths in providing a comprehensive methodology that targets both analysis and design activities; - Proposing and designing a socially aware agent-oriented recommender system both to exemplify the application of the proposed approach and to explore its potential on supporting knowledge creation and sharing. - Implementing an Information Retrieval algorithm to support the previously mentioned system in generating recommendations. Besides describing the algorithm, this thesis brings experimental results to prove its effectiveness

A TRÍPLICE HÉLICE E OS PARQUES TECNOLÓGICOS: UMA ANÁLISE DO SAPIENS PARQUE EM FLORIANÓPOLIS – SANTA CATARINA/BRASIL

O modelo de inovação criado em 1990 definiu a relação entre governo-universidade-indústria, chamado tríplice hélice. A interação entre as universidades e empresas tem se desenvolvido com a intervenção de agentes para articular essa interface. Os parques tecnológicos são áreas que propiciam aos setores público e privado um ambiente favorável ao desenvolvimento de inovações e à melhoria da competitividade de seus produtos, processos e serviços. O objetivo deste artigo foi verificar a relação do Sapiens Parque - parque tecnológico e de inovação - em Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, no Sul do Brasil, com a tríplice hélice, identificando a interação entre os agentes. A pesquisa se caracteriza como um estudo de caso, exploratório-descritiva, qualitativa, com coletas bibliográfica e documentais como revisão da literatura e entrevista com representante do parque. O resultado da pesquisa demonstrou que a interação dos três atores da tríplice hélice possibilita um sistema de inovação sustentável e desenvolvimento econômico. Percebeu-se no Sapiens Parque a atuação dos atores, onde o governo fomenta o desenvolvimento econômico e social por meio de novas estruturas organizacionais e atração de investimentos, as empresas atuam em um ambiente inovador, e a universidade estimula o fluxo e transferência de conhecimento e tecnologia entre elas