Success management – From theory to practice

Success Management focuses on defining, leveraging, and securing the success of endeavours at maximum levels by gaining a comprehensive awareness of what is valued by stakeholders to reach success and managing accordingly to that understanding. Success Management has proven to be valuable in the context of project management; however, previous research does not provide a theoretical sound basis or detailed guidance for its practical implementation. This article contributes to filling this gap in the literature by providing the theoretical foundation of Success Management and describing in detail the implementation and key findings of a Success Management process carried out in the context of an IT/IS project by a large multinational company. The results show that Success Management can both raise a holistic awareness of the success contributors and promote success-focused planning and action. In this article, researchers and practitioners can find a full perspective on Success Management, from the theoretical principles to a step-by-step guide for practical implementation.We would like to thank all the project team members who participated in the Success Management process, particularly: Pedro Ribeiro, Flávio Vilarinho, António Silva, Marcos Andrade, and João Ramos. We would also like to thank the Editors and Reviewers: first, for their vision, initiative and hard work in organizing a special issue under the important subject of project success; second, for their valuable comments for improving the original manuscript and for all the support provided. This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

SHREWS: A game with augmented reality for training computational thinking

This paper proposes a game to help young students training Computational Thinking (CT) skills to aid in solving problems. CT is a problem-solving approach based on picking a complex problem, understand what the problem is, and develop solutions in a way that a computer or human could solve. To help in this task, Augmented Reality(AR) will provide a more engaging visual way of interaction to keep students motivated while they search for solving problems. This benefit is a consequence of the AR capability of providing a visual and dynamic representation of abstract concepts. This work investigates AR and CT concepts and the best way of combining them for training student's skills to understand software and its effects. Thus, these concepts will be explored for the construction of learning activities to explain and create analogies to understand complex concepts related to computer programs. So the focus of the paper is the introduction of Shrews, the game created in this context. The principle and the proposed architecture are detailed. At the end, there is a description of how the game works and the current state of the prototype. We believe that the immersive experience using AR and CT concepts is one of the important aspects of the game to maintain a motivational approach to students. An exploratory prototype is created to explore the topic of teaching CT skills via playing a video game.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

Automatic verification of design rules in PCB manufacturing

Nowadays, electronics can be found in almost every available device. At the core of electronic devices there are Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). To create a suitable PCB there is the need of complying with several constraints, both concerning electrical and layout design. Thus, the design rules related to the PCB manufacturing and assembly are very important since these restrictions are fundamental to ensure the creation of a viable physical PCB. Electrical Computer Aided Design (ECAD) tools are able to automatically verify such rules, but they only consider a subset of the total required rules. The remaining rules are currently manually checked, which may increase the occurrence of errors and, consequently, increase the overall costs in designing and in the manufacturing process of a PCB. Being the design a crucial phase in the manufacturing procedure, a software system that automatically verifies all design rules and produce the corresponding assessment report is fundamental. Such software system is addressed in this paper.This work was funded by the project “iFACTORY: Novas Capacidades de Industrialização”, with reference 002814 supported by FEDER trough “Portugal2020 Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização” (COMPETE2020). This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/201

A ubiquitous service-oriented automatic optical inspection platform for textile industry

Within a highly competitive market context, quality standards are vital for the textile industry, in which related procedures to assess respective manufacture still mainly rely on human-based visual inspection. Thereby, factors such as ergonomics, analytical subjectivity, tiredness and error susceptibility affect the employee's performance and comfort in particular and impact the economic healthiness of each company operating in this industry, generally. In this paper, a defect detection-oriented platform for quality control in the textile industry is proposed to tackle these issues and respective impacts, combining computer vision, deep learning, geolocation and communication technologies. The system under development can integrate and improve the production ecosystem of a textile company through a properly adapted information technology setup and associated functionalities such as automatic defect detection and classification, real-time monitoring of operators, among others.This work was financed by the project “Smart Production Process” (No. POCI-01-0247-FEDER-045366), supported under the Incentive System for Research and Technological Development - Business R&DT (Individual Projects)

Adaptive content generation for games

From a simple entertainment activity to a learning tool, it is undeniable that video games are one of the most active and relevant areas in today's society. Since their inception, video games experienced an evolution unmatched by almost any other area and today's video games are complex pieces of software built by expensive multidisciplinary teams. Procedural Content Generation (PCG) offers an alternative to manual design of video game content, optimizing the process of development and thus reducing its cost. However, the content that is generated by traditional PCG techniques is usually very generic and it struggles to offer meaningful game experiences to a diverse player base. Recent years have brought some new PCG techniques that try to solve this problem by dynamically adjusting the generation of content to suit the needs of each individual player. The work presented in this paper focuses on the development of a new PCG methodology that aims to close the gap between game developers and their players. This is achieved by providing the developers with relevant real time player and playing context information and thus creating an easier way for developers to adjust their content generation process in run time to better suit the needs of each player. This was achieved by first designing a methodology that models the player, their context and the game. It was also developed a simple game to showcase the potential of such methodology. The end result was a game that adapts some of its content to different types of players and contexts.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER007043 and FCT – Fundac¸ao para a Ci ˜ encia e Tecnologia within the Project ˆ Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Recognition and use of emotions in games

Facial expression and emotions recognition had attracted the attention of game developers and there are some game proposals, in which, by detecting faces, it is possible to detect who is playing and automatically load the players' profile. Likewise, the recognition of the players' facial expressions has been used to alter the expression of their avatars.In this work, we intended to study ways to use the recognition of a player's facial expression to change some parameters of a game, such as stimulate it when the player is bored or increasing its difficulty, for example, when it detects that the player is more stimulated and happy.This paper proposes a new approach for facial expression and emotion recognition, which divides the classification stage into two steps. First it is detected if it is a positive, a negative or a neutral emotion. Then it is applied a refinement step to recognize the particular positive (happiness or surprise) or negative (sadness, fear, anger or disgust) emotion. Our approach runs in real-time and was compared with the most common classification methods and has shown a great accuracy.We built a game to test our approach. The estimation of the player's emotional state was used to change certain parameters of the game, which increases or decreases the game difficulty.- We would like to send a message of appreciation to the colleagues of the group of Computer Vision Interaction and Graphics (CVIG), from the Centro de Computacao Grafica (CCG), for the support and suggestions given, which proved to be very useful during the working period. This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013

Reconstructing the past: providing an enhanced perceptual experience

Accurate modeling/reconstruction and visualization of real environments, particularly archaeological sites, is both a major challenge and a crucial task. This work will address the entire process of the virtual reconstruction of archaeological sites, since the construction of the virtual model until its visualization. The chapter begins with an introduction to the process of virtual reconstruction of archaeological sites, where the several stages that should take place to obtain a faithful virtual representation of an archaeological site and its artifacts are identified. Moreover, each stage is characterized and its main methods and techniques are identified, in dedicated sections. The authors' contribution for the state of the art will be highlighted in each stage. The chapter ends with the authors' vision about future trends for this field and unveils what could be their contributions to this vision.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ontology-based procedural modelling of traversable buildings composed by arbitrary shapes

This book presents a new procedural modelling methodology capable of producing traversable buildings constrained by arbitrary convex shapes, based on a pure treemap approach. The authors establish a process to change the format of interior rooms, through wall number modification and offer an adaptation of a “fake-concave” technique to support non-convex building layouts. It will also include: • A proposal for an extensible building ontology to guide the methodology process and support the generation of other architectural style buildings (e.g. roman houses); • A presentation of an ontology-based grammar to provide the procedural modelling methodology with production rules; • Experimental computer managed processes for the stochastic generation of buildings. Most of the existing solutions regarding building interiors only focus on the generation of floor plans mainly composed of rectangular shapes. Yet there are a wide variety of ancient and contemporary buildings that are composed of shapes other than rectangles, both internally and externally. Ontology-based Procedural Modelling of Traversable Buildings Composed by Arbitrary Shapes will address this by providing the Procedural Modelling field with processes and techniques capable of properly supporting for example, digital preservation of cultural heritage or extensive virtual urban environment productions, specifically ones involving the generation/reconstruction of virtual buildings with such geometric requirements.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A context-aware method for authentically simulating outdoors shadows for mobile augmented reality

Visual coherence between virtual and real objects is a major issue in creating convincing augmented reality (AR) applications. To achieve this seamless integration, actual light conditions must be determined in real time to ensure that virtual objects are correctly illuminated and cast consistent shadows. In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate daylight illumination and use this information in outdoor AR applications to render virtual objects with coherent shadows. The illumination parameters are acquired in real time from context-aware live sensor data. The method works under unprepared natural conditions. We also present a novel and rapid implementation of a state-of-the-art skylight model, from which the illumination parameters are derived. The Sun's position is calculated based on the user location and time of day, with the relative rotational differences estimated from a gyroscope, compass and accelerometer. The results illustrated that our method can generate visually credible AR scenes with consistent shadows rendered from recovered illumination.This work was supported in part by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia - FCT, under the grant number SFRH/BD/73129/2010, and the European Union (COMPETE, QREN and FEDER), under the project REC I/EEI-SII/0360/2012 "MASSIVE-Multimodal Acknowledgeable MultiSenSorial Immersive Virtual Environments". This work is also supported by the project "TEC4Growth - Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020" is financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Generic and reconfigurable virtual reality simulation system

Typically, industrial equipment virtual simulators lack flexibility to adapt to new requirements or needs and usually are made with a specific objective in mind. Therefore, there is the need to develop Virtual Reality (VR) simulators with sufficiently dynamic bases so that the training manager can configure and simulate a set of different machines, without needing expensive development processes that usually result in the reformulation of the developed system foundations in order to adapt to new needs. This paper proposes a generic and reconfigurable virtual reality system, capable of simulating the operation of different types of machines and suitable to be used in the training of workers for the operation of the various machines, for instance the ones present in an entire production line. The proposed approach is based on the use of a specification language that describes both the physical and behavioral characteristics of the machines to be simulated. A specification file, written using this language, is fed to the VR simulator that interprets its content and builds, automatically, the corresponding virtual reality environment, which can be used by the trainees to operate the machine(s). This approach allows using the same VR simulator to simulate any machine. A prototype of the VR system was built and applied in a test scenario. The results reveal that the development of systems with dynamic bases is promising and deserving of future work to build a more complete and flexible VR simulation system.- This work has been supported by national funds through FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019