ToPI - uma abordagem online para identificar locais de interesse utilizando fotografias geo-referenciadas

Due to the growing use of social networks people no longer just consume data, they also produce and share it. Geo-tagged information, i.e., data with geographical location, have been used in many attempts to identify popular places and help tourists that will visit unfamiliar cities. This Master Thesis presents an online strategy that uses geo-tagged photos and their metadata in order to identify places of interest inside a given geographical area and retrieve relevant related information. The whole process runs automatically in real time, returning updated information about places. The proposed strategy takes into account the inherent dynamism of social media, and thus is robust under inconsistencies and/or outdated information, a common issue in solutions that rely on previously stored data. The analysis of the results showed that our approach is very promising, returning places that present high agreement with those from a popular travel website.

Junho de 2013: o mês que não começou

This work aimed to analyze the so called June Journeys which happened in Brazil in 2013, in an effort to establish a proper ontology for cyberspace that goes beyond old dichotomies that put men and techniques in polar opposites, making difficult to perform a constructive – and not merely pessimist – analysis of the crossroads between politics and technology. This analysis uses as basis and methodological guidance the Theory of Actor-Network (ANT or TAR) widely used in social studies of science and technology to overcome these dichotomies and allow the analysis of networks, so that is clear the political instability that arises in this context which profoundly changes the political game.