Computational tool to support design of DAC Converter model AD7528 with the object code in XML

Based on literature review, electronic systems design employ largely top-down methodology. The top-down methodology is vital for success in the synthesis and implementation of electronic systems. In this context, this paper presents a new computational tool, named BD2XML, to support electronic systems design. From a block diagram system of mixed-signal is generated object code in XML markup language. XML language is interesting because it has great flexibility and readability. The BD2XML was developed with object-oriented paradigm. It was used the AD7528 converter modeled in MATLAB / Simulink as a case study. The MATLAB / Simulink was chosen as a target due to its wide dissemination in academia and industry. From this case study it is possible to demonstrate the functionality of the BD2XML and make it a reflection on the design challenges. Therefore, an automatic tool for electronic systems design reduces the time and costs of the design.

Free tools and strategies for the generation of 3D finite element meshes: Modeling of the cardiac structures

The Finite Element Method is a well-known technique, being extensively applied in different areas. Studies using the Finite Element Method (FEM) are targeted to improve cardiac ablation procedures. For such simulations, the finite element meshes should consider the size and histological features of the target structures. However, it is possible to verify that some methods or tools used to generate meshes of human body structures are still limited, due to nondetailed models, nontrivial preprocessing, or mainly limitation in the use condition. In this paper, alternatives are demonstrated to solid modeling and automatic generation of highly refined tetrahedral meshes, with quality compatible with other studies focused on mesh generation. The innovations presented here are strategies to integrate Open Source Software (OSS). The chosen techniques and strategies are presented and discussed, considering cardiac structures as a first application context. © 2013 E. Pavarino et al.

Proposal for a code of good practice in statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean and implementation plan for 2012-2013

Incluye Bibliografía

Geração automática de código para microcontroladores aplicada a um ambiente de co-projeto de hardware e software

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Proposta de Algoritmos Inteligentes para Localizar Faltas e Monitorar a Qualidade da Energia em Redes de Distribuição de Energia Elétrica

Pós-graduação em Engenharia Elétrica - FEIS

Automatic Indexing and Information Visualization: A Study Based on Paraconsistent Logic

This paper reports a research to evaluate the potential and the effects of use of annotated Paraconsistent logic in automatic indexing. This logic attempts to deal with contradictions, concerned with studying and developing inconsistency-tolerant systems of logic. This logic, being flexible and containing logical states that go beyond the dichotomies yes and no, permits to advance the hypothesis that the results of indexing could be better than those obtained by traditional methods. Interactions between different disciplines, as information retrieval, automatic indexing, information visualization, and nonclassical logics were considered in this research. From the methodological point of view, an algorithm for treatment of uncertainty and imprecision, developed under the Paraconsistent logic, was used to modify the values of the weights assigned to indexing terms of the text collections. The tests were performed on an information visualization system named Projection Explorer (PEx), created at Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMC - USP Sao Carlos), with available source code. PEx uses traditional vector space model to represent documents of a collection. The results were evaluated by criteria built in the information visualization system itself, and demonstrated measurable gains in the quality of the displays, confirming the hypothesis that the use of the para-analyser under the conditions of the experiment has the ability to generate more effective clusters of similar documents. This is a point that draws attention, since the constitution of more significant clusters can be used to enhance information indexing and retrieval. It can be argued that the adoption of non-dichotomous (non-exclusive) parameters provides new possibilities to relate similar information.

The meccano method for simultaneous volume parametrization and mesh generation of complex solids

[EN]The meccano method is a novel and promising mesh generation method for simultaneously creating adaptive tetrahedral meshes and volume parametrizations of a complex solid. We highlight the fact that the method requires minimum user intervention and has a low computational cost. The method builds a 3-D triangulation of the solid as a deformation of an appropriate tetrahedral mesh of the meccano. The new mesh generator combines an automatic parametrization of surface triangulations, a local refinement algorithm for 3-D nested triangulations and a simultaneous untangling and smoothing procedure. At present, the procedure is fully automatic for a genus-zero solid. In this case, the meccano can be a single cube. The efficiency of the proposed technique is shown with several applications...

The meccano method for automatic 3-d triangulation and volume parametrization of complex solids

[EN]In this paper we review the novel meccano method. We summarize the main stages (subdivision, mapping, optimization) of this automatic tetrahedral mesh generation technique and we concentrate the study to complex genus-zero solids. In this case, our procedure only requires a surface triangulation of the solid. A crucial consequence of our method is the volume parametrization of the solid to a cube. We construct volume T-meshes for isogeometric analysis by using this result. The efficiency of the proposed technique is shown with several examples. A comparison between the meccano method and standard mesh generation techniques is introduced.-1…

Query rewriting in information retrieval: automatic context extraction from local user documents to improve query results

The central objective of research in Information Retrieval (IR) is to discover new techniques to retrieve relevant information in order to satisfy an Information Need. The Information Need is satisfied when relevant information can be provided to the user. In IR, relevance is a fundamental concept which has changed over time, from popular to personal, i.e., what was considered relevant before was information for the whole population, but what is considered relevant now is specific information for each user. Hence, there is a need to connect the behavior of the system to the condition of a particular person and his social context; thereby an interdisciplinary sector called Human-Centered Computing was born. For the modern search engine, the information extracted for the individual user is crucial. According to the Personalized Search (PS), two different techniques are necessary to personalize a search: contextualization (interconnected conditions that occur in an activity), and individualization (characteristics that distinguish an individual). This movement of focus to the individual's need undermines the rigid linearity of the classical model overtaken the ``berry picking'' model which explains that the terms change thanks to the informational feedback received from the search activity introducing the concept of evolution of search terms. The development of Information Foraging theory, which observed the correlations between animal foraging and human information foraging, also contributed to this transformation through attempts to optimize the cost-benefit ratio. This thesis arose from the need to satisfy human individuality when searching for information, and it develops a synergistic collaboration between the frontiers of technological innovation and the recent advances in IR. The search method developed exploits what is relevant for the user by changing radically the way in which an Information Need is expressed, because now it is expressed through the generation of the query and its own context. As a matter of fact the method was born under the pretense to improve the quality of search by rewriting the query based on the contexts automatically generated from a local knowledge base. Furthermore, the idea of optimizing each IR system has led to develop it as a middleware of interaction between the user and the IR system. Thereby the system has just two possible actions: rewriting the query, and reordering the result. Equivalent actions to the approach was described from the PS that generally exploits information derived from analysis of user behavior, while the proposed approach exploits knowledge provided by the user. The thesis went further to generate a novel method for an assessment procedure, according to the "Cranfield paradigm", in order to evaluate this type of IR systems. The results achieved are interesting considering both the effectiveness achieved and the innovative approach undertaken together with the several applications inspired using a local knowledge base.

Steps Ahead in the Few-Group CRoss-Section Library Generation at the Pin Level

There exists an interest in performing pin-by-pin calculations coupled with thermal hydraulics so as to improve the accuracy of nuclear reactor analysis. In the framework of the EU NURISP project, INRNE and UPM have generated an experimental version of a few group diffusion cross sections library with discontinuity factors intended for VVER analysis at the pin level with the COBAYA3 code. The transport code APOLLO2 was used to perform the branching calculations. As a first proof of principle the library was created for fresh fuel and covers almost the full parameter space of steady state and transient conditions. The main objective is to test the calculation schemes and post-processing procedures, including multi-pin branching calculations. Two library options are being studied: one based on linear table interpolation and another one using a functional fitting of the cross sections. The libraries generated with APOLLO2 have been tested with the pin-by-pin diffusion model in COBAYA3 including discontinuity factors; first comparing 2D results against the APOLLO2 reference solutions and afterwards using the libraries to compute a 3D assembly problem coupled with a simplified thermal-hydraulic model.

Methodology for automated generation of multiple choice questions in self assessment

Current trends in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) are moving towards the continuous evaluation of the students in substitution of the traditional evaluation based on a single test or exam. This fact and the increase in the number of students during last years in Engineering Schools, requires to modify evaluation procedures making them compatible with the educational and research activities. This work presents a methodology for the automatic generation of questions. These questions can be used as self assessment questions by the student and/or as queries by the teacher. The proposed approach is based on the utilization of parametric questions, formulated as multiple choice questions and generated and supported by the utilization of common programs of data sheets and word processors. Through this approach, every teacher can apply the proposed methodology without the use of programs or tools different from those normally used in his/her daily activity

Effectiveness of abstract interpretation in automatic parallelization: a case study in logic programming

We report on a detailed study of the application and effectiveness of program analysis based on abstract interpretation to automatic program parallelization. We study the case of parallelizing logic programs using the notion of strict independence. We first propose and prove correct a methodology for the application in the parallelization task of the information inferred by abstract interpretation, using a parametric domain. The methodology is generic in the sense of allowing the use of different analysis domains. A number of well-known approximation domains are then studied and the transformation into the parametric domain defined. The transformation directly illustrates the relevance and applicability of each abstract domain for the application. Both local and global analyzers are then built using these domains and embedded in a complete parallelizing compiler. Then, the performance of the domains in this context is assessed through a number of experiments. A comparatively wide range of aspects is studied, from the resources needed by the analyzers in terms of time and memory to the actual benefits obtained from the information inferred. Such benefits are evaluated both in terms of the characteristics of the parallelized code and of the actual speedups obtained from it. The results show that data flow analysis plays an important role in achieving efficient parallelizations, and that the cost of such analysis can be reasonable even for quite sophisticated abstract domains. Furthermore, the results also offer significant insight into the characteristics of the domains, the demands of the application, and the trade-offs involved.

Reduced certificates for abstraction-carrying code

Abstraction-Carrying Code (ACC) has recently been proposed as a framework for mobile code safety in which the code supplier provides a program together with an abstraction whose validity entails compliance with a predefined safety policy. The abstraction plays thus the role of safety certifícate and its generation is carried out automatically by a fixed-point analyzer. The advantage of providing a (fixedpoint) abstraction to the code consumer is that its validity is checked in a single pass of an abstract interpretation-based checker. A main challenge is to reduce the size of certificates as much as possible while at the same time not increasing checking time. We introduce the notion of reduced certifícate which characterizes the subset of the abstraction which a checker needs in order to validate (and re-construct) the full certifícate in a single pass. Based on this notion, we instrument a generic analysis algorithm with the necessary extensions in order to identify the information relevant to the checker. We also provide a correct checking algorithm together with sufficient conditions for ensuring its completeness. The experimental results within the CiaoPP system show that our proposal is able to greatly reduce the size of certificates in practice.

Abstraction-carrying code

Proof-Carrying Code (PCC) is a general approach to mobile code safety in which programs are augmented with a certifícate (or proof). The practical uptake of PCC greatly depends on the existence of a variety of enabling technologies which allow both to prove programs correct and to replace a costly verification process by an efñcient checking procedure on the consumer side. In this work we propose Abstraction-Carrying Code (ACC), a novel approach which uses abstract interpretation as enabling technology. We argüe that the large body of applications of abstract interpretation to program verification is amenable to the overall PCC scheme. In particular, we rely on an expressive class of safety policies which can be defined over different abstract domains. We use an abstraction (or abstract model) of the program computed by standard static analyzers as a certifícate. The validity of the abstraction on the consumer side is checked in a single-pass by a very efficient and specialized abstract-interpreter. We believe that ACC brings the expressiveness, flexibility and automation which is inherent in abstract interpretation techniques to the área of mobile code safety. We have implemented and benchmarked ACC within the Ciao system preprocessor. The experimental results show that the checking phase is indeed faster than the proof generation phase, and that the sizes of certificates are reasonable.

An automatic translation scheme from prolog to the andorra kernel language

The Andorra family of languages (which includes the Andorra Kernel Language -AKL) is aimed, in principie, at simultaneously supporting the programming styles of Prolog and committed choice languages. On the other hand, AKL requires a somewhat detailed specification of control by the user. This could be avoided by programming in Prolog to run on AKL. However, Prolog programs cannot be executed directly on AKL. This is due to a number of factors, from more or less trivial syntactic differences to more involved issues such as the treatment of cut and making the exploitation of certain types of parallelism possible. This paper provides basic guidelines for constructing an automatic compiler of Prolog programs into AKL, which can bridge those differences. In addition to supporting Prolog, our style of translation achieves independent and-parallel execution where possible, which is relevant since this type of parallel execution preserves, through the translation, the user-perceived "complexity" of the original Prolog program.