Engineering a search and rescue application with a wireless sensor network - based localization mechanism

The advent of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies is paving the way for a panoply of new ubiquitous computing applications, some of them with critical requirements. In the ART-WiSe framework, we are designing a two-tiered communication architecture for supporting real-time and reliable communications in WSNs. Within this context, we have been developing a test-bed application, for testing, validating and demonstrating our theoretical findings - a search&rescue/pursuit-evasion application. Basically, a WSN deployment is used to detect, localize and track a target robot and a station controls a rescuer/pursuer robot until it gets close enough to the target robot. This paper describes how this application was engineered, particularly focusing on the implementation of the localization mechanism.

Model driven development implementation of a control systems user interfaces specification tool

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Uma metaheurística para a programação de projectos com multi-modos e recursos limitados

Este artigo apresenta uma nova abordagem (MM-GAV-FBI), aplicável ao problema da programação de projectos com restrições de recursos e vários modos de execução por actividade, problema conhecido na literatura anglo-saxónica por MRCPSP. Cada projecto tem um conjunto de actividades com precedências tecnológicas definidas e um conjunto de recursos limitados, sendo que cada actividade pode ter mais do que um modo de realização. A programação dos projectos é realizada com recurso a um esquema de geração de planos (do inglês Schedule Generation Scheme - SGS) integrado com uma metaheurística. A metaheurística é baseada no paradigma dos algoritmos genéticos. As prioridades das actividades são obtidas a partir de um algoritmo genético. A representação cromossómica utilizada baseia-se em chaves aleatórias. O SGS gera planos não-atrasados. Após a obtenção de uma solução é aplicada uma melhoria local. O objectivo da abordagem é encontrar o melhor plano (planning), ou seja, o plano que tenha a menor duração temporal possível, satisfazendo as precedências das actividades e as restrições de recursos. A abordagem proposta é testada num conjunto de problemas retirados da literatura da especialidade e os resultados computacionais são comparados com outras abordagens. Os resultados computacionais validam o bom desempenho da abordagem, não apenas em termos de qualidade da solução, mas também em termos de tempo útil.

Personalized public transportation information

Thesis to obtain the Master of Science Degree in Computer Science and Engineering

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

On the requirements of interpolating polynomials for path motion constraints

In the framework of multibody dynamics, the path motion constraint enforces that a body follows a predefined curve being its rotations with respect to the curve moving frame also prescribed. The kinematic constraint formulation requires the evaluation of the fourth derivative of the curve with respect to its arc length. Regardless of the fact that higher order polynomials lead to unwanted curve oscillations, at least a fifth order polynomials is required to formulate this constraint. From the point of view of geometric control lower order polynomials are preferred. This work shows that for multibody dynamic formulations with dependent coordinates the use of cubic polynomials is possible, being the dynamic response similar to that obtained with higher order polynomials. The stabilization of the equations of motion, always required to control the constraint violations during long analysis periods due to the inherent numerical errors of the integration process, is enough to correct the error introduced by using a lower order polynomial interpolation and thus forfeiting the analytical requirement for higher order polynomials.

Development of Biomimetic Robots in the EPS Engineering Programme Capstone Project

This paper proposes the development of biologically inspired robots as the capstone project of the European Project Semester (EPS) framework. EPS is a one semester student centred international programme offered by a group of European engineering schools (EPS Providers) as part of their student exchange programme portfolio. EPS is organized around a central module (the EPS project) and a set of complementary supportive modules. Project proposals refer to open multidisciplinary real world problems. Its purpose is to expose students to problems of a greater dimension and complexity than those faced throughout the degree programme as well as to put them in contact with the socalled real world, in opposition to the academic world. Students are organized in teams, grouping individuals from diverse academic backgrounds and nationalities, and each team is fully responsible for conducting its project. EPS provides an integrated framework for undertaking capstone projects, which is focused on multicultural and multidisciplinary teamwork, communication, problem-solving, creativity, leadership, entrepreneurship, ethical reasoning and global contextual analysis. The design and development of biologically inspired robots allows the students to fulfil the previously described requirements and objectives and, as a result, we recommend the adoption of these projects within the EPS project capstone module for the benefit of engineering students.

Quality-of-service aware routing for static and mobile IPv6-based low-power and lossy sensor networks using RPL

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a paradigm over the last few years as a result of the tight integration of the computing and the physical world. The requirement of remote sensing makes low-power wireless sensor networks one of the key enabling technologies of IoT. These networks encompass several challenges, especially in communication and networking, due to their inherent constraints of low-power features, deployment in harsh and lossy environments, and limited computing and storage resources. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [1] was proposed by the IETF ROLL (Routing Over Low-power Lossy links) working group and is currently adopted as an IETF standard in the RFC 6550 since March 2012. Although RPL greatly satisfied the requirements of low-power and lossy sensor networks, several issues remain open for improvement and specification, in particular with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and support for mobility. In this paper, we focus mainly on the RPL routing protocol. We propose some enhancements to the standard specification in order to provide QoS guarantees for static as well as mobile LLNs. For this purpose, we propose OF-FL (Objective Function based on Fuzzy Logic), a new objective function that overcomes the limitations of the standardized objective functions that were designed for RPL by considering important link and node metrics, namely end-to-end delay, number of hops, ETX (Expected transmission count) and LQL (Link Quality Level). In addition, we present the design of Co-RPL, an extension to RPL based on the corona mechanism that supports mobility in order to overcome the problem of slow reactivity to frequent topology changes and thus providing a better quality of service mainly in dynamic networks application. Performance evaluation results show that both OF-FL and Co-RPL allow a great improvement when compared to the standard specification, mainly in terms of packet loss ratio and average network latency. 2015 Elsevier B.V. Al

Process engineering of liver cells for drug testing applications

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Bioengenharia

GVSOS: A New Client for OGC SOS Interface Standard

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Advancing tendon regeneration through the development of bio-stimulating tissue engineering approaches

Tendon tissue engineering (TE) requires tailoring scaffolds designs and properties to the anatomical and functional requirements of tendons located in different regions of the body. Cell sourcing is also of utmost importance as tendon cells are scarce. Recently, we have found that it is possible to direct the tenogenic differentiation of Amniotic fluid and Adipose tissue derived stem cells (hAFSCs and hASCs), and also that there are hASCs subpopulations that might be more prone to tenogenic differentiation. Nevertheless, biochemical stimulation may not be enough to develop functional TE substitutes for a tissue that is known to be highly dependent on mechanical loading.

Enrollment time as a requirement for biometric hand recognition systems

Biometric systems are increasingly being used as a means for authentication to provide system security in modern technologies. The performance of a biometric system depends on the accuracy, the processing speed, the template size, and the time necessary for enrollment. While much research has focused on the first three factors, enrollment time has not received as much attention. In this work, we present the findings of our research focused upon studying user’s behavior when enrolling in a biometric system. Specifically, we collected information about the user’s availability for enrollment in respect to the hand recognition systems (e.g., hand geometry, palm geometry or any other requiring positioning the hand on an optical scanner). A sample of 19 participants, chosen randomly apart their age, gender, profession and nationality, were used as test subjects in an experiment to study the patience of users enrolling in a biometric hand recognition system.

A domain-specific language for ETL patterns specification in Data Warehousing Systems

During the last few years many research efforts have been done to improve the design of ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) systems. ETL systems are considered very time-consuming, error-prone and complex involving several participants from different knowledge domains. ETL processes are one of the most important components of a data warehousing system that are strongly influenced by the complexity of business requirements, their changing and evolution. These aspects influence not only the structure of a data warehouse but also the structures of the data sources involved with. To minimize the negative impact of such variables, we propose the use of ETL patterns to build specific ETL packages. In this paper, we formalize this approach using BPMN (Business Process Modelling Language) for modelling more conceptual ETL workflows, mapping them to real execution primitives through the use of a domain-specific language that allows for the generation of specific instances that can be executed in an ETL commercial tool.

Refinement and variability techniques in model transformation of software requirements

Tese de Doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de Informação

Piezoelectric polymers as biomaterials for tissue engineering applications

Tissue engineering often rely on scaffolds for supporting cell differentiation and growth. Novel paradigms for tissue engineering include the need of active or smart scaffolds in order to properly regenerate specific tissues. In particular, as electrical and electromechanical clues are among the most relevant ones in determining tissue functionality in tissues such as muscle and bone, among others, electroactive materials and, in particular, piezoelectric ones, show strong potential for novel tissue engineering strategies, in particular taking also into account the existence of these phenomena within some specific tissues, indicating their requirement also during tissue regeneration. This referee reports on piezoelectric materials used for tissue engineering applications. The most used materials for tissue engineering strategies are reported together with the main achievements, challenges and future needs for research and actual therapies. This review provides thus a compilation of the most relevant results and strategies and a start point for novel research pathways in the most relevant and challenging open questions.