Homogeneization effects of variable speed limits.

Changing factors (mainly traffic intensity and weather conditions) affecting road conditions require a suitable optimal speed at any time. To solve this problem, variable speed limit systems (VSL) - as opposed to fixed limits - have been developed in recent decades. This term has included a number of speed management systems, most notably dynamic speed limits (DSL). In order to avoid the indiscriminate use of both terms in the literature, this paper proposes a simple classification and offers a review of some experiences, how their effects are evaluated and their results. This study also presents a key indicator which measures the speed homogeneity and a methodology to obtain the data based on floating cars and GPS technology applying it to a case study on a section of the M30 urban motorway in Madrid (Spain). It also presents the relation between this indicator and road performance and emissions values.

Methodology for developing an advanced communications system for the Deaf in a new domain

A methodology for developing an advanced communications system for the Deaf in a new domain is presented in this paper. This methodology is a user-centred design approach consisting of four main steps: requirement analysis, parallel corpus generation, technology adaptation to the new domain, and finally, system evaluation. During the requirement analysis, both the user and technical requirements are evaluated and defined. For generating the parallel corpus, it is necessary to collect Spanish sentences in the new domain and translate them into LSE (Lengua de Signos Española: Spanish Sign Language). LSE is represented by glosses and using video recordings. This corpus is used for training the two main modules of the advanced communications system to the new domain: the spoken Spanish into the LSE translation module and the Spanish generation from the LSE module. The main aspects to be generated are the vocabularies for both languages (Spanish words and signs), and the knowledge for translating in both directions. Finally, the field evaluation is carried out with deaf people using the advanced communications system to interact with hearing people in several scenarios. In this evaluation, the paper proposes several objective and subjective measurements for evaluating the performance. In this paper, the new considered domain is about dialogues in a hotel reception. Using this methodology, the system was developed in several months, obtaining very good performance: good translation rates (10% Sign Error Rate) with small processing times, allowing face-to-face dialogues.

Change-impact driven agile architecting

Trabajo Ya Publicado de Congreso CORE A

Robust Real-time Vision-based Aircraft Tracking From Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Aircraft tracking plays a key and important role in the Sense-and-Avoid system of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents a novel robust visual tracking algorithm for UAVs in the midair to track an arbitrary aircraft at real-time frame rates, together with a unique evaluation system. This visual algorithm mainly consists of adaptive discriminative visual tracking method, Multiple-Instance (MI) learning approach, Multiple-Classifier (MC) voting mechanism and Multiple-Resolution (MR) representation strategy, that is called Adaptive M3 tracker, i.e. AM3. In this tracker, the importance of test sample has been integrated to improve the tracking stability, accuracy and real-time performances. The experimental results show that this algorithm is more robust, efficient and accurate against the existing state-of-art trackers, overcoming the problems generated by the challenging situations such as obvious appearance change, variant surrounding illumination, partial aircraft occlusion, blur motion, rapid pose variation and onboard mechanical vibration, low computation capacity and delayed information communication between UAVs and Ground Station (GS). To our best knowledge, this is the first work to present this tracker for solving online learning and tracking freewill aircraft/intruder in the UAVs.

A Ground-Truth Video Dataset for the Development and Evaluation of Vision-based Sense-and-Avoid systems

The importance of vision-based systems for Sense-and-Avoid is increasing nowadays as remotely piloted and autonomous UAVs become part of the non-segregated airspace. The development and evaluation of these systems demand flight scenario images which are expensive and risky to obtain. Currently Augmented Reality techniques allow the compositing of real flight scenario images with 3D aircraft models to produce useful realistic images for system development and benchmarking purposes at a much lower cost and risk. With the techniques presented in this paper, 3D aircraft models are positioned firstly in a simulated 3D scene with controlled illumination and rendering parameters. Realistic simulated images are then obtained using an image processing algorithm which fuses the images obtained from the 3D scene with images from real UAV flights taking into account on board camera vibrations. Since the intruder and camera poses are user-defined, ground truth data is available. These ground truth annotations allow to develop and quantitatively evaluate aircraft detection and tracking algorithms. This paper presents the software developed to create a public dataset of 24 videos together with their annotations and some tracking application results.

A GESTÃO EDUCATIVO-CULTURAL PARA A TERCEIRA IDADE. A EXPERIÊNCIA DO SESC PAULISTA

É evidente a vida mais ativa do idoso assim como a necessidade de espaços que possam oferecer momentos de lazer, cultura, interação e estudo por parte deste grupo. Entendendo isto, este trabalho tem o intuito de estudar dentro do SESC paulista o departamento voltado à terceira idade, a chamada GETI (Gerência de Estudos e Programas para Terceira Idade). Procura-se criar uma linha histórica clara que aborda sua criação, estrutura, forma de gestão e principais ações com o idoso. Busca-se o entendimento do SESC como um possível perfil de atividade do Terceiro Setor. A fim de se verificar a eficácia das ações desenvolvidas, o trabalho estuda o modus operandi de três unidades que hoje possuem o chamado TSI (Trabalho Social com o Idoso) por meio do entendimento da forma de elaboração destas ações pelos coordenadores destas unidades e o resultado deste trabalho pelo olhar do idoso freqüentador. A busca de informações e pesquisa deu-se através de dados secundários provenientes de levantamento bibliográfico e documental em fontes públicas, como o próprio acervo do SESC, além de pesquisas recentes sobre o idoso, como a da Fundação Perseu Abramo. Por meio deste levantamento buscouse analisar o programa, sua metodologia, diretrizes e peculiaridades. A fim de se detalhar a análise, trabalhou-se com uma pesquisa qualitativa descritiva que mostrou os aspectos importantes da gestão educativo-cultural para o idoso, além da pesquisa em profundidade com gerentes e coordenadores da GETI e contribuição valiosa de gerontólogos e ex colaboradores do SESC. Para que fosse possível analisar a existência ou não de divergências no entendimento destas ações para o idoso, o autor procurou identificar esta questão por meio da narrativa oral deste público. Desta forma procura-se a compreensão do tema desde a gerência do SESC até seu freqüentador.(AU)

A GESTÃO EDUCATIVO-CULTURAL PARA A TERCEIRA IDADE. A EXPERIÊNCIA DO SESC PAULISTA

É evidente a vida mais ativa do idoso assim como a necessidade de espaços que possam oferecer momentos de lazer, cultura, interação e estudo por parte deste grupo. Entendendo isto, este trabalho tem o intuito de estudar dentro do SESC paulista o departamento voltado à terceira idade, a chamada GETI (Gerência de Estudos e Programas para Terceira Idade). Procura-se criar uma linha histórica clara que aborda sua criação, estrutura, forma de gestão e principais ações com o idoso. Busca-se o entendimento do SESC como um possível perfil de atividade do Terceiro Setor. A fim de se verificar a eficácia das ações desenvolvidas, o trabalho estuda o modus operandi de três unidades que hoje possuem o chamado TSI (Trabalho Social com o Idoso) por meio do entendimento da forma de elaboração destas ações pelos coordenadores destas unidades e o resultado deste trabalho pelo olhar do idoso freqüentador. A busca de informações e pesquisa deu-se através de dados secundários provenientes de levantamento bibliográfico e documental em fontes públicas, como o próprio acervo do SESC, além de pesquisas recentes sobre o idoso, como a da Fundação Perseu Abramo. Por meio deste levantamento buscouse analisar o programa, sua metodologia, diretrizes e peculiaridades. A fim de se detalhar a análise, trabalhou-se com uma pesquisa qualitativa descritiva que mostrou os aspectos importantes da gestão educativo-cultural para o idoso, além da pesquisa em profundidade com gerentes e coordenadores da GETI e contribuição valiosa de gerontólogos e ex colaboradores do SESC. Para que fosse possível analisar a existência ou não de divergências no entendimento destas ações para o idoso, o autor procurou identificar esta questão por meio da narrativa oral deste público. Desta forma procura-se a compreensão do tema desde a gerência do SESC até seu freqüentador.(AU)

Empowering global software development with business intelligence

Context: Global Software Development (GSD) allows companies to take advantage of talent spread across the world. Most research has been focused on the development aspect. However, little if any attention has been paid to the management of GSD projects. Studies report a lack of adequate support for management’s decisions made during software development, further accentuated in GSD since information is scattered throughout multiple factories, stored in different formats and standards. Objective: This paper aims to improve GSD management by proposing a systematic method for adapting Business Intelligence techniques to software development environments. This would enhance the visibility of the development process and enable software managers to make informed decisions regarding how to proceed with GSD projects. Method: A combination of formal goal-modeling frameworks and data modeling techniques is used to elicitate the most relevant aspects to be measured by managers in GSD. The process is described in detail and applied to a real case study throughout the paper. A discussion regarding the generalisability of the method is presented afterwards. Results: The application of the approach generates an adapted BI framework tailored to software development according to the requirements posed by GSD managers. The resulting framework is capable of presenting previously inaccessible data through common and specific views and enabling data navigation according to the organization of software factories and projects in GSD. Conclusions: We can conclude that the proposed systematic approach allows us to successfully adapt Business Intelligence techniques to enhance GSD management beyond the information provided by traditional tools. The resulting framework is able to integrate and present the information in a single place, thereby enabling easy comparisons across multiple projects and factories and providing support for informed decisions in GSD management.