Projeto visita virtual e videoconfer??ncia judicial

Este projeto nasceu de uma parceria entre o Departamento Penitenci??rio Nacional e a Defensoria P??blica da Uni??o (DPU). Apresenta duas importantes vertentes no ??mbito da execu????o penal. A primeira relaciona-se ao direito de manuten????o dos v??nculos afetivos dos presidi??rios, possibilitando o contato deles com seus familiares e amigos; e a segunda refere-se ?? realiza????o de audi??ncias judiciais por videoconfer??ncia. Desde a implanta????o do Projeto Visita Virtual e Videoconfer??ncia Judicial, em maio de 2010, 509 presos participaram da visita virtual e puderam conversar e visualizar seus familiares e amigos por meio desse recurso, conferindo, assim, um resultado extremamente satisfat??rio, visto que h?? pelo menos um ano n??o recebiam visitas. De mar??o de 2011 at?? julho deste ano, foram realizadas 160 videoconfer??ncias

Escrit??rio virtual

Este projeto refere-se ?? implementa????o de um modelo de gest??o que reduz os custos com as ??reas-meio, e volta o seu potencial para o provimento de solu????es das necessidades do cliente. ?? uma nova forma de conceber o tempo, o espa??o e os relacionamentos, mediante a cria????o de um escrit??rio virtual que visa aproximar os t??cnicos aos seus clientes. O funcion??rio carrega consigo o notebook e o aparelho celular podendo trabalhar em qualquer lugar e a qualquer hora, com o objetivo de atender as demandas dos clientes com prontid??o e agilidade no momento da solicita????o. Os resultados deste modelo podem ser percebidos tanto na satisfa????o dos clientes como dos funcion??rios envolvidos

Variação na dieta da tartaruga verde, Chelonia mydas, e o impacto da ingestão de lixo ao longo da costa brasileira

Neste trabalho nós estudamos a dieta da tartaruga verde, Chelonia mydas, e os fatores envolvidos na variação de sua ecologia alimentar. Avaliamos também o impacto da ingestão de lixo, e os fatores que podem explicar a elevada ingestão destes resíduos entre os animais marinhos. No estudo da ecologia alimentar, nós avaliamos mais de 400 indivíduos, entre dados originais e da literatura, distribuídos ao longo de um gradiente latitudinal e diversos ambientes. As tartarugas se alimentaram majoritariamente de macroalgas, porém apresentaram uma grande plasticidade alimentar, tanto em relação à estratégia de forrageamento quanto à dieta. Nas regiões mais frias e com menor disponibilidade de algas, as tartarugas mudaram de uma dieta herbívora, para uma dieta baseada em matéria animal. Esta mudança de dieta acarretou também em uma mudança de estratégia de forrageamento, saindo da alimentação bentônica para uma alimentação pelágica. Estratégia esta que também foi encontrada nas áreas estuarinas. A plasticidade alimentar se deve à interação de fatores intrínsecos (restrições fisiológicas) e extrínsecos (regionais e locais). As diferenças nas estratégias de forragenamento acarretam também em diferenças na exposição a ameaças. Um exemplo disso é a ingestão de lixo, que apesar de ter sido registrada em mais de 70% das tartarugas (N = 265), representou uma ameaça maior aos animais com estratégia de forrageamento pelágica. O plástico foi o material mais ingerido, tendo como principal fonte itens relacionados à alimentação e sacolas plásticas. O estudo também mostrou que uma quantidade pequena de lixo (0,5 g) é suficiente para causar a morte. Este resultado revelou que o potencial de letalidade por ingestão de lixo é muito maior que a mortalidade observada. A verdadeira ameaça da ingestão de lixo está sendo mascarada pela elevada mortalidade relacionada às atividades pesqueiras. A ingestão de lixo é normalmente atribuída à confusão de um item alimentar específico com o resíduo, como águas-vivas e sacolas plásticas. Porém, nós mostramos que se trata de uma questão mais ampla, e usamos a tartaruga verde, aves marinhas e peixes para ressaltar a importância de outros fatores como: abundância do lixo no ambiente, estratégia de forrageamento, capacidade de detecção do resíduo e amplitude da dieta. Nós acreditamos que a ingestão de lixo ocorre devido a uma armadilha evolutiva muito mais ampla do que a previamente sugerida, e que deve afetar muito mais espécies que as que foram até hoje reportadas. Desarmar esta armadilha será particularmente difícil devido ao contínuo e crescente despejo de plástico no ambiente marinho e sua alta persistência no ambiente.

A Platform to Emulate Ambient Assisted Living Environments

According to the opinion of clinicians, emerging medical conditions can be timely detected by observing changes in the activities of daily living and/or in the physiological signals of a person. To accomplish such purpose, it is necessary to properly monitor both the person’s physiological signals as well as the home environment with sensing technology. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a promising technology for this support. After receiving the data from the sensor nodes, a computer processes the data and extracts information to detect any abnormality. The computer runs algorithms that should have been previously developed and tested in real homes or in living-labs. However, these installations (and volunteers) may not be easily available. In order to get around that difficulty, this paper suggests the making of a physical model to emulate basic actions of a user at home, thus giving autonomy to researchers wanting to test the performance of their algorithms. This paper also studies some data communication issues in mobile WSNs namely how the orientation of the sensor nodes in the body affects the received signal strength, as well as retransmission aspects of a TDMA-based MAC protocol in the data recovery process.

Los modelos CAMEL y Promethee como instrumentos de análisis de la banca virtual en España

Consideramos de interés realizar un análisis financiero de la banca virtual en España para ser capaces de posicionar aquellas entidades bancarias que vieron en el canal de Internet una vía de expansión hacia nuevos clientes o como consolidación de los existentes, ya que todos los bancos creados en España de carácter virtual son filiales de grandes grupos bancarios. Utilizamos como modelos de análisis la aplicación de los métodos multicriterio CAMEL y Promethee. Como conclusiones del trabajo se observa que, independientemente del método utilizado, la entidad que mejor se posiciona para el periodo de análisis estudiado (2004-2010) es Bancopopular-e. No obstante, son entidades que todavía alcanzan valores muy bajas de rentabilidad y liquidez y donde datos como la eficiencia o la calidad de activos son muy mejorables.

LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF A MASTER DEGREE IN ANIMATION AND ILLUSTRATION

This paper aims to describe the processes of teaching illustration and animation, together, in the context of a masters degree program. In Portugal, until very recently, illustration and animation higher education courses, were very scarce and only provided by a few private universities, which offered separated programs - either illustration or animation. The MA in Illustration and Animation (MIA) based in the Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e Ave in Portugal, dared to join these two creative areas in a common learning model and is already starting it’s third edition with encouraging results and will be supported by the first international conference on illustration and animation (CONFIA). This masters program integrates several approaches and techniques (in illustration and animation) and integrates and encourages creative writing and critique writing. This paper describes the iterative process of construction, and implementation of the program as well as the results obtained on the initial years of existence in terms of pedagogic and learning conclusions. In summary, we aim to compare pedagogic models of animation or illustration teaching in higher education opposed to a more contemporary and multidisciplinary model approach that integrates the two - on an earlier stage - and allows them to be developed separately – on the second part of the program. This is based on the differences and specificities of animation (from classic techniques to 3D) and illustration (drawing the illustration) and the intersection area of these two subjects within the program structure focused on the students learning and competencies acquired to use in professional or authorial projects.

Virtual simulation of the postsurgical cosmetic outcome in patientswith pectus excavatum

Pectus excavatum is the most common congenital deformity of the anterior chest wall, in which several ribs and the sternum grow abnormally. Nowadays, the surgical correction is carried out in children and adults through Nuss technic. This technic has been shown to be safe with major drivers as cosmesis and the prevention of psychological problems and social stress. Nowadays, no application is known to predict the cosmetic outcome of the pectus excavatum surgical correction. Such tool could be used to help the surgeon and the patient in the moment of deciding the need for surgery correction. This work is a first step to predict postsurgical outcome in pectus excavatum surgery correction. Facing this goal, it was firstly determined a point cloud of the skin surface along the thoracic wall using Computed Tomography (before surgical correction) and the Polhemus FastSCAN (after the surgical correction). Then, a surface mesh was reconstructed from the two point clouds using a Radial Basis Function algorithm for further affine registration between the meshes. After registration, one studied the surgical correction influence area (SCIA) of the thoracic wall. This SCIA was used to train, test and validate artificial neural networks in order to predict the surgical outcome of pectus excavatum correction and to determine the degree of convergence of SCIA in different patients. Often, ANN did not converge to a satisfactory solution (each patient had its own deformity characteristics), thus invalidating the creation of a mathematical model capable of estimating, with satisfactory results, the postsurgical outcome

A contribution to a virtual enterprise taxonomy

This paper presents a taxonomy able to contribute to building a framework within the domain of Virtual Enterprises (VE). A VE taxonomy currently does not exist, and this lack is felt in the ambiguous way that some concepts are addressed, leading to a fragment understanding that hinders the development of the science of VE integration and management. The structure of the taxonomy developed is based on the view of the system as a 5-tuple consisting of Input, Control, Output, Mechanism, and Process, which is the underlying system-view in the well-know IDEF0 diagramming technique. In particular, this taxonomy addresses the VE extended lifecycle that implies the use of a meta-organization called Market of Resources, as an original contribution to the VE theory and practice. The taxonomy presented is constructed in a way to be easily complemented with other VE partial taxonomies that may be found in literature.

A importância da personagem virtual no contexto da animação 3D em tempo real

O desenvolvimento de personagens digitais tridimensionais1 na área da animação, a constante procura por soluções tecnológicas convincentes, aliado a uma estética própria, tem contribuído para o sucesso e afirmação da animação tridimensional, na indústria do entretenimento. Contudo, toda a obra que procura ou explora a vertente digital/3D, torna-se ‘vitima’ das limitações do render2 aplicado a uma sequência de imagens, devido ao aumento dos custos financeiros e humanos, assim como da influência e dificuldade implicadas no cumprimento dos objectivos e prazos. O tempo real tem assumido, cada vez mais, um papel predominante na indústria da animação interactiva. Com a evolução da tecnologia surgiu a necessidade de procurar a metodologia apropriada que sirva de alavanca para o desenvolvimento de animações 3D em tempo real, através de softwares open-source ou de baixo orçamento, para a redução de custos, que possibilite simultaneamente descartar qualquer dependência do render na animação 3D. O desenvolvimento de personagens em tempo real, possibilita o surgimento de uma nova abordagem: a interactividade na arte de animar. Esta possibilita a introdução de um vasto leque de novas aplicações e consequentemente, contribui para o aumento do interesse e curiosidade por parte do espectador. No entanto, a inserção, implementação e (ab)uso da tecnologia na área da animação, levanta questões atuais sobre qual o papel do animador. Esta dissertação procura analisar estes aspectos, dando apoio ao projecto de animação 3D em tempo real, denominado ‘PALCO’.

A taxonomy for virtual enterprises

The purpose of this paper is to present a taxonomy able to contribute to building a framework within the domain of Virtual Enterprises (VE), to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and contributions to knowledge, as well as for trust building among VE stakeholders. A VE taxonomy currently does not exist, and this lack is felt in the ambiguous way that some concepts are addressed, leading to a fragment understanding that hinders the development of the science of VE integration and management. The structure of the taxonomy developed is based on the view of the system as a 5-tuple consisting of Input, Control, Output, Mechanism, and Process, which is the underlying system-view in the well-know IDEF0 diagramming technique. In particular, this taxonomy addresses the VE extended lifecycle that implies the use of a meta-organization called Market of Resources, as an original contribution to the VE theory and practice. The taxonomy presented does not repeat what the literature already includes, or the commonplaces, and it is constructed in a way to be easily complemented with other VE partial taxonomies that may be found in literature. Some suggestions for extensions to other interrelated domains (as evolution leaves taxonomies in an open or incompleteness state) are given in the text.

Money laundering and virtual money: the bitcoin example

Money laundering operations faced multiple changes and become more complex, in line with financial innovation. Often, regulation does not follow that innovation, giving opportunity to take advantage of thes e gaps in less lawful activities. The bitcoin is a virtual currency that has grown significantly, both in value and in volume of transactions, in recent years. The dimension of the phenomenon led to an increasing surveillance from the financial supervisors . We search for evidence of the relationship between money laundering and transactions carried out in bitcoins, the most popular virtual currency at the moment. We analyse the official publications relating the two themes, academic research and the notori ety within the international media. The attitudes toward the bitcoin are diverse, but all share concerns about its future impact. Some sparse evidence indicates that bitcoin may be an opportunity for money laundering, however more data is required.

A Travel Optimization System for Academic Environments

Carpooling initiated in America in the 1970s due to the oil crisis. However, over the past years, carpooling has increased significantly across the world. Some countries have created a High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane to encourage commuters not to travel alone. In additional, carpool websites has been developed to facilitate the connection between the commuters, making it possible to create a compatible match in a faster and efficient manner. This project focuses on carpooling, especially in an academic environment since younger people are more likely to choose carpool. Initially, an intense research was made to examine carpool studies that occurred all over the world, following with a research of higher education institutes that use carpooling as a transportation mode. Most websites created carpools by targeting people from a specific country. These commuters have different origins and destinations making it more complicated to create compatible matches. The objective of this project is to develop a system helping teachers and students from an academic environment to create carpool matches. This objective makes it easier to create carpools because these students and teachers have the same destination. During the research, it was essential to explore, as many as possible, existing carpool websites that are available across the world. After this analysis, several sketches were made to develop the layout and structure of the web application that’s being implemented throughout the project. Once the layout was established, the development of the web application was initiated. This project had its ups and downs but it accomplished all the necessary requirements. This project can be accessed on the link: http://ipcacarpool.somee.com. Once the website was up and running, a web-based survey was developed to study the reasons that motivate people to consider carpooling as an alternative to driving alone. To develop this survey was used a tool called Survey Planet. This survey contained 408 respondents, which 391 are students and 17 are teachers. This study concludes that a majority of the respondents don’t carpool, however they will consider carpooling if there was a dedicated parking space. A majority of the respondents that carpool initiated less than a year ago, indicating that this mean of transportation is recent.

Comunidade de práticas virtual para investigadores : um projeto em desenvolvimento

As Comunidades de Prática fomentam a aprendizagem, transmissão e produção de conhecimento na organização. Contudo, esta perspetiva é ainda pouco desenvolvida nas comunidades online de e para investigadores. Neste artigo, apresenta-se o plano de desenvolvimento de uma Comunidade de Prática, desenvolvida na plataforma Moodle e num grupo no Facebook, para investigadores na Universidade Aberta, alicerçado num enquadramento teórico do tema, com o qual se pretende reforçar a comunicação online e cooperação entre os investigadores, potencializando a coesão e melhoria de práticas a nível da investigação. Pela análise de entrevistas realizadas aos investigadores e das dinâmicas geradas no grupo de Facebook verifica-se interesse no desenvolvimento de projetos de investigação e preferência pelo trabalho em equipa, apesar da falta de financiamento, tempo ou apoio. Apurou-se ainda um aumento de interações em publicações dos próprios investigadores, sendo que, em média, apenas 21 dos 43 membros do grupo visualizam as publicações, havendo maior ou menor interesse conforme o tipo de publicação feita.

(Virtual) Agents for running electricity markets

This paper describes a multi-agent based simulation (MABS) framework to construct an artificial electric power market populated with learning agents. The artificial market, named TEMMAS (The Electricity Market Multi-Agent Simulator), explores the integration of two design constructs: (i) the specification of the environmental physical market properties and (ii) the specification of the decision-making (deliberative) and reactive agents. TEMMAS is materialized in an experimental setup involving distinct power generator companies that operate in the market and search for the trading strategies that best exploit their generating units' resources. The experimental results show a coherent market behavior that emerges from the overall simulated environment.

A flexible side information generation framework for distributed video coding

One of the most efficient approaches to generate the side information (SI) in distributed video codecs is through motion compensated frame interpolation where the current frame is estimated based on past and future reference frames. However, this approach leads to significant spatial and temporal variations in the correlation noise between the source at the encoder and the SI at the decoder. In such scenario, it would be useful to design an architecture where the SI can be more robustly generated at the block level, avoiding the creation of SI frame regions with lower correlation, largely responsible for some coding efficiency losses. In this paper, a flexible framework to generate SI at the block level in two modes is presented: while the first mode corresponds to a motion compensated interpolation (MCI) technique, the second mode corresponds to a motion compensated quality enhancement (MCQE) technique where a low quality Intra block sent by the encoder is used to generate the SI by doing motion estimation with the help of the reference frames. The novel MCQE mode can be overall advantageous from the rate-distortion point of view, even if some rate has to be invested in the low quality Intra coding blocks, for blocks where the MCI produces SI with lower correlation. The overall solution is evaluated in terms of RD performance with improvements up to 2 dB, especially for high motion video sequences and long Group of Pictures (GOP) sizes.