Implantação de um sistema de detecção de vazamentos em oleodutos com tratamento de alarmes falsos

The pumping of fluids in pipelines is the most economic and safe form of transporting fluids. That explains why in Europe there was in 1999 about 30.000 Km [7] of pipelines of several diameters, transporting millíons of cubic meters of crude oil end refined products, belonging to COCAWE (assaciation of companies of petroleum of Europe for health, environment and safety, that joint several petroleum companies). In Brazil they are about 18.000 Km of pipelines transporting millions of cubic meters of liquids and gases. In 1999, nine accidents were registered to COCAWE. Among those accidents one brought a fatal victim. The oil loss was of 171 m3, equivalent to O,2 parts per million of the total of the transported volume. Same considering the facts mentioned the costs involved in ao accident can be high. An accident of great proportions can bríng loss of human lives, severe environmental darnages, loss of drained product, loss . for dismissed profit and damages to the image of the company high recovery cost. In consonance with that and in some cases for legal demands, the companies are, more and more, investing in systems of Leak detection in pipelines based on computer algorithm that operate in real time, seeking wíth that to minimize still more the drained volumes. This decreases the impacts at the environment and the costs. In general way, all the systems based on softWare present some type of false alarm. In general a commitment exists betWeen the sensibílity of the system and the number of false alarms. This work has as objective make a review of thé existent methods and to concentrate in the analysis of a specific system, that is, the system based on hydraulic noise, Pressure Point Analyzis (PPA). We will show which are the most important aspects that must be considered in the implementation of a Leak Detection System (LDS), from the initial phase of the analysis of risks passing by the project bases, design, choice of the necessary field instrumentation to several LDS, implementation and tests. We Will make na analysis of events (noises) originating from the flow system that can be generator of false alarms and we will present a computer algorithm that restricts those noises automatically

Síntese de superfícies seletivas de frequência atráves de técnicas de computação natural

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior

Técnicas de computação natural para segmentação de imagens médicas

Image segmentation is one of the image processing problems that deserves special attention from the scientific community. This work studies unsupervised methods to clustering and pattern recognition applicable to medical image segmentation. Natural Computing based methods have shown very attractive in such tasks and are studied here as a way to verify it's applicability in medical image segmentation. This work treats to implement the following methods: GKA (Genetic K-means Algorithm), GFCMA (Genetic FCM Algorithm), PSOKA (PSO and K-means based Clustering Algorithm) and PSOFCM (PSO and FCM based Clustering Algorithm). Besides, as a way to evaluate the results given by the algorithms, clustering validity indexes are used as quantitative measure. Visual and qualitative evaluations are realized also, mainly using data given by the BrainWeb brain simulator as ground truth

Modelagem aplicada à análise de desempenho do provedor de serviços de uma rede de automação hospitalar ieee 802.3/pm-ah de tempo real

The incorporate of industrial automation in the medical are requires mechanisms to safety and efficient establishment of communication between biomedical devices. One solution to this problem is the MP-HA (Multicycles Protocol to Hospital Automation) that down a segmented network by beds coordinated by an element called Service Provider. The goal of this work is to model this Service Provider and to do performance analysis of the activities executed by in establishment and maintenance of hospital networks

Uma arquitetura para detecção online de transientes em sinais de eletrocardiograma sobre o protocolo IEEE 802.3 com PM-AH

The occurrence of transients in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals indicates an electrical phenomenon outside the heart. Thus, the identification of transients has been the most-used methodology in medical analysis since the invention of the electrocardiograph (device responsible for benchmarking of electrocardiogram signals). There are few papers related to this subject, which compels the creation of an architecture to do the pre-processing of this signal in order to identify transients. This paper proposes a method based on the signal energy of the Hilbert transform of electrocardiogram, being an alternative to methods based on morphology of the signal. This information will determine the creation of frames of the MP-HA protocol responsible for transmitting the ECG signals through an IEEE 802.3 network to a computing device. That, in turn, may perform a process to automatically sort the signal, or to present it to a doctor so that he can do the sorting manually

A Informática como recurso didático para a aprendizagem de Física no ensino médio

The accomplishment of this work was motivated by our concerns, while teacher of Physics discipline, in the medium teaching and in the higher education, where we have been observing a lot of difficulties in the students' acting, to the they try to give pursuit out to their studies of the classroom, because of the lack of appropriate equipments, or even, of a laboratory where they can put in practice the studied contents. The work aims at to build and to test an educational software that it serves as tool auxiliadora in Physics learning in the Medium Teaching, in the area of electricity, with emphasis in the study of the electrodynamic in resistors. The developed software comes as an alternative to the learning problems, putting the computer science as auxiliary tool, because, besides being an alternative in the middle of the technological expansion, endowed with several resources, it stimulates the significant learning, according to David Ausubel's perspective. A software containing a program destined to the applicability of physics contents in the branch of the electricity is presented as an auxiliary tool, where the student can, not just, to review the contents presented at room, as well as for in practice, through a virtual laboratory, some of these contents, besides testing their knowledge through a bank of discursive subjects. The evaluation of the developed software was made submitting him/it to the professionals' of physics area appreciation. Equally, through continuous evaluations, they were made comparisons among the students' of five different groups acting, in the same school, that you/they were used of the program as tool of his auxiliary learning, and the acting of those that didn't use it

Relação entre a doença periodontal e doença cardiovascular: há uma preocupação por parte dos que fazem clínica médica e odontológica na cidade de Natal?

The relationship between periodontal and cardiovascular diseases is a reality in the current days. The knowledge about the role of periodontal disease as a risk factor to cardiovascular disease from dentistry and physicians is very important to try to eliminate this risk factor. The aim of this work was to investigate, using a questionary, if physicians and dentistry are aware about this relationship and if they think that it is important. These forms were distributed in 4 groups: cardiologists (n=90), physicians from other specialist (POS) (n=110), periodontists (n=35) and dentistry from other specialist (DOE) (n=85). We had a loss off 32,4% of the total sample due to a lack of response of some professionals. Our results showed that all cardiologists, all dentists and 68,2% of POE said that they had gotten information about the relationship between periodontal and cardiovascular disease, and just 6 POS don t believe that this relationship can occur. When questioned if, even when a periodontal disease is diagnosed, there is a habit to treat or orient the patient for treatment, 29,5% of cardiologists answered no, 25,5% of POE also answered that they did not orient and only 1 DOE answered that he did not treat nor orient. All periodontists said that treat their patients when periodontal disease was identify. The physicians seem not to find important the relationship that exist between periodontal and cardiovascular diseases and the dentistry have shown a good knowledge about this subject. Maybe, if physicians and dentistry work together, the incidence of cardiovascular disease decreases

Uma plataforma de integração de middleware para computação ubíqua

One of the current challenges of Ubiquitous Computing is the development of complex applications, those are more than simple alarms triggered by sensors or simple systems to configure the environment according to user preferences. Those applications are hard to develop since they are composed by services provided by different middleware and it is needed to know the peculiarities of each of them, mainly the communication and context models. This thesis presents OpenCOPI, a platform which integrates various services providers, including context provision middleware. It provides an unified ontology-based context model, as well as an environment that enable easy development of ubiquitous applications via the definition of semantic workflows that contains the abstract description of the application. Those semantic workflows are converted into concrete workflows, called execution plans. An execution plan consists of a workflow instance containing activities that are automated by a set of Web services. OpenCOPI supports the automatic Web service selection and composition, enabling the use of services provided by distinct middleware in an independent and transparent way. Moreover, this platform also supports execution adaptation in case of service failures, user mobility and degradation of services quality. The validation of OpenCOPI is performed through the development of case studies, specifically applications of the oil industry. In addition, this work evaluates the overhead introduced by OpenCOPI and compares it with the provided benefits, and the efficiency of OpenCOPI s selection and adaptation mechanism

Algoritmos de agrupamento aplicados a dados de expressão gênica de câncer: um estudo comparativo

The use of clustering methods for the discovery of cancer subtypes has drawn a great deal of attention in the scientific community. While bioinformaticians have proposed new clustering methods that take advantage of characteristics of the gene expression data, the medical community has a preference for using classic clustering methods. There have been no studies thus far performing a large-scale evaluation of different clustering methods in this context. This work presents the first large-scale analysis of seven different clustering methods and four proximity measures for the analysis of 35 cancer gene expression data sets. Results reveal that the finite mixture of Gaussians, followed closely by k-means, exhibited the best performance in terms of recovering the true structure of the data sets. These methods also exhibited, on average, the smallest difference between the actual number of classes in the data sets and the best number of clusters as indicated by our validation criteria. Furthermore, hierarchical methods, which have been widely used by the medical community, exhibited a poorer recovery performance than that of the other methods evaluated. Moreover, as a stable basis for the assessment and comparison of different clustering methods for cancer gene expression data, this study provides a common group of data sets (benchmark data sets) to be shared among researchers and used for comparisons with new methods

Mestre em Sistemas e Computação

In this work will applied the technique of Differential Cryptanalysis, introduced in 1990 by Biham and Shamir, on Papílio s cryptosystem, developed by Karla Ramos, to test and most importantly, to prove its relevance to other block ciphers such as DES, Blowfish and FEAL-N (X). This technique is based on the analysis of differences between plaintext and theirs respective ciphertext, in search of patterns that will assist in the discovery of the subkeys and consequently in the discovery of master key. These differences are obtained by XOR operations. Through this analysis, in addition to obtaining patterns of Pap´ılio, it search to obtain also the main characteristics and behavior of Papilio throughout theirs 16 rounds, identifying and replacing when necessary factors that can be improved in accordance with pre-established definitions of the same, thus providing greater security in the use of his algoritm

Apoiando a Construcao de Testes de Aceitacao Automatizados a partir da Especificacao de Requisitos

A automação consiste em uma importante atividade do processo de teste e é capaz de reduzir significativamente o tempo e custo do desenvolvimento. Algumas ferramentas tem sido propostas para automatizar a realização de testes de aceitação em aplicações Web. Contudo, grande parte delas apresenta limitações importantes tais como necessidade de valoração manual dos casos de testes, refatoração do código gerado e forte dependência com a estrutura das páginas HTML. Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma linguagem de especificação de teste e uma ferramenta concebidas para minimizar os impactos propiciados por essas limitações. A linguagem proposta dá suporte aos critérios de classes de equivalência e a ferramenta, desenvolvida sob a forma de um plug-in para a plataforma Eclipse, permite a geração de casos de teste através de diferentes estratégias de combinação. Para realizar a avaliação da abordagem, utilizamos um dos módulos do Sistema Unificado de Administração Publica (SUAP) do Instituto Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). Participaram da avaliação analistas de sistemas e um técnico de informática que atuam como desenvolvedores do sistema utilizado.

Apoiando a construção de testes de aceitação automatizados a partir da especificação de requisitos

Automation has become increasingly necessary during the software test process due to the high cost and time associated with such activity. Some tools have been proposed to automate the execution of Acceptance Tests in Web applications. However, many of them have important limitations such as the strong dependence on the structure of the HTML pages and the need of manual valuing of the test cases. In this work, we present a language for specifying acceptance test scenarios for Web applications called IFL4TCG and a tool that allows the generation of test cases from these scenarios. The proposed language supports the criterion of Equivalence Classes Partition and the tool allows the generation of test cases that meet different combination strategies (i.e., Each-Choice, Base-Choice and All Combinations). In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we used the language and the associated tool for designing and executing Acceptance Tests on a module of Sistema Unificado de Administração Pública (SUAP) of Instituto Federal Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). Four Systems Analysts and one Computer Technician, which work as developers of the that system, participated in the evaluation. Preliminary results showed that IFL4TCG can actually help to detect defects in Web applications

Cloud Integrator: uma plataforma para composição de serviços em ambientes de computação em nuvem

With the advance of the Cloud Computing paradigm, a single service offered by a cloud platform may not be enough to meet all the application requirements. To fulfill such requirements, it may be necessary, instead of a single service, a composition of services that aggregates services provided by different cloud platforms. In order to generate aggregated value for the user, this composition of services provided by several Cloud Computing platforms requires a solution in terms of platforms integration, which encompasses the manipulation of a wide number of noninteroperable APIs and protocols from different platform vendors. In this scenario, this work presents Cloud Integrator, a middleware platform for composing services provided by different Cloud Computing platforms. Besides providing an environment that facilitates the development and execution of applications that use such services, Cloud Integrator works as a mediator by providing mechanisms for building applications through composition and selection of semantic Web services that take into account metadata about the services, such as QoS (Quality of Service), prices, etc. Moreover, the proposed middleware platform provides an adaptation mechanism that can be triggered in case of failure or quality degradation of one or more services used by the running application in order to ensure its quality and availability. In this work, through a case study that consists of an application that use services provided by different cloud platforms, Cloud Integrator is evaluated in terms of the efficiency of the performed service composition, selection and adaptation processes, as well as the potential of using this middleware in heterogeneous computational clouds scenarios

Aprendizagem da língua japonesa apoiada por ferramentas computacionais: estudo e desenvolvimento do jogo Karuchā Ships Invaders

The use of technology tools for teaching and learning has grown increasingly in our daily life. In this context, a branch that has had tremendous growth is the area of teaching and learning language through computational tools. The study of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning), accomplished in this research, aims to evaluate existing tools in this context, focused specifically on the Japanese language; and from this study, accomplish the development of a new computational tool that can assist teaching/learning of the Japanese language. As results, we present a wide survey on the subject in various technologies/devices, as well as the complete development process of a new tool, the Karuchā Ships Invaders game, that proposes to teach basic concepts of the language, blended with entertainment, and still, focusing on the Brazilian students of Japanese language audience. We will present all the concept phases of the game and its evolution through the research, as well as an interface evaluation. Still, we present proposal and validation of a method to evaluate motivational aspects of computational tools with educational focus, and results extracted from an experiment accomplished with prospective users

O consentimento informado: Qual o seu real valor na prática médica?

Trata-se de um artigo que comenta sobre a real importância do Termo de Consentimento Informado na prática médica. Este documento tem sido cada vez mais usado como uma prática defensiva, a fim de constituir provas para defesa de um eventual processo judicial de responsabilidade médica, desvirtuando assim a idéia original, que seria a de respeitar a autonomia do paciente e delimitar a responsabilidade médica. O documento tem como objetivo mostrar que o médico cumpriu com seu dever de informar. Seu grande valor reside nos casos onde existam riscos de danos irreversíveis ao paciente. Conclui-se, porém, que um prontuário bem elaborado onde se inclui o registro das informações que foram transmitidas, bem como o grau de participação dos pacientes e seus familiares nas decisões terapêuticas, também deve ter valor ético e jurídico semelhante do TCI.