REXIB: Remote Experiments Interface Builder

Remote Experimentation is an educational resource that allows teachers to strengthen the practical contents of science & engineering courses. However, building up the interfaces to remote experiments is not a trivial task. Although teachers normally master the practical contents addressed by a particular remote experiment they usually lack the programming skills required to quickly build up the corresponding web interface. This paper describes the automatic generation of experiment interfaces through a web-accessible Java application. The application displays a list of existent modules and once the requested modules have been selected, it generates the code that enables the browser to display the experiment interface. The tools? main advantage is enabling non-tech teachers to create their own remote experiments.

Liquid crystal beads constrained on thin cellulosic fibers: Electric field induced microrotors and N-I transition

We directly visualize the response of nematic liquid crystal drops of toroidal topology threaded in cellulosic fibers, suspended in air, to an AC electric field and at different temperatures over the N-I transition. This new liquid crystal system can exhibit non-trivial point defects, which can be energetically unstable against expanding into ring defects depending on the fiber constraining geometries. The director anchoring tangentially near the fiber surface and homeotropically at the air interface makes a hybrid shell distribution that in turn causes a ring disclination line around the main axis of the fiber at the center of the droplet. Upon application of an electric field, E, the disclination ring first expands and moves along the fiber main axis, followed by the appearance of a stable "spherical particle" object orbiting around the fiber at the center of the liquid crystal drop. The rotation speed of this particle was found to vary linearly with the applied voltage. This constrained liquid crystal geometry seems to meet the essential requirements in which soliton-like deformations can develop and exhibit stable orbiting in three dimensions upon application of an external electric field. On changing the temperature the system remains stable and allows the study of the defect evolution near the nematic-isotropic transition, showing qualitatively different behaviour on cooling and heating processes. The necklaces of such liquid crystal drops constitute excellent systems for the study of topological defects and their evolution and open new perspectives for application in microelectronics and photonics.

Manipulator trajectory planning using a MOEA

Generating manipulator trajectories considering multiple objectives and obstacle avoidance is a non-trivial optimization problem. In this paper a multi-objective genetic algorithm based technique is proposed to address this problem. Multiple criteria are optimized considering up to five simultaneous objectives. Simulation results are presented for robots with two and three degrees of freedom, considering two and five objectives optimization. A subsequent analysis of the spread and solutions distribution along the converged non-dominated Pareto front is carried out, in terms of the achieved diversity.

A contribution to the e-framework: a specification of a programming exercise evaluation service

This work is a contribution to the e-Framework, arguably the most prominent e-learning framework today, and consists of the definition of a service for the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. This evaluation domain differs from trivial evaluations modelled by languages such as the IMS Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) specification. Complex evaluation domains justify the development of specialized evaluators that participate in several business processes. These business processes can combine other type of systems such as Programming Contest Management Systems, Learning Management Systems, Integrated Development Environments and Learning Object Repositories where programming exercises are stored as Learning Objects. This contribution describes the implementation approaches used, more precisely, behaviours & requests, use & interactions, applicable standards, interface definition and usage scenarios.

Transactional filesystems

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática

Sobre o novo em design

Dissertação de Mestrado em Ciências da Comunicação Cultura Contemporânea e Novas Tecnologias

Materials selection for a set of multiple parts considering manufacturing costs and weight reduction with structural isoperformance using direct multisearch optimization

Materials selection is a matter of great importance to engineering design and software tools are valuable to inform decisions in the early stages of product development. However, when a set of alternative materials is available for the different parts a product is made of, the question of what optimal material mix to choose for a group of parts is not trivial. The engineer/designer therefore goes about this in a part-by-part procedure. Optimizing each part per se can lead to a global sub-optimal solution from the product point of view. An optimization procedure to deal with products with multiple parts, each with discrete design variables, and able to determine the optimal solution assuming different objectives is therefore needed. To solve this multiobjective optimization problem, a new routine based on Direct MultiSearch (DMS) algorithm is created. Results from the Pareto front can help the designer to align his/hers materials selection for a complete set of materials with product attribute objectives, depending on the relative importance of each objective.

Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks Training Through Charged System Search and its Application for Non-Technical Losses Detection

The non-technical loss is not a problem with trivial solution or regional character and its minimization represents the guarantee of investments in product quality and maintenance of power systems, introduced by a competitive environment after the period of privatization in the national scene. In this paper, we show how to improve the training phase of a neural network-based classifier using a recently proposed meta-heuristic technique called Charged System Search, which is based on the interactions between electrically charged particles. The experiments were carried out in the context of non-technical loss in power distribution systems in a dataset obtained from a Brazilian electrical power company, and have demonstrated the robustness of the proposed technique against with several others natureinspired optimization techniques for training neural networks. Thus, it is possible to improve some applications on Smart Grids.

Arc exchange systems and renormalization

We exhibit the construction of stable arc exchange systems from the stable laminations of hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. We prove a one-to-one correspondence between (i) Lipshitz conjugacy classes of C(1+H) stable arc exchange systems that are C(1+H) fixed points of renormalization and (ii) Lipshitz conjugacy classes of C(1+H) diffeomorphisms f with hyperbolic basic sets Lambda that admit an invariant measure absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure on Lambda. Let HD(s)(Lambda) and HD(u)(Lambda) be, respectively, the Hausdorff dimension of the stable and unstable leaves intersected with the hyperbolic basic set L. If HD(u)(Lambda) = 1, then the Lipschitz conjugacy is, in fact, a C(1+H) conjugacy in (i) and (ii). We prove that if the stable arc exchange system is a C(1+HDs+alpha) fixed point of renormalization with bounded geometry, then the stable arc exchange system is smooth conjugate to an affine stable arc exchange system.

Algorithmic skeleton framework for the orchestration of GPU computations

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

O regime dialógico na obra de João César Monteiro: matérias e conteúdos de uma prática subversiva

Tese apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Doutor em Ciências da Comunicação - Comunicação e Linguagem

Determinação das forças de impacto num quebra-mar misto utilizando o modelo numérico Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Mecânica

Customer Lifetime Value: a framework for application in the insurance industry - Building a Business Process to Generate and Maintain an Automatic Estimation Agent

Research Project submited as partial fulfilment for the Master Degree in Statistics and Information Management

Data-centric concurrency control on the java programming language

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Desenvolvimento de formulações de elementos finitos para barras sujeitas a cargas transitórias

Com o presente trabalho pretende-se formular, implementar e validar duas classes de elementos finitos não-convencionais para problemas elastoestáticos e elastodinâmicos (harmónicos e transitórios) envolvendo barras solicitadas por cargas axiais. O desempenho numérico dos elementos não convencionais é estudado para uma larga gama de situações de interesse prático e comparado com o dos elementos finitos conformes de deslocamento (convencionais). A resolução de problemas transitórios envolve a integração no tempo e no espaço das equações diferenciais governativas, bem como a imposição das respetivas condições iniciais e de fronteira. A metodologia de integração no tempo adotada neste trabalho é baseada no método de Newmark. A resolução de problemas estáticos e harmónicos não carece de integração no tempo, ou a mesma é feita de forma trivial. Concluída a discretização no tempo, a segunda fase da resolução envolve a integração no espaço de cada uma das equações discretizadas, nomeadamente através do método dos elementos finitos. Para esse efeito, apresentam-se as formulações relativas aos elementos finitos convencionais, híbridos e híbridos-Trefftz. As três formulações têm como ponto de partida a forma fraca da equação diferencial de Navier, que é imposta utilizando o método de Galerkin. A principal diferença entre os elementos convencionais e não-convencionais prende-se com a maneira como são impostas as condições de fronteira de Dirichlet e as condições de compatibilidade nas fronteiras interiores. Os elementos não convencionais são implementados numa plataforma computacional desenvolvida de raiz no ambiente Matlab. A implementação é feita de maneira a permitir uma definição muito geral e flexível da estrutura e das respetivas ações, bem como das discretizações no tempo e no espaço e das bases de aproximação, que podem ser diferentes para cada elemento finito. Por fim, efetuam-se testes numéricos com o objetivo de analisar os resultados obtidos com os elementos não convencionais e de os comparar com as respetivas soluções analíticas (caso existam), ou com os resultados obtidos utilizando elementos convencionais. É especialmente focada a convergência das soluções aproximadas sob refinamentos da malha (h), no espaço e no tempo, e das funções de aproximação (p), sendo que o uso simultâneo dos dois refinamentos parece conduzir mais rapidamente a soluções próximas da solução exata. Analisam-se também problemas complexos, envolvendo propagação de ondas de choque, com o fim de se efetuar uma comparação entre os elementos convencionais, disponíveis no programa comercial SAP2000, e os elementos não convencionais fornecidos pela plataforma computacional desenvolvida neste trabalho.