Alexandre Nóbrega Duarte

An approach to generate and embed sign language video tracks into multimedia contents

Deaf people have serious problems to access information due to their inherent difficulties to deal with spoken and written languages. This work tries to address this problem by proposing a solution for automatic generation and insertion of sign language video tracks into captioned digital multimedia content. Our solution can process a subtitle stream and generate the sign language track in real-time. Furthermore, it has a set of mechanisms that exploit human computation to generate and maintain their linguistic constructions. The solution was instantiated for the Digital TV, Web and Digital Cinema platforms and evaluated through a set of experiments with deaf users.

A Software-Based Solution for Distributing and Displaying 3D UHD Films

As an alternative to traditional hardware-based ultra-high definition (UHD) multimedia systems, the proposed software-based approach offers a better cost-benefit ratio and might help facilitate large-scale deployment.

A Systematic Mapping Study on Fault Management in Cloud Computing

Background: The large computational infrastructures required to provide the on-demand services that most users are now used to are more prone to failures than any single computational device. Thus, fault management is a essential activity in the realization of the cloud computing model. Aims: This work aims at identifying well-explored topics on fault management in cloud computing as well as pin-pointing gaps in the scientific literature that may represent opportunities for further research and development in this area. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study to collect, filter and classify scientific works in this area. The 4535 scientific papers found on major search engines were filtered and the remaining 166 papers were classified according to a taxonomy described in this work. Results: We found that IaaS is most explored in the selected studies. The main dependability functions explored were Tolerance and Removal, and the attributes were Reliability and Availability. Most papers had been classified by research type as Solution Proposal. Conclusion: This work summarizes and classifies the research effort conducted on fault management in cloud computing, providing a good starting point for further research in this area.

A Framework for Automated Software Testing on the Cloud

This work presents the framework Cloud Testing, a solution to parallelize the execution of a test suite over a distributed cloud infrastructure. The use of a cloud as runtime environment for automated software testing provides a more efficient and effective solution when compared to traditional methods regarding the exploration of diversity and heterogeneity for testing coverage. The objective of this work is evaluate our solution regarding the performance gains achieved with the use of the framework showing that it is possible to improve the software testing process with very little configuration overhead and low costs.

A solution for transmitting and displaying UHD 3D raw videos using lossless compression

This paper describes a software-based approach for transmitting, and displaying ultra high definition (UHD) videos (ex: 4K) in raw format (2D or 3D).The viability of using lossless compression algorithms for transmission, and exhibition of UHD raw videos was investigated. This approach allows the transmission of raw videos for supporting the development of distributed edition tools for UHD videos, and high quality visualization using a lower bandwidth. We conducted performance studies of eight lossless compression algorithms, aiming at analyze the compression ratio for 4K videos, and the latency in video encoding and decoding. Finally, a multi-thread version of the LZ4HC was integrated with the Fogo Player, which is a software-based 4K player developed in a previous work. We obtained a reduction of about 38% in bandwidth requirements, and a decoding latency that allowed the exhibition in real time of 4K videos.

WebMedia XX: Who We Are And What We Have Done In The Last Two Decades

In this paper we analyze the scientific articles published in 18 previous WebMedia editions, from 1995 to 2012, in order to provide a birds eye view over the Brazilian Multimedia Community and to show how the research topics addressed in the WebMedia series of events have evolved over the time. We used Social Network Analysis techniques to identify research groups, clusters and topics on papers presented in the WebMedia events over the last two decades. The results showed that WebMedia has a multidisciplinary nature with a connected component of core authors that is evolving to include an increasing number of new authors every year, showing that the community is still evolving.

VLibras-BOX: Flexible Portuguese-LIBRAS Translation Server Encapsulation for Distributed, Centralized or Hybrid Scenarios

In this paper we present the concept of a VLibras-Box, a building box for distributed sign-language translation infrastructures. A VLibras-Box encapsulates a Portuguese to Brazilian Sign Language translation service and additional components needed to combine multiple VLibras-Boxes in order to assembly a fault-tolerant and scalable translation infrastructure. We present three different application scenarios, hanging from a single VLibras-Box, where the translation endpoint is defined in an static way to multiple translation servers scenarios with dynamic selection and a two-way load balancing strategy to compose public, private and hybrid fault-tolerant distributed translation infrastructures.

QD Framework: Using Dynamic Catalogs to Organize Mirror Servers on Scalable and Resilient Service Meshes

In this paper we conceptualize and define the QD Framework, a generic solution to manage a set of mirror servers, enabling a specific online service to be offered on the web with a better availability and success rate for requests. The framework includes all the components needed to deal with such service: registration, cataloging, monitoring, distribution and access for the end users. For validation, a case study was done with an implementation of the proposed framework to support a large scale service that provides machine translation of digital content in portuguese language to LIBRAS (Brazilian Sign Language).

INFOGRAPHY USAGE IN A SYSTEMATIC MAPPING ABOUT ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS ANALYSIS

The resources and possibilities to reproduce objective information through infography methods are numberless. This article presents interactive infography contributions to represent data as a result of a systematic mapping in the area of online social networks analysis. We tried to evidence how interactive infography resources can synthetize complex information in a simple visual representation.

A Scalable and Fault Tolerant Architecture to Provide Deaf Accessibility as a Service

Deaf people face serious difficulties to access information. The fact is that they communicate naturally through sign languages, whereas, to most of them, the spoken languages are considered only a second language. When designed, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) rarely take into account the barriers that deaf people face. It is common that application developers do not hire sign languages interpreters to provide an accessible version of their app/site to deaf people. Currently, there are tools for automatic translation from sign languages to spoken languages, but, unfortunately, they are not available to third parties. To reduce these problems, it would be interesting if any automatic translation tool/service could be publicly available. This is the main goal of this work: use a preconceived machine translation from Portuguese Language to Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) (named VLIBRAS) and provide Deaf Accessibility as a Service (DAaaS) publicly. The idea is to abstract inherent problems in the translation process between the Portuguese Language and LIBRAS by providing a service that performs the automatic translation of multimedia content to LIBRAS. VLIBRAS was primarily deployed as a centralized system, and this conventional architecture has some disadvantages when compared to distributed architectures. In this paper we propose two distributed architectures in order to provide a scalable service and achieve fault tolerance. For conception and availability of this service, it will be used the cloud computing paradigm to incorporate the following additional benefits: transparency, high availability, and efficient use of resources.