Fernando Ribeiro

Timely and Keyword-Based Dynamic Content Selection for Public Displays

In public display systems determine what to present and when is a central feature. Although several adaptive scheduling alternatives have been explored, which introduce sensibility of the display to some type of external variable, they are still very dependent on the user in their behavior, content specific in their nature and very rigid in their adaptation to their social environment, not providing visitors of the place with appropriate, rich and personalized information according to their interests and expectations. There is a need for solutions that successfully integrate the wealth of dynamic web sources as providers for situated and updated content with social and contextual environment around the display so as to present the most appropriate content at every moment, and thus improving the utility of the system. In this paper, we present a recommender system for public situated displays that is able to autonomously select relevant content from Internet sources using a keyword-based place model as input. Based on external relevance criteria the system finds and pre-selects only those sources that are more relevant, and an adaptive scheduling algorithm continuously select content that are relevant, timely, in accordance with the place model, sensitive to immediate indications of interest and balanced to serve the broad range of interests of the target population. To evaluate this system we have carried out two partial experiments. The results showed that keyword-based shared place models jointly with content specific relevance models are a simple and valid approach to user-generated content for public displays.

Autonomous and Context-Aware Scheduling for Public Displays Using Place-Based Tag Clouds

Public displays are an increasingly ubiquitous element of our sociodigital landscape with a strong potential to become key building blocks for AmI. For that purpose, they should have the ability to dynamically and autonomously select content from web sources according to the relevance of their content to the continuous flow of social settings around the display. In this paper, we explore the creation of a public display system that evaluates the relevance of content from web sources and selects the most relevant content according to a dynamic tag cloud that incorporates static place definitions, but is also sensitive to the people around the display. We have developed and evaluate a dynamic content selection system based on those principles. The results show that place visitors recognize the sensitivity of the system to their demands and that a place tag cloud can provide an important element for the interpretation of place and for the combination of the interests expressed by the place owner and the multiple place visitors.

Place-Aware Content Selection from Dynamic Web Sources for Public Displays

Public digital displays could greatly benefit from the ability to dynamically select from the Internet content items that would be strongly related with the place where each display is installed. Generically, this is similar to the type of problem addressed by recommender systems. However, the usage context of a public display raises specific challenges that may limit the applicability of existing recommender systems. In this paper, we explore the creation of a recommender system for public situated displays that is able to autonomously select relevant content from Internet sources using keywords as input. This type of recommender system should enable public displays to become devices for Internet information delivery in public spaces, while also making them more situated in the social settings in which they are installed. We have created a recommender system based on these principles and we have conducted two studies to evaluate the perceived performance of the system. The results have shown that keywords can be very effective in driving user-generated content, but they often need to be complemented with contextual information that disambiguates their semantics.

A low cost cell calibration technique and its PC based control software

In this study, a technique is presented to measure the absolute position of a robot and any other strategic positions within the workcell, and also its specially built control software. One of the most important factors affecting the absolute or world accuracy of robots is the variation in arm geometry from a perfect kinematics form. Since arm position is essentially controlled by means of joint angles, Cartesian co-ordinates of the tool centre point are derived from the forward kinematics transform equations assuming a perfect kinematics form. Any deviation from this perfect case will result in world positional errors and hence, for effective off-line programming it is important to calibrate the real robot hardware against the virtual model used by the robot simulation computer systems. This paper reports on work carried out in developing such a low cost calibration technique, its PC based control software and performance monitoring systems.

Hand gesture recognition system based in computer vision and machine learning

Hand gesture recognition is a natural way of human computer interaction and an area of very active research in computer vision and machine learning. This is an area with many different possible applications, giving users a simpler and more natural way to communicate with robots/systems interfaces, without the need for extra devices. So, the primary goal of gesture recognition research applied to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is to create systems, which can identify specific human gestures and use them to convey information or controlling devices. For that, vision-based hand gesture interfaces require fast and extremely robust hand detection, and gesture recognition in real time. This paper presents a solution, generic enough, with the help of machine learning algorithms, allowing its application in a wide range of human-computer interfaces, for real-time gesture recognition. Experiments carried out showed that the system was able to achieve an accuracy of 99.4 % in terms of hand posture recognition and an average accuracy of 93.72 % in terms of dynamic gesture recognition. To validate the proposed framework, two applications were implemented. The first one is a real-time system able to help a robotic soccer referee judge a game in real time. The prototype combines a vision-based hand gesture recognition system with a formal language definition, the Referee CommLang, into what is called the Referee Command Language Interface System (ReCLIS). The second one is a real-time system able to interpret the Portuguese Sign Language. Sign languages are not standard and universal and the grammars differ from country to country. Although the implemented prototype was only trained to recognize the vowels, it is easily extended to recognize the rest of the alphabet, being a solid foundation for the development of any vision-based sign language recognition user interface system.

Effects of the ESD protections in the behavior of a 2.4 GHz RF transceiver: Problems and solutions

This paper identifies the main problems related to the electrostatic discharge (ESD) in submicron CMOS processes. The mitigation of this problem is made with the use of protections, in order to avoid the destruction of the internal and input/output circuits connected to the bondingpads. In the 2.4 GHz ISM band, the parallel capacitance and the serial resistance of the ESD protections have effects in the behavior of RF transceivers. The major identified effect was the transmission range. It is proposed two strategies to solve the secondary effects, due to the protections. All the measurements and simulations were made for a 2.4 GHz RF CMOS transceiver, designed and fabricated using the UMC 0.18 mum RF CMOS process.

Robot orientation with histograms on MSL

One of the most important tasks on robot soccer is localization. The team robots should self-localize on the 18 × 12 meters soccer field. Since a few years ago the soccer field has increased and the corner posts were removed and that increased the localization task complexity. One important aspect to take care for a proper localization is to find out the robot orientation. This paper proposes a new technique to calculate the robot orientation. The proposed method consists of using a histogram of white-green transitions (to detect the lines on the field) to know the robot orientation. This technique does not take much computational time and proves to be very reliable.

Interacting and Making Personalized Recommendations of Places of Interest to Tourists

Nowadays, applications that are developed to support tourists should go much further than simply providing information about places or recommending places or routes based on the user location. They should be able to provide users with simple mechanisms to interact with places of interest and provide them with relevant information and recommendations about new relevant places of interest or tours according to their preferences and the preferences of other tourists with similar interests. In this work we describe a system that explores information about tourists’ interactions with places of interest and their opinions about each place, to recommend new places of interest, pedestrian tours and to promote products and services which are in accordance with their expectations. First experiments show that the system can help the tourists to interact with places of interest, helping them in their visits and also to promote shops and services.

Software development for medication administration record in clinics and small nursing homes — A case study

This paper presents a development process of an application to nursing homes, in order to support the nursing team, in particular electronic register medication delivery. For this is established the design of the process of functional prototype following the steps of software development. The project ends with a testing phase that according to the results obtained by satisfaction surveys, the use of this application in the institutions was considered an advantage in supporting the nursing work by providing an improved quality of the institution and organizational processes. This work was developed entirely within some disciplines of a higher education program, resulting in a practical application for health entities from knowledge and work within the academic route. Article give emphasis to the various technical aspects related to the developed application.

A Mobile Application to Provide Personalized Information for Mobility Impaired Tourists

Mobile applications that are developed to assist disabled people in their tourist activities should go much further than simply providing information about points of interest or recommending places or routes based on the user location. Due the specific needs of each person in this group, they should be able to provide them with information about the most suitable points of interest and recommend them with the most suitable places to visit which should be contextualized according to their specific needs and interests. This work describes a proposal for a personalized system to assist mobility disabled people in their tourist activities. The system considers the accessibility features of each tourism service, or product, and the users’ preferences and disabilities and explores information about their interactions and opinions about each place, to recommend points of interest, routes and services that best suit their specific needs and interests.