Guido Lemos de Souza Filho

Ginga-J: The procedural middleware for the Brazilian digital TV system

The recent development of the research on digital terrestrial television in Brazil has led the country.s government to state a series of premises in which the government shows to care not only for technology improvement, but also to use this development as a tool for ameliorating the Brazilian social context, in what concerns digital inclusion. These premises and necessities have generated some peculiarities in the development process, which directly influenced in the functionalities granted by the Brazilian.s middleware choice. This paper, thus, seeks to explain all the architecture of the Java part — called Ginga-J — of the Ginga middleware, highlighting the new features, especially when confronting the Brazilian middleware with the other middlewares worldwide defined.

Versioning Support in the HyperProp System

This paper discusses version control for hypermedia models with composite nodes that allow distinct representations of the same information segment to be treated as versions. Several problems arise from the possibility of a node being contained in different nested compositions, as well as being presented (edited) with different representations. The paper discusses these issues, relating partial solutions proposed in several hypermedia models and presenting the proposal defined in the Nested Context Model of the HyperProp system.

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.

OddCI: on-demand distributed computing infrastructure

The availability of large quantities of processors is a crucial enabler of many-task computing. Voluntary computing systems have proven that it is possible to build computing platforms with millions of nodes to support the execution of embarrassingly parallel applications. These systems, however, lack the flexibility of more traditional grid infrastructures. On the other hand, flexible infrastructures currently available can gather only dozens of thousands nodes. We propose a novel architecture for generic Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) that can be instantiated on demand to be, at the same time, flexible and highly-scalable. Bringing the scalability from voluntary computing, the flexibility from grid computing and the elasticity from cloud computing in a single arrangement, our proposal allows for fast setup, fast initialization and fast dismantle of customized DCI supported by both dedicated and shared underlying infrastructures. Our approach leverages broadcast communication as an efficient mechanism to enable aggregation of geographically distributed computing resources, including millions of non-traditional processing devices such as PDA, mobile phones and Digital TV receivers, using both opportunistic and non-opportunistic models. We show the feasibility of the proposed architecture by implementing it atop a digital television system. We also assess the performance of such system and show that it can be used to execute several classes of many-tasks computing applications with very high efficiency, substantially decreasing their response time.

A 3 TV: anytime, anywhere and by anyone TV

The cultural paradigm we experience today is absolutely different from that one where television and all its formats were created: Internet and all its functionalities have improved communication and the broadcast services nowadays are, also, not the same as they were. Television has found its way of neo-omnipresence -- not only by its now old standards, but using the global network to reach every single worldwide untouched spot. Parallel to all this, what was predicted by almost two decades ago has come finally true: collaboration and collectivity are the new recognizable patterns of the World Wide Web ethics. These patterns, these ways, have received the alias of Web 2.0, and represent, now, what is the newest among Internet subjectivity standards. This paper, therefore, seeks to demonstrate the likely changes unleashed by the mixing of these technologic formats with TV. The proposed application, called A3TV (formerly known as RNPTV), developed under Brazilian National Research Network (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa -- RNP) supervision, aims to scale the TV experience, by bringing its content anytime (delivering it in a service integrated with video-on-demand), accessible from anywhere (different platforms and with viewers globally spread) and made by anyone (being able to be managed by users on an Internet community).

A Multi-stream Tool to Support Transmission in Surgery Applied to Telemedicine

The increasing network bandwidth capacity and the diminishing costs of related services have led to a rising number of applications in the field of Information and Communication Technology. A special case is applications based on video streaming. Telemedicine can be highlighted in some scenarios for applying this technology, such as clinical sessions, second medical opinion, interactive lessons or virtual conferences. These scenarios often imply a dedicated transmission environment. A restriction in such solutions is the inability to handle multiple video streams. Thus, this paper presents a low-cost infrastructure for video collaboration in healthcare and based on open technologies. The proposed infrastructure enables remote management of simultaneous multiple streams. We also discuss results of experiments held in the Lauro Wanderley Academic Hospital, Brazil. One of the results is the contribution for teaching experiences, particularly by allowing students to remotely regard surgical procedures and providing real-time interaction. Finally, we present new prospects for using the developed technology on other applications in Telemedicine and Telepresence.

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.

Automatic generation of Brazilian sign language windows for digital TV systems

Deaf people have serious difficulties accessing information. The support for sign language (their primary means of communication) is rarely addressed in information and communication technologies. Furthermore, there is a lack of works related to machine translation for sign language in real-time and open-domain scenarios, such as TV. To minimize these problems, in this paper, we propose an architecture for machine translation to Brazilian sign language (LIBRAS) and its integration, implementation and evaluation for digital TV systems, a real-time and open-domain scenario. The system, called LibrasTV, allows the LIBRAS windows to be generated and displayed automatically from a closed caption input stream in Brazilian Portuguese. LibrasTV also uses some strategies, such as low time consuming, text-to-gloss machine translation and LIBRAS dictionaries to minimize the computational resources needed to generate the LIBRAS windows in real-time. As a case study, we implemented a prototype of LibrasTV for the Brazilian digital TV system and performed some tests with Brazilian deaf users to evaluate it. Our preliminary evaluation indicated that the proposal is efficient, as long as its delays and bandwidth are low. In addition, as previously mentioned in the literature, avatar-based approaches are not the first choice for the majority of deaf users, who prefer human translation. However, when human interpreters are not available, our proposal is presented as a practical and feasible alternative to fill this gap.

A Model-driven Approach for Integration of Interactive Applications and Web Services: A Case Study in Interactive Digital TV Platform

This work proposed a model-driven development approach related to interactive multimedia applications and Web services integration. It is based on extension of an existing modeling language, which integrates modeling concepts for interactive applications and adds support for Web Services. Three Interactive Digital TV applications were modeled and developed. As we show, the evaluation of the approach brought benefits not supported by related works, like requirements structuring and reducing amount of work needed to finalize the code generated.