Jacques Duílio Brancher

Strategies to reconstruct 3D Coffea arabica L. plant structure

Accurate model of structural elements is necessary to model the foliage and fruit distributions in cultivated plants, both of them being key parameters for yield prediction. However, the level of details in architectural data collection could vary, simplifying the data collection when plants get older and because of the high time cost required. In the present study, we aimed at reconstructing and analyzing plant structure, berry distributions and yield in Coffea arabica (Arabica coffee), by using both detailed or partial morphological information and probabilistic functions. Different datasets of coffee plant architectures were available with different levels of detail depending on the tree age. Three scales of decomposition—plant, axes and metamers were used reconstruct the plant architectures. CoffePlant3D, a software which integrates a series of mathematical, computational and statistical methods organized in three newly developed modules, AmostraCafe3D, VirtualCafe3D and Cafe3D, was developed to accurately reconstruct coffee plants in 3D, whatever the level of details available. The number of metamers of the 2nd order axes was shown to be linearly proportional to that of the orthotropic trunk, and the number of berries per metamer was modeled as a Gaussian function within a specific zone along the plagiotropic axes. This ratio of metamer emission rhythm between the orthotropic trunk and plagiotropic axes represents the pillar of botanical events in the C. arabica development and was central in our modeling approach, especially to reconstruct missing data. The methodology proposed for reconstructing coffee plants under the CoffePlant3D was satisfactorily validated across dataset available and could be performed for any other Arabica coffee variety.

A survey about the impact of support areas in Brazilian software companies

In the last fifteen years, Brazilian companies software developers promoted mainly through government initiatives, the improvement in their processes through the implementation of software quality models. This contributed to the increase of national companies certified in MPS.Br SW, CMMI and other models. However, some problems persist in the creation and maintenance of software process in these companies. Through a survey of certified companies, this article presents an overview of these companies, their production processes and areas that support these processes. The main conclusion is that problems that occur in adjacent areas generate impacts on software projects enterprises.

Interactive Data Structure Learning Platform

The advent in technology in the past few years allowed an improvement in the educational area, as the increasing in the development of educational system. One of the techniques that emerged in this lapse is called Gamification, defined as the utilization of video game mechanics outside its bounds. Researchers in this area found positive results in the application of these concepts in several areas from marketing to education. In education, there are researches that covers from elementary to higher education, with many variations to adequate to the educators methodologies. Among higher education, focusing on IT courses, Data Structures can be considered an important subject to be taught, as they are base for many systems. Based on the exposed this paper describes the development and implementation of an interactive web learning environment, called DSLEP (Data Structure Learning Platform), to support students in higher education IT courses. The system includes basic concepts taught on this discipline as stacks, queues, lists, arrays, trees and was implemented to receive new ones. The system is also implemented with gamification concepts, as points, levels, and leader boards, to motivate students in the learning process and stimulate self-learning.

A Web System for Solving Real Problems Involving Partial Differential Equations in Generalized Coordinates

Numerical simulations based on partial differential equations are applied to different knowledge areas. There was a motivation for the use of computational tools to perform real and numerical simulations, however many of these are restricted to a software installation and limiting processing, mainly in mobile devices. The aim of this study was to develop a web system which is able to solve real problems involving partial differential equations in 2D generalized coordinates, by the finite difference discretization. The system consists of web service for client-server communication, a database, a module of processing calculation (back-end) and a graphical user interface (front-end). The system can be executed on devices regardless their performance, such as personal computers and mobile devices, since the calculations are made on a remote server. The contribution is the availability of a web architecture for including other types of differential equations and consequently, for real problems and situations, such as energy conduction and pollutant transportation.

InterpolMateS1- The module for interpolation of growth and production of yerba-mate

Yerba-mate (Ilex paraguariensis St. Hil.) is a subtropical, evergreen, dioecious, South-American tree, and an economically important species, whose leaves and twigs are extensively used as a primary material in the preparation of diverse beverages. Its architecture is defined by Rauhs model, which comprises the rhythmic growth, and consequently, the existence of growth units. The aims of this study were to define the mathematical functions for growth unit formation related to various morphological parameters, to interpolate the 3D reconstructions for two-year period and to calculate the leaf/fine twig production of males and females cultivated in two contrasting environments (monoculture - and forest understory). For this purpose, InterpolMateS1, one deterministic and empirical model, has been developed. It interpolates the structural reconstructions of plants in 3D based on several known growth stages, and estimates the plant production for beverage industry. Various morphological characters were defined to parameterize the InterpolMateS1: metamer number, individual leaf size, main axes elongation, leaf number increase per axes, total leaf area, leaf shed per axes and branching. The VPlants and PlantGLViewer software were used for plant codifying and 3D reconstruction, while the modules of InterpolMateS1 were written in NetBeans IDE (Java). The cubic splines functions fitted correctly with the observed values of morphological characters during four growth flushes in two-year continuum. The out-put of useful biomass production in InterpolMateS1 was related to mock-up leaf area, fine branch volume and various forest productive parameters (i.e., specific leaf area, specific wood mass). The next steps in development of this forestry/agronomy useful software consider the coupling of yerba-mate mock-ups with carbon gain and storage on plant and landscape scale for two environments - monoculture and forest understory.

Sarasvati: Diagnostic method for software process improvement

The growing demand for software brings companies in this sector the need to constantly improve their processes. However, not all companies obtained the expected return from Process Improvement, and one of the causes of this problem is the diagnosis that precedes the implementations of reference models. This article presents the Sarasvati method of diagnosis, whose objective is to provide information for the selection of the model / level of maturity that best meets the objectives of the company. A tool was created to get company data and turn them into a map that shows your situation. Finally, this map is compared to the maps of the reference models to show the improvement that each one can provide to the company. The method was evaluated in two ways: in the first stage, the methodology was evaluated by four experts in the subject. Then, the method was applied in a set of companies. The result of the evaluation was considered satisfactory, concluding that there are indications that the method is a viable option to support companies in the diagnosis for Process Improvement projects.

GamAPI - Uma API para Gamificação

A Gamificacao baseia-se na insercao elementos de jogo em um ambiente fora do seu escopo, com o objetivo de melhorar o engajamento e comprometimento de um individuo para a realizacao de uma tarefa. Para alcancar tal objetivo, a Gamificacao trabalha com conceitos como: premiacoes; medalhas ou emblemas; progressao e um sistema de ranking. O objetivo deste trabalho e a criacao de uma API que proporcione uma opcao para implementar os conceitos e os mecanismos de gerenciamento de Gamificacao, sem a necessidade de se ter uma estrutura propria e que conduza o aluno a uma experiencia prazerosa na educacao. Os resultados obtidos apontaram que, a API auxiliou no aumento da motivacao dos alunos e os conduziu a este estado de imersao, contribuindo para o processo educacional.

SSIE: An Automatic Data Extractor for Sports Management in Athletics Modality

Sports management concerns the organization of sport results and modalities information and statistical analysis by professionals. However, these information scattered around the web or organized by sport events which difficult the prospection of sport talents and the textual information are unstructured or semi-structured. This work proposes a Summary Sport Information Extraction System (SSIE) to generate a summary of statistics of the athletics modality by the automatic information extraction of documents retrieved from web. These documents are converted in textual information and classified using Naive Bayes learning method, according to sport type. After the documents retrieval and classification, text segmentation/tokenization, corpus annotation and entity/subset recognition by chunking were used to generate data frames in parse trees structure. The parse trees information are stored in a database, from which was possible to summary projection and big data analyzing over the web. The main contribution of this work was the clustering of huge amount of data spread on the web, useful for sports management.

Client-server architecture for pre and post-processing of real problems involving two-dimensional generalized coordinates

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to propose a Web environment for pre-processing and post-processing for 2D problems in generalized coordinate systems. Design/methodology/approach – The system consists of a Web service for client-server communication, a database for user information, simulation requests and results storage, a module of (for) calculation processing (front-end) and a graphical interface for visualization of discretized mesh (back-end). Findings – The Web system was able to model real problems and situations, where the user can describe the problem or upload a geometry file descriptor, generated from computer graphics software. The Web system, programmed for finite difference solutions, was able to generate a mesh from other complex methods, such as finite elements method, adapting it to the proposed Web system, respecting the finite difference mesh structure. Research limitations/implications – The proposed Web system is limited to solve partial differential equations by finite difference...

Utilizing gamification with social network to aid students in programming languages lessons in higher education IT courses (abstract only)

Programming Languages and its uses play a vital role in IT higher education courses, because it is necessary that students have a good understanding in order to become full fledged developers. We made a study to verify the initial reception of this method regarding the students satisfaction and so, this meta-paper proposes the continuation of this research. It involves the utilization of a Social Network and gamification concepts, like badges, points, levels and leader boards to improve students participation.