Mário Rodrigues

An Integrated Service Solution for Digital Discount Coupons Processing

This paper describes a digital coupons management system that aims to dematerialize the couponing process since its origin (the Issuer) to its final state (the Consumer), passing by the Retailer of the product, and allowing to reduce costs, prevent frauds, improve the procedural efficiency and get knowledge about patterns of usage of coupons by consumer profiles. The system provides quality control of dematerialized coupons and Consumers mobile access, allowing the connection and integration with the information systems of Issuers and Retailers, which makes it an innovative system with a high degree of portability of its components.

A robot with natural interaction capabilities

This paper describes the architecture and current capabilities of Carl, a prototype of an intelligent service robot, designed having in mind such tasks as serving food in a reception or acting as a host in an organization. The approach that has been followed in the design of Carl is based on an explicit concern with the integration of the major dimensions of intelligence, namely communication, action, reasoning and learning. The paper focuses on the multi-modal human-robot communication capabilities of Carl, since these have been significantly improved during the last year.

An Interactive Book Authoring Tool to Introduce Programming Logic in Schools.

In the past years, there was a growing interest in teaching computational thinking in elementary and high school institutions. Although the idea is spread and well accepted among academics, it has been rarely put in practice in the classrooms. Currently, when a programming-related activity is offered, with some few exceptions, it is usually presented as an extra-curricular (optional) activity. However, it does not need to be disassociated from the common school curriculum. The present work is based on the idea that programming logic can be used transversally with different subjects, such as history, geography, science, literacy, mathematics, among others. The authors envisage to accomplish this goal by enabling programming as a supporting tool for teachers and students, allowing them to create digital interactive books. The tool, named piBook, has its main focus in the production of interactive storytelling using non-linear narratives. Besides, it is also possible to create textual games (such as role-playing games), interactive activities (such as quizzes), tutorials, chatbots and similar applications.

Towards a Proposal of an Application to Promote Volunteering through Television to Help Older Adults.

This article seeks to present a proposal of a project that aims to develop a television (TV) application that allows older adults to ask for support from a group of volunteers in specific tasks, using voice to carry out some tasks. To this end, a review was made to identify projects that have been addressing TV and voice interfaces in the context of systems and services directed to older adults. The review also focused on initiatives that use digital technologies to support volunteering targeting older adults. In addition, a questionnaire was applied to a group of people considered to be among the groups of stakeholders of the abovementioned application. The results of the review show that, even with several improvements in the last years in voice interaction area, it is not yet generally considered in TV applications and there seem to be few applications that are focused on foster volunteering targeting older adults. Furthermore, the data obtained by the questionnaire reveal the existence of a set of factors that do not allow a generalized acceptance of the use of a TV application to ask for help from a group of volunteers, despite being recognized by diverse groups of stakeholders that this type of applications is important.

Describing and comparing Big Data querying tools

In the past years, Big Data has become a hot topic across several business areas. One of the main concerns regarding this concept is how to handle the massive volume and variety of data efficiently. Due to the notorious complexity of the data associated to the Big Data concept, usually motivated by data volume, efficient querying analysis mechanisms are mandatory for data analysis purposes. Motivated by the rapidly development of tools and frameworks for Big Data, there is much discussion about querying tools and, specifically, those more appropriated for specific analytical needs. This paper explores some of the available querying tools, describing and comparing their main characteristics and architectures, crucial knowledge for selecting the more appropriate ones for inclusion in a specific Big Data analytical architecture.

piBook: Introducing Computational Thinking to Diversified Audiences

Information and communication technologies are reshaping the way we live and work. The expectation is that computational thinking will be a pervasive skill in (near-) future professions of ours’ increasingly digitized and responsive economies. Although this idea is spread and well accepted, acquiring such skills often implies attending specialized courses. However, the basic concepts of computational thinking do not need to be a specialized skill learned disassociated from other school curricula. As it is more related with mental tools used in the process of reflecting and solving problems it can be learned by being applied to a large variety of topics.

Offroad tracks: A web mapping application proposal for track sharing and query

Every year hundreds of touristic off-road initiatives are organized, in which participants automatically record the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of the track using handheld devices. Among other are registered the vehicle position, speed, and altitude. This data allows inferring relevant information such as the difficulty of the road and the recommended speed for a variety of scenarios. For instance, during fire-fighting, fire and civil protection can verify if these paths are useful and appropriate for their vehicle, thus improving response time. This article discusses the design of an open source web mapping application that features track sharing and uses those tracks to generate value for other activities. The article explains how the application selects and sorts paths composed by TTT tracks and normal roads, using diverse features to assist the decision making process of institutions such as Fire Department corporations. The current interface of the application is presented and includes a dynamic map and a landmark manager.

Data Gathering, Preparation and Enrichment

This chapter presents the domain independent part of the general architecture of Information Extraction (IE) systems. This first part aims at preparing documents by the application of several Natural Language processing tasks that enrich the documents with morphological and syntactic information. This is made in successive processing steps which start by making contents uniform, and end by identifying the roles of the words and how they are arranged.

Extracting Relevant Information Using a Given Semantic

This chapter presents an example of software architecture, developed by the authors, for performing Ontology Based Information Extraction (OBIE) using an arbitrary ontology. The goal of the architecture is to allow the deployment of applications for arbitrary domains without need of system reprogramming. For that, human operator(s) define the semantics of the application and provide some examples of ontology concepts in target texts; then the system learns how to extract information according to the defined ontology.

Identifying Things, Relations, and Semantizing Data

This chapter concludes the presentation of the generic pipelined architecture of Information Extraction (IE) systems, by presenting its domain dependent part.