Priscilla Avegliano

A crowdsourcing platform for the construction of accessibility maps

We present in this article a crowdsourcing platform that enables the collaborative creation of accessibility maps. The platform provides means for integration of different kind of data, collected automatically or with user intervention, to augment standard maps with accessibility information. The article shows the architecture of the platform, dedicating special attention to the smartphone applications we developed for data collection. The article also describes a preliminar experiment conducted on field, showing how the analysis of data produced by our solution can bring novel insights in accessibility challenges that can be found in cities.

Taxonomy of Citizen Sensing for Intelligent Urban Infrastructures

Citizen sensing is a new sensor-based data collection paradigm and is focused on the extraction of data generated by people. Initiatives based on this concept are becoming crucial for designers of intelligent urban infrastructures, since they enable the collection of several types of relevant data that cannot be properly captured by traditional physical sensors. A large number of articles and projects associated with the topic appeared over the last few years, and with them the need for properly classifying and organizing these works. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of citizen sensing initiatives and illustrate each of its dimensions through a survey of recent articles in the area. The proposed scheme also supports the identification and stimulates the development of projects addressing data collection methodologies that have not been properly explored so far. In addition, we present a platform capable of aggregating, analyzing, and extracting knowledge from data generated by physical and human sensing techniques. Finally, we report a real-world experiment in which we used our platform to map accessibility conditions of streets and sidewalks located in a four square kilometer area in São Paulo, Brazil. Our results show that a full coverage was obtained with the support of eight volunteers after only three hours, hence illustrating the effectiveness of the technology.

Dynamic Adjustment of Subtitles Using Audio Fingerprints

Anyone who ever downloaded subtitle files from the Internet has faced problems synchronizing them with the associated media files. Even with the efforts of communities on reviewing user-contributed subtitles and with mechanisms in movie players to automate the discovery of subtitles for a given media, users still face lip synchronization issues. In this work we conduct a study on several subtitle files associated with popular movies and TV series and analyze their differences. Based on that, we propose a two-phase subtitle synchronization method that annotates subtitles with audio fingerprints, which serve as synchronization anchors to the media player. Preliminary results obtained with our prototype suggest that our technique is effective and has minimal impact on the extension of subtitle formats and on media playback performance.

Smarter board: a community-oriented communication tool

In this demo we present the Smarter Board, a platform designed to facilitate the creation of a community-focused social network, with a special focus on groups of people with disabilities. The communication is based on text messages, which makes the system easy to use and more accessible to communities where network connections are not well-developed and where the people do not have much experience with more advanced technological tools. The solution also provides a manage interface, through which administrators are able to mediate the messages and the users. We also implemented a matching procedure for the identification of related posts (e.g., it can check if there are compatible car ride offers and car ride requests) in order to make users aware of what is being posted and, even more important, adopt the technology.

Marker-assisted recognition of dynamic content in public spaces

In this work we present an image processing-based assistant for helping visually impaired citizens with the task of recognizing dynamic content within fixed layouts of displays in public spaces. Our solution relies on the placement of markers, in order to facilitate the location and recognition of target objects and, at the same time, provide hints to users about how to better position their mobile devices cameras to capture the whole information contained in the display.

Marker-based image recognition of dynamic content for the visually impaired

The access to information displayed in public spaces is a challenge faced by visually impaired people for which image processing techniques have the potential to deliver satisfactory solutions. However, object recognition algorithms must initially locate possible candidates in the images, which is a hard task in complex scenes. In this article, we introduce an image processing technique that relies on the incorporation of markers to panels and boards with fixed layouts displaying dynamic content. The markers allow: a) locating the objects to be recognized; b) correcting perspective in the input images; c) limiting the training set size for supervised learning; and d) guiding the visually impaired by indicating how they should position their devices for adequate pictures. The proposed technique can be used for automatic recognition of texts and images and is suitable for deployment on mobile devices, providing more independence to the citizens. Results of preliminary tests on vending machines show that this method is robust enough to be used in practice.

Theoretical Aspects of the Integrated Route Planning Problem

Abstract In this article, we introduce the Integrated Route Planning Problem (IRPP) , which deals with the assignment of touristic itineraries, composed of activities characterized by their capacity and opening time, to visitors that may have variable time availabilities and different levels of preference for the activities. We show that the IRPP is challenging from the computational point of view, present a mathematical programming formulation of the problem and discuss aspects of a solution method based on the column generation technique. We also show how some tools of probabilistic planning and agent-based modeling may be used to address important aspects of the problem.