INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

INES project awarded

INES researcher Herbert Diniz(CIn/UFPE) attended the Smart City Expo World Congress 2015 to represent the project Bike Cidadao and receive the prize of third position on Ceremony awards of Smart City App Hack – Fiware online competetition. The congress was held in Barcelona, Spain, from November 17th to 19th, 2015.

INES at FIE 2015: session chair and two papers

Ricardo Amorim will attend the Frontiers in Education 2015 (FIE 2015) to chair the session entitled “Student engagement II” and to the presentation of the following papers:

“SmartLAK: A Big Data Architecture for Supporting Learning Analytics Services”. Authors: Thomas Rabelo, Manuel Lama, Ricardo Amorim and Juan Carlos Vidal.

“Effectiveness of Practices with Sensors in Engaging in Meaningful Learning in Higher Education: Extending a Framework of Ubiquitous Learning”. Authors: Josilene Brito, Alex Sandro, Ricardo Amorim, Ivanildo Melo and Bruno Monteiro.

The conference will be held in El Paso, Texas, from October 21th to 24th, 2015.

INES, ASSERT & CIn/UFPE researchers at CBSoft 2015

Prof. Vinicius Cardoso Garcia (CIn/UFPE) together with graduate and undergraduate students will attend the Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice (CBSoft 2015), one of the major events held annually by the Brazilian Computer Society.

The congress will take place in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil from the September, 21st to September, 25th of 2015.

This activity is part of the project “Social Machines and Research Team – SMaRT” and is one of the results of the research being done by ASSERT Lab.

Coordinator of HealthDrones project visits research group of Numerical Optimization and Modeling.

Silvana Bocanegra, coordinator of HeathDrones project, will visit the Group of Numerical Optimization and Modeling – GNOM  (https://gnom.upc.edu/) at UPC. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya from 27 July 2015 to 08 August 2015.  The research group maintains projects with the GNOM-UPC since 2011. The goal of this technical visit is to evaluate the use of large scale optimization algorithms and modeling strategies on routing algorithms and on-board computation for the software plataform of drones.

Technical visit to Barcelona Tech and HUVH

Jones Albuquerque, coordinator of DESERT-MAP project, will visit

UPC. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. BarcelonaTech.

Computational Biology Complex Systems Research Group (https://mosimbio.upc.edu).

from 27 July 2015 to 08 August 2015. The research group maintains projects with the UPC since 2011.This visit is to evaluate the possibility of the integration platform designed to desertification risk analysis to combat epidemics in Africa.

Jones will also visit

Vall d’Hebron University Hospital (HUVH): Tropical and International Health Center and Microbiology Department, both integrated in the International Health Project of the Catalan National Health System (PROSICS–http://barcelonaprosics.wordpress.com/).

in the period of 10 to 14 August 2015, to discuss and evaluate the possibility of integrating DESERT-MAP platform with its monitoring systems of endemic and epidemic in Spain.

Project HEALTHDRONES

Researchers acquire 40% of the equipment according to project HEALTHDRONES. The equipment is to improve the simulation infrastructure to test algorithms used to assess the degree of programmability of the software platform developed for UAVs.

The first results

Some autonomous simulation test flight controlled by our “API” in a Parrot Elite model and without GPS or GPRS or any kind of manufacturer facility have been done. They can be found here:

bit.ly/VideosHealthDrones.

Some photos are also available illustrating how we use Arduino to control the UAV. Thus, we became independent of the trading platform.

The next steps

The entire process will be documented in a dissertation to be completed in August 2015 (www.ppgia.ufrpe.br) and subsequently published in a scientific journal in the area.

Another dissertation is underway (first results even in 2015). This tests the degree of programmability platform developed when applied to control outbreaks in populations.

ASSERT Lab & INES & UFPE researches at VEME Workshop

In 9 – 14 August 2015 St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, the ASSERT LAB group will participate of the 20th International Bioinformatics Workshop on Virus Evolution and Molecular Epidemiology (VEME), more information here.

Biomedical data processing is a relatively new and challenging research field. Some of these challenges are addressed for Software Engineering, mostly the ones that handle with big data processing, pattern recognition, alignment and mapping of genetic and molecular information.

With the intention of assist researchers for training in Bioinformatics methods, the International Committee for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) will promote from august 9 to 15 of 2015 the international workshop on Virus Evolution and Molecular Epidemiology (VEME), hosted by The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. The workshop is co-organized by the University of Leuven (Belgium) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (USA).

One of 4-day course offered is  ‘Large Dataset Analysis’  that will cover the more complex analysis of full genomes, huge datasets of pathogens including Next Generation Sequencing data, and combined analyses of pathogen and host. On day 5, the workshop have some half-day courses including ‘Large Phylogenies’, ‘Visualization of Large Phylogenies with Metadata’, ‘Recombination and Networks’ and ‘Virus Analysis Tools’.

Vinicius Cardoso Garcia pretends to attend the VEME 2015 with his Phd student Jackson Raniel Florencio da Silva in order to better understand the Software Engineering applications and practices in bioinformatics field and to start to work together with the Rega Institute research group (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) in order to establish new research trends and partnership in the context of the RegaDB project.

INES at CCNC 2015

Rafael Roballo Wanderley (MSc student) will attend CCNC 2015, in Las Vegas (USA), where he will present the paper “A Web-based platform for Scavenger Hunt Games using the Internet of Things”.

The article is part of the project “Barramento de Serviços para Cidades Inteligentes”.

IndoLoR – Indoor Location Radar

The advent of mobile technologies and the new technological trend of connecting objects to the global computer network, also known as Internet of things, are making ubiquitous computing a reality in many corporate and residential environments. This new scenario is creating new opportunities for applications, in particular for smart environments. An application area that can take advantage of the technological capabilities provided by smart environments are the RTLS – real time location systems. Classic examples are the problem of indoor and outdoor location. Intrinsically, people are already familiar with outdoor applications that usually use location based on GPS (global positioning system) to provide LBS (Location-based services). This application is especially common in cars and on mobile devices. However, the indoor location adds new challenges, depending on a pre-existing infrastructure in the environment and a better location accuracy. In general, contextual information (checking at specific points) and the level of the received communication signal (RSSI – Received Signal Strength Indicated) are analyzed for the location of the target object, which might be a person or an object. Wireless technologies such as WiFi, RFID, Zigbee and Bluetooth are the most frequently used for indoor tracking.

This project aims to develop, integrate and evaluate solutions of hardware, software and networks for automation of enterprise environments that enable the development of applications with high added value of indoor location. The solution called IndoLoR (Indoor Location Radar), integrates several emerging areas such as Internet of Things, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, Cloud Computing, Smart Sensors Network and Context Sensitivity.

HEALTHDRONES – Evaluating drones as a software platform for development of applications for monitoring epidemiological and crowd phenomena

The use of satellite data can be complemented by collected one by devices in flight (unmanned aerial vehicles called here “drones”). This provides a platform of data very close to reality and can be programmable by IOT (Internet Of Things) applications. These data can be used for monitoring environments at risk or under specific control (epidemiological or any crowd phenomena). This project will provide an overview of the software platforms available today for development of algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in autonomous flight to be used in IOT applications. We are primarily interested in their use for epidemiological monitoring of areas under risk, but these platforms can be used to monitor any kind of crowd event. In particular, in this project, images are captured and processed using NOAA and Meteosat 8 Satellites. They are operated by GOESERE-UFRPE (Laboratory of GIS and Remote Sensing of the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco) – http://www.dtr.ufrpe.br/geosere/ – and are used to compose the monitoring scenarios.  Images and other data are also captured and processed by the drones platforms and its sensors. This information will compound automatic surveillance scenarios of the phenomena.

The development of a prototype for Schistosomiasis will provide an evaluation of the platforms used for this project. In this way, as the main outcome, this project will provide an overview of technologies available today, their ability to integrate with legacy systems and their programming capabilities. It is expected to evaluate at least five different air platforms and this project enables the acquisition of such platforms. The importance of this project for the industry takes on the aspect of evaluation of commercial platforms for UAVs to be a possible IDE for software applications in industry.

This project is a coordinate action by researchers from GOESERE-UFRPE, CIN-UFPE, CESAR, LIKA, EPITRACK and ISI-TICs.