Taxonomic classification has always been important to the study of any biological system. Many biological species will go unclassified and become lost forever at the current rate of classification. The current state of computer technology makes image storage and retrieval possible on a global level. As a result, computer-aided taxonomy is now possible. Content based image retrieval techniques utilize visual features of the image for classification. By utilizing image content and computer technology, the gap between taxonomic classification and species destruction is shrinking. This content based study utilizes the Fourier Descriptors of fifteen known landmark features on three Carpiodes species: C.carpio, C.velifer, and C.cyprinus. Classification analysis involves both unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms. Fourier Descriptors of the fifteen known landmarks provide for strong classification power on image data. Feature reduction analysis indicates feature reduction is possible. This proves useful for increasing generalization power of classification.

Com o crescente aumento no número de imagens geradas em mídias digitais surgiu a necessidade do desenvolvimento de novas técnicas de recuperação desses dados. Um critério de busca que pode ser utilizado na recuperação das imagens é o da dissimilaridade, no qual o usuário deseja recuperar as imagens semelhantes à uma imagem de consulta. Para a realização das consultas são empregados vetores de características extraídos das imagens e funções de distância para medir a dissimilaridade entre pares desses vetores. Infelizmente, a busca por conteúdo de imagens em consultas simples tende a gerar resultados que não correspondem ao interesse do usuário misturados aos resultados significativos encontrados, pois em geral há uma descontinuidade semântica entre as características extraídas automaticamente e a subjetividade da interpretação humana. Com o intuito de tratar esse problema, diversos métodos foram propostos para a diminuição da descontinuidade semântica. O foco principal desta tese é o desenvolvimento de métodos escaláveis para a redução da descontinuidade semântica em sistemas recuperação de imagens por conteúdo em tempo real. Nesta sentido, são apresentados: a formalização de consultas por similaridade que permitem a utilização de múltiplos centros de consulta em espaços métricos como base para métodos de realimentação de relevância; um método exato para otimização dessas consultas nesses espaços; e um modelo para tratamento da diversidade em consultas por similaridade e heurísticas para sua otimização / The increasing number of images captured in digital media fostered the developmet of new methods for the recovery of these images. Dissimilarity is a criteria that can be used for image retrieval, where the results are images that are similar to a given reference. The queries are based on feature vectors automatically extracted from the images and on distance functions to measure the dissimilarity between pair of vectors. Unfortunately, the search for images in simple queries may result in images that do not fulfill the user interest together with meaningful images, due to the semantic gap between the image features and to the subjectivity of the human interpretation. This problem leaded to the development of many methods to deal with the semantic gap. The focus of this thesis is the development of scalable methods aiming the semantic gap reduction in real time for content-based image retrieval systems. For this purpose, we present the formal definition of similarity queries based on multiple query centers in metric spaces to be used in relevance feedback methods, an exact method to optimize these queries and a model to deal with diversity in nearest neighbor queries including heuristics for its optimization

Os mapas conceituais (MCs) são úteis para representar o conhecimento dos alunos e promover a aprendizagem significativa. A análise detalhada de mapas conceituais pode revelar informações latentes que não são percebidas a partir da mera leitura do seu conjunto de proposições. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo propor a análise de vizinhança (AViz) como uma forma inovadora de analisar os MCs obtidos em sala de aula. A seleção de um conceito obrigatório (CO) permite verificar como os alunos o relaciona com outros conceitos, que são denominados conceitos vizinhos (CVs). MCs (n=69) sobre as mudanças climáticas formam o primeiro conjunto de dados empíricos que ratifica o potencial da AViz. O CO selecionado foi dispersão, a fim de analisar se os alunos conseguem relacioná-lo com o caráter global desse problema ambiental. Os padrões identificados a partir da AViz sugerem que, apesar de serem submetidos a uma mesma sequência didática, nem todos os alunos conseguiram utilizar o CO de forma adequada. Isso pode ser explicado a partir da Teoria da Aprendizagem Significativa de David Ausubel, que destaca o papel fundamental dos conhecimentos prévios no processo de assimilação de novas informações. / Concept maps (CMs) are useful to represent students\' knowledge and to promote meaningful learning. The deep analysis of concept maps may reveal latent information that is not perceived from the simple reading of its propositional network. This work proposes the Neighborhood Analysis (NeAn) as an innovative way to analyze the CMs obtained in classrooms. The selection of a compulsory concept (CC) allows teachers to evaluate how the students relate it to other concepts, named neighbors (NCs). CMs (n=69) on climate change are the first set of empirical data that confirms the potential of NeAn. Dispersion was selected as CC in order to check whether students can relate it with the global perspective of this environmental problem. The patterns found from the NeAn suggest that, despite being exposed to the same didactic activities, some students could not use the CC properly. This may be explained from David Ausubel\'s learning theory, which stresses the critical role of prior knowledge in the assimilation process of new information.

A crescente disponibilidade de dados em diferentes domínios tem motivado o desenvolvimento de técnicas para descoberta de conhecimento em grandes volumes de dados complexos. Trabalhos recentes mostram que a busca em dados complexos é um campo de pesquisa importante, já que muitas tarefas de mineração de dados, como classificação, detecção de agrupamentos e descoberta de motifs, dependem de algoritmos de busca ao vizinho mais próximo. Para resolver o problema da busca dos vizinhos mais próximos em domínios complexos muitas abordagens determinísticas têm sido propostas com o objetivo de reduzir os efeitos da maldição da alta dimensionalidade. Por outro lado, algoritmos probabilísticos têm sido pouco explorados. Técnicas recentes relaxam a precisão dos resultados a fim de reduzir o custo computacional da busca. Além disso, em problemas de grande escala, uma solução aproximada com uma análise teórica sólida mostra-se mais adequada que uma solução exata com um modelo teórico fraco. Por outro lado, apesar de muitas soluções exatas e aproximadas de busca e mineração terem sido propostas, o modelo de programação em CPU impõe restrições de desempenho para esses tipos de solução. Uma abordagem para melhorar o tempo de execução de técnicas de recuperação e mineração de dados em várias ordens de magnitude é empregar arquiteturas emergentes de programação paralela, como a arquitetura CUDA. Neste contexto, este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para buscas kNN de alto desempenho baseada numa técnica de hashing e implementações paralelas em CUDA. A técnica proposta é baseada no esquema LSH, ou seja, usa-se projeções em subespac¸os. O LSH é uma solução aproximada e tem a vantagem de permitir consultas de custo sublinear para dados em altas dimensões. Usando implementações massivamente paralelas melhora-se tarefas de mineração de dados. Especificamente, foram desenvolvidos soluções de alto desempenho para algoritmos de descoberta de motifs baseados em implementações paralelas de consultas kNN. As implementações massivamente paralelas em CUDA permitem executar estudos experimentais sobre grandes conjuntos de dados reais e sintéticos. A avaliação de desempenho realizada neste trabalho usando GeForce GTX470 GPU resultou em um aumento de desempenho de até 7 vezes, em média sobre o estado da arte em buscas por similaridade e descoberta de motifs / The increasing availability of data in diverse domains has created a necessity to develop techniques and methods to discover knowledge from huge volumes of complex data, motivating many research works in databases, data mining and information retrieval communities. Recent studies have suggested that searching in complex data is an interesting research field because many data mining tasks such as classification, clustering and motif discovery depend on nearest neighbor search algorithms. Thus, many deterministic approaches have been proposed to solve the nearest neighbor search problem in complex domains, aiming to reduce the effects of the well-known curse of dimensionality. On the other hand, probabilistic algorithms have been slightly explored. Recently, new techniques aim to reduce the computational cost relaxing the quality of the query results. Moreover, in large-scale problems, an approximate solution with a solid theoretical analysis seems to be more appropriate than an exact solution with a weak theoretical model. On the other hand, even though several exact and approximate solutions have been proposed, single CPU architectures impose limits on performance to deliver these kinds of solution. An approach to improve the runtime of data mining and information retrieval techniques by an order-of-magnitude is to employ emerging many-core architectures such as CUDA-enabled GPUs. In this work we present a massively parallel kNN query algorithm based on hashing and CUDA implementation. Our method, based on the LSH scheme, is an approximate method which queries high-dimensional datasets with sub-linear computational time. By using the massively parallel implementation we improve data mining tasks, specifically we create solutions for (soft) realtime time series motif discovery. Experimental studies on large real and synthetic datasets were carried out thanks to the highly CUDA parallel implementation. Our performance evaluation on GeForce GTX 470 GPU resulted in average runtime speedups of up to 7x on the state-of-art of similarity search and motif discovery solutions

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:30:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andrea de Menezes Martini.pdf: 2906105 bytes, checksum: 3057cd442318096ddd3562973f718036 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-04-27 / This study is based on the research of both Philosophy and Civil Procedural Rights. It is known that the greater principle of rights lies on either intuition or awareness of Love and respect to our neighbor. And because of this, the principle of mankind s Dignity for its rights in every Nation is of great importance these days. The State should provide social structure in order to have a full development of the person s dignity whereas Judiciary, as social institution, is responsible to defend people s liberties through equal opportunities on a civil process with easy procedures and simplified methods which suit the needs of those who have got the rights, and does justice to the proper result of an efficient jurisdictional tutelage. The present study is based on the bibliographic, analytical and hermeneutical research to prove that Brazilian State s neglect towards its people has made the full development of their Dignity difficult and also the major role of justice before mankind and its dignity once nobody has got complete knowledge of their own rights. Therefore, there is a compelling need of a civil education about everyone s rights and information on institutions in order to break down the barriers which separate people from their civil defenders / Este estudo situa-se na pesquisa da Filosofia e do Direito Processual Civil. Partiu-se da idéia de que o princípio maior do Direito reside na intuição ou na consciência de Respeito e de Amor ao Próximo. Por isso, hoje é grande a importância do princípio da Dignidade da Pessoa Humana para o Direito de diversas Nações. O Estado deve fornecer estrutura social para que haja o pleno desenvolvimento da Dignidade da Pessoa Humana, enquanto cabe ao Poder Judiciário, como instituição social, defender a liberdade individual de cada pessoa com igualdade de oportunidades iniciais através de um Processo Civil com formas fáceis e métodos simplificados que atendam o calor das necessidades daquele que possui o direito e faz jus ao resultado adequado da tutela jurisdicional sem demora. O presente estudo parte da pesquisa bibliográfica, analítica e hermenêutica com a intenção de demonstrar que o descaso do Estado Brasileiro com o seu povo tem dificultado o desenvolvimento pleno da Dignidade da Pessoa Humana e dificultado também o trabalho principal da justiça frente à Pessoa Humana e sua Dignidade. Conclui-se, inicialmente, que não são todos que possuem conhecimentos acerca dos seus direitos e por isso surge a necessidade de uma educação civil acerca dos direitos de cada um e as informações acerca das instituições para que se eliminem as barreiras que separam o povo dos seus defensores civis

Dans le cadre des systèmes de transport intelligents (STI), les véhicules peuvent avoir beaucoup de capteurs (caméras, lidars, radars, etc.) et d’applications (évitement des collisions, surveillance du trafic, etc.) générant des données. Ils représentent alors une source d’information importante. Les applications locales peuvent augmenter considérablement leur efficacité en partageant une telle information au sein du réseau. La précision des données, la confiance et la pertinence peuvent être vérifiées lors de la réception de données provenant d’autres nœuds. Par conséquent, nous croyons qu’une question importante à répondre dans ce contexte est: “Comment partager efficacement les données dans un tel environnement?” Le partage de données est une tâche complexe dans les réseaux dynamiques. De nombreuses problèmes telles que les connexions intermittentes, la variation de la densité du réseau et la congestion du médium de communication se posent. Une approche habituelle pour gérer ces problèmes est basée sur des processus périodiques. En effet, un message envoyé plusieurs fois peut atteindre sa destination même avec des connexions intermittentes et des réseaux à faible densité. Néanmoins, dans les réseaux à haute densité, ils peuvent entraîner une congestion du médium de communication. Dans cette thèse, nous abordons le problème du partage de données dans des réseaux dynamiques en nous appuyant sur des horizons de pertinence. Un horizon est défini comme une zone dans laquelle une information devrait être reçue. Nous commençons par nous concentrer sur le partage de données au sein des voisins directs (à 1 saut de distance). Ensuite, nous proposons une solution pour construire une carte des voisins, centrée sur le nœud ego, dans un horizon à n sauts. Enfin, nous relâchons la définition de l’horizon pour la définir de façon dynamique, où différents éléments de données peuvent atteindre des distances différentes (sauts). En ce qui concerne la solution pour les horizons à 1 saut, notre technique adaptative prend en compte la dynamique des nœuds et la charge du réseau. Afin d’assurer une diffusion efficace des données dans différents scénarios, la fréquence d’envoi des messages est définie en fonction des mouvements des véhicules et d’une estimation du taux de perte du réseau. Après, nous nous concentrons sur la carte des voisins jusqu’à n sauts de distance. Comme la communication avec des nœuds éloignés apporte des problèmes supplémentaires (actions de transfert, retards plus importants, informations périmées), une évaluation de confiance des nœuds identifiés et une estimation de fiabilité du chemin vers chaque voisin sont ajoutées à la carte. Au lieu d’exécuter des processus de diffusion séparés, notre troisième contribution porte sur une stratégie de coopération dont l’objectif principal est de diffuser des données tout en satisfaisant la plupart des nœuds. À cette fin, une trame unique est transmise de nœud en nœud. Sa charge utile est mise à jour localement afin qu’elle contienne les éléments de données les plus pertinents en fonction de certains critères (par exemple, urgence, pertinence). Une telle stratégie définit ainsi un horizon centré sur les données. Nous validons nos propositions au moyen d’émulations de réseaux réalistes. De toutes nos études et des résultats obtenus, nous pouvons affirmer que notre approche apporte des perspectives intéressantes pour le partage de données dans des réseaux dynamiques comme les VANET. / In the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems - ITS, vehicles may have a lot of sensors (e.g. cameras, lidars, radars) and applications (collision avoidance, traffic monitoring, etc.) generating data. They represent then an important source of information. Local applications can significantly increase their effectiveness by sharing such an information within the network. Data accuracy, confidence and pertinence can be verified when receiving data from other nodes. Therefore, we believe that an important question to answer in this context is: “How to efficiently share data within such an environment?” Data sharing is a complex task in dynamic networks. Many concerns like intermittent connections, network density variation and communication spectrum congestion arise. A usual approach to handle these problems is based on periodic processes. Indeed, a message sent many times can reach its destination even with intermittent connections and low density networks. Nevertheless, within high density networks, they may lead to communication spectrum scarcity. In this thesis we address the problem of data sharing in dynamic networks by relying in so-called horizons of pertinence. A horizon is defined as an area within which an information is expected to be received. We start focusing on data sharing within direct neighbors (at 1-hop of distance). Then we propose a solution to construct a map of neighbors, centered in the ego-node, within a horizon of n-hops. Finally, we relax the horizon definition to a dynamic defined one where different data items may reach different distances (hops). Regarding the solution for 1-hop horizons, our adaptive technique takes into account nodes’ dynamics and network load. In order to ensure an effective data dissemination in different scenarios, the sending messages frequency is defined according to vehicles movements and an estimation of the network loss rate. Following, we focus on the map of neighbors up to n-hops of distance. As communicationwith distant nodes brings additional concerns (forwarding actions, larger delays, out-of-date information), a trust evaluation of identified nodes and a reliability estimation of the multi-hop path to each neighbor is added to the map. Instead of running separated disseminating processes, our third contribution deals with a cooperative strategy with the main goal of disseminating data while satisfying most of the nodes. For this purpose a unique frame is forwarded from node to node. Its payload is locally updated so that it contains the most relevant data items according to some criteria (e.g. urgency, relevance). Such a strategy defines thus a data-centered horizon. We validate our proposals by means of realistic network emulations. From all our studies and achieved results we can state that our approach brings interesting insights for data sharing in dynamic networks like VANETs.

Este trabalho apresenta uma investigação pioneira dos encadeamentos que conduziram a formação da coleção de arte brasileira do Museu de Arte Moderna de Nova York (MoMA), buscando desvendar os fatores que levaram peças nacionais a serem incorporadas ao acervo da proeminente instituição americana, partindo da primeira aquisição em 1939 e mapeando todos os ingressos ao longo dos anos 1940. O objetivo central do estudo é compreender os processos históricos que direcionaram a aquisição e permitiram a recepção das obras por parte da instituição no período investigado, bem como os fatores que permitiram que ela divulgasse a arte brasileira no contexto cultural americano no decênio de 1940. / This study presents a pioneering effort to set out the formation processes of the Museum of Modern Art in Ney York (MoMA) Brazilian art collection, revealing the sequence of events that lead artworks from Brazil to be acquired by this institution from 1939 to 1949. Its aim is to understand the historical scenarios that allowed these artworks to be received by the museum in the delimited time, as well as to comprehend the reasons that propelled MoMA to promote Brazilian art in the 1940s. The investigation work was based on correspondence of key people in this process Nelson Rockefeller, Alfred H. Barr Jr., Lincoln Kirstein and Cândido Portinari as well as on documents produced by the MoMA; the results of this research opens new possibilities of understanding the relations between Brazil and the United States, in the fields of art, culture and politics.

"Many current and future medical devices are wearable, using the human body as a conduit for wireless communication, which implies that human body serves as a crucial part of the transmission medium in body area networks (BANs). Implantable medical devices such as Pacemaker and Cardiac Defibrillators are designed to provide patients with timely monitoring and treatment. Endoscopy capsules, pH Monitors and blood pressure sensors are used as clinical diagnostic tools to detect physiological abnormalities and replace traditional wired medical devices. Body-mounted sensors need to be investigated for use in providing a ubiquitous monitoring environment. In order to better design these medical devices, it is important to understand the propagation characteristics of channels for in-body and on- body wireless communication in BANs. The IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group 6 is officially working on the standardization of Body Area Network, including the channel modeling and communication protocol design. This thesis is focused on the propagation characteristics of human body movements. Specifically, standing, walking and jogging motions are measured, evaluated and analyzed using an empirical approach. Using a network analyzer, probabilistic models are derived for the communication links in the medical implant communication service band (MICS), the industrial scientific medical band (ISM) and the ultra- wideband (UWB) band. Statistical distributions of the received signal strength and second order statistics are presented to evaluate the link quality and outage performance for on-body to on- body communications at different antenna separations. The Normal distribution, Gamma distribution, Rayleigh distribution, Weibull distribution, Nakagami-m distribution, and Lognormal distribution are considered as potential models to describe the observed variation of received signal strength. Doppler spread in the frequency domain and coherence time in the time domain from temporal variations is analyzed to characterize the stability of the channels induced by human body movements. The shape of the Doppler spread spectrum is also investigated to describe the relationship of the power and frequency in the frequency domain. All these channel characteristics could be used in the design of communication protocols in BANs, as well as providing features to classify different human body activities. Realistic data extracted from built-in sensors in smart devices were used to assist in modeling and classification of human body movements along with the RF sensors. Variance, energy and frequency domain entropy of the data collected from accelerometer and orientation sensors are pre- processed as features to be used in machine learning algorithms. Activity classifiers with Backpropagation Network, Probabilistic Neural Network, k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm and Support Vector Machine are discussed and evaluated as means to discriminate human body motions. The detection accuracy can be improved with both RF and inertial sensors."

With the advent of computers and the information age, vast amounts of data generated in a great deal of science and industry fields require the statisticians to explore further. In particular, statistical and computational problems in biology and medicine have created a new field of bioinformatics, which is attracting more and more statisticians, computer scientists, and biologists. Several procedures have been developed for tracing the source of fecal pollution in water resources based on certain characteristics of certain microorganisms. Use of this collection of techniques has been termed microbial source tracking (MST). Most of the current methods for MST are based on patterns of either phenotypic or genotypic variation in indicator organisms. Studies also suggested that patterns of genotypic variation might be more reliable due to their less association with environmental factors than those of phenotypic variation. Among the genotypic methods for source tracking, fingerprinting via rep-PCR is most common. Thus, identifying the specific pollution sources in contaminated waters based on rep-PCR fingerprinting techniques, viewed as a classification problem, has become an increasingly popular research topic in bioinformatics. In the project, several statistical methods for classification were studied, including linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, logistic regression, and $k$-nearest-neighbor rules, neural networks and support vector machine. This project report summaries each of these methods and relevant statistical theory. In addition, an application of these methods to a particular set of MST data is presented and comparisons are made.

Purpose – The purpose of the study is to expand the knowledge of how wheel motor currents can be combined with machine learning to be used in a collision detection system for autonomous robots, in order to decrease the number of external sensors and open new design opportunities and lowering production costs. Method – The study is conducted with design science research where two artefacts are developed in a cooperation with Globe Tools Group. The artefacts are evaluated in how they categorize data given by an autonomous robot in the two categories collision and non-collision. The artefacts are then tested by generated data to analyse their ability to categorize. Findings – Both artefacts showed a 100 % accuracy in detecting the collisions in the given data by the autonomous robot. In the second part of the experiment the artefacts show that they have different decision boundaries in how they categorize the data, which will make them useful in different applications. Implications – The study contributes to an expanding knowledge in how machine learning and wheel motor currents can be used in a collision detection system. The results can lead to lowering production costs and opening new design opportunities. Limitations – The data used in the study is gathered by an autonomous robot which only did frontal collisions on an artificial lawn. Keywords – Machine learning, K-Nearest Neighbour, Multilayer Perceptron, collision detection, autonomous robots, Collison detection based on current. / Syfte – Studiens syfte är att utöka kunskapen om hur hjulmotorstömmar kan kombineras med maskininlärning för att användas vid kollisionsdetektion hos autonoma robotar, detta för att kunna minska antalet krävda externa sensorer hos dessa robotar och på så sätt öppna upp design möjligheter samt minska produktionskostnader Metod – Studien genomfördes med design science research där två artefakter utvecklades i samarbete med Globe Tools Group. Artefakterna utvärderades sedan i hur de kategoriserade kollisioner utifrån en given datamängd som genererades från en autonom gräsklippare. Studiens experiment introducerade sedan in data som inte ingick i samma datamängd för att se hur metoderna kategoriserade detta. Resultat – Artefakterna klarade med 100% noggrannhet att detektera kollisioner i den giva datamängden som genererades. Dock har de två olika artefakterna olika beslutsregioner i hur de kategoriserar datamängderna till kollision samt icke-kollisioner, vilket kan ge dom olika användningsområden Implikationer – Examensarbetet bidrar till en ökad kunskap om hur maskininlärning och hjulmotorströmmar kan användas i ett kollisionsdetekteringssystem. Studiens resultat kan bidra till minskade kostnader i produktion samt nya design möjligheter Begränsningar – Datamängden som användes i studien samlades endast in av en autonom gräsklippare som gjorde frontalkrockar med underlaget konstgräs. Nyckelord – Maskininlärning, K-nearest neighbor, Multi-layer perceptron, kollisionsdetektion, autonoma robotar