Este trabalho propõe um Ambiente de Programação de Robôs Móveis direcionado especialmente à língua portuguesa, que consiste em um novo ambiente de programação gráfica e textual, capaz de atender a perfis diferenciados de usuários. O ambiente de programação contém três módulos para programação de robôs móveis: o modulo C ou editor C, o módulo Assembly ou editor Assembly, e o módulo blocos que é um módulo que contêm blocos de programação para auxiliar os programadores inexperientes a programarem robôs móveis por meio de uma meta linguagem desenvolvida que encapsula a linguagem C. O diferencial deste trabalho consiste na Gramática adaptativa criada para robôs móveis, que é uma derivação das gramáticas descendentes recursivas com um mecanismo de busca (\"look ahead\"). A derivação encontra-se na definição formal de gramática que foi adaptada nessa proposta para permitir a categorização de terminais da gramática, adicionando um passo a mais na compilação, que é a checagem de categorias permitidas da linguagem. Nesta dissertação são relacionados alguns ambientes de programação de robôs disponíveis na literatura bem como uma discussão de suas características. Também são apresentados experimentos realizados com usuários não especializados em programação, principalmente crianças, e com o Laboratório de Robótica a Distância da Universidade de São Paulo em São Carlos, São Paulo / This work proposes a Mobile Robot Programming Environment focused in the Portuguese language, which is able to attend different user categories and where the user can work textually and graphically. The programming environment contains three different modules: the C module, or C editor; the Assembly module, or Assembly editor; and the block module, which contains programming blocks that can help novice programmers to develop software for mobile robots using a meta-language that encapsulates the C language. The major contribution of this work consists of the proposition of a novel adaptive grammar, specially developed to mobile robots, which is a derivation of recursive descendent grammars, containing a look ahead module. The derivation is found in the formal definition of the grammar, adapted to allow the specification of grammar terminals, adding one more compilation step, which is the check of language permitted categories. The document presents some robot programming environments found in literature and discusses their characteristics. The results show experiments performed with non-specialized users, mostly children, and with the Remote Robotics Laboratory of the University of São Paulo, in São Carlos, São Paulo state, Brazil

Este trabalho propõe um Ambiente de Programação de Robôs Móveis direcionado especialmente à língua portuguesa, que consiste em um novo ambiente de programação gráfica e textual, capaz de atender a perfis diferenciados de usuários. O ambiente de programação contém três módulos para programação de robôs móveis: o modulo C ou editor C, o módulo Assembly ou editor Assembly, e o módulo blocos que é um módulo que contêm blocos de programação para auxiliar os programadores inexperientes a programarem robôs móveis por meio de uma meta linguagem desenvolvida que encapsula a linguagem C. O diferencial deste trabalho consiste na Gramática adaptativa criada para robôs móveis, que é uma derivação das gramáticas descendentes recursivas com um mecanismo de busca (\"look ahead\"). A derivação encontra-se na definição formal de gramática que foi adaptada nessa proposta para permitir a categorização de terminais da gramática, adicionando um passo a mais na compilação, que é a checagem de categorias permitidas da linguagem. Nesta dissertação são relacionados alguns ambientes de programação de robôs disponíveis na literatura bem como uma discussão de suas características. Também são apresentados experimentos realizados com usuários não especializados em programação, principalmente crianças, e com o Laboratório de Robótica a Distância da Universidade de São Paulo em São Carlos, São Paulo / This work proposes a Mobile Robot Programming Environment focused in the Portuguese language, which is able to attend different user categories and where the user can work textually and graphically. The programming environment contains three different modules: the C module, or C editor; the Assembly module, or Assembly editor; and the block module, which contains programming blocks that can help novice programmers to develop software for mobile robots using a meta-language that encapsulates the C language. The major contribution of this work consists of the proposition of a novel adaptive grammar, specially developed to mobile robots, which is a derivation of recursive descendent grammars, containing a look ahead module. The derivation is found in the formal definition of the grammar, adapted to allow the specification of grammar terminals, adding one more compilation step, which is the check of language permitted categories. The document presents some robot programming environments found in literature and discusses their characteristics. The results show experiments performed with non-specialized users, mostly children, and with the Remote Robotics Laboratory of the University of São Paulo, in São Carlos, São Paulo state, Brazil

Students with upper body motor impairments, such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, ALS, etc., face challenges when learning to program in block-based programming environments, because these environments are highly dependent on the physical manipulation of a mouse or keyboard to drag and drop elements on the screen. In my dissertation, I make the block-based programming environment Blockly, accessible to students with upper body motor impairment by adding speech as an alternative form of input. This voice-enabled version of Blockly will reduce the need for the use of a mouse or keyboard, making it more accessible to students with upper body motor impairments. The voice-enabled Blockly system consists of the original Blockly application, a speech recognition API, predefined voice commands, and a custom function. Three user studies have been conducted, a preliminary study, a usability study, and an A/B test. These studies revealed a lot of information, such as the need for simpler, shorter, and more intuitive commands, the need to change the target audience, the shortcomings of speech recognition systems, etc. The feedback received from each study influenced design decisions at different phases. The findings also gave me insight into the direction I would like to go in the future. This work was started and finished in 2 years.

Grades Computacionais (grid computing) já é uma realidade tanto no meio acadêmico quanto no meio empresarial. Seu uso se tornou popular principalmente devido à divulgação dos trabalhos nesta área e pela propaganda de produtos e softwares que oferecem essa idéia. Apesar disso, ambientes para o desenvolvimento de aplicações orientadas a objetos em Java para uma infra-estrutura de grid ainda é escasso. Algumas iniciativas oferecem bibliotecas para este desenvolvimento. Outras utilizam paradigmas diferentes, como o de passagem de mensagem, para o desenvolvimento de aplicações. Além disso, a própria infra-estrutura de grid, formada por diferentes domínios administrativos com diferentes políticas de segurança e uso, impede que as aplicações sejam executadas nos diversos níveis existentes no grid. Estes níveis, formados por computadores e clusters de computadores com nós de execução, possuem endereçamento privado, impossibilitando que as aplicações alocadas em cada um desses computadores/nós, em diferentes domínios e diferentes endereços, se comuniquem de forma transparente. Visando uma solução para esses problemas, esta tese apresenta um ambiente para programação orientada a objetos distribuídos e paralelos, em Java, denominado J4GE. Nesse ambiente, o modelo orientado a objetos é base para a distribuição das classes, métodos e atributos existente em uma aplicação. Além disso, o ambiente oferece transparência no acesso aos objetos espalhados pelo grid através de um Serviço de Mensagem, independente do nível onde o recurso, computador ou nó, se encontra. Essa transparência permite também que o programador utilize a plataforma Java sem a necessidade de aprender ou conhecer novas bibliotecas ou paradigmas, diminuindo o esforço no desenvolvimento de aplicações para grid. E, juntamente com os recursos da plataforma Java e do ambiente J4GE, é possível criar objetos distribuídos com comportamento paralelo e concorrente, trazendo maior eficiência para a execução da aplicação. / Grid computing is already a reality both in academic and business world. Its use has become popular mainly because of the projects in this area and the advertising of products and software that offer this idea. Nevertheless, environments for development of object-oriented applications in Java for grid infrastructure are still scarce. Some initiatives offer libraries for this development. Others use different paradigms such as the message-passing for development of applications. Moreover, the infrastructure of grid, formed by different administrative domain with different security policies, prevents the execution of applications at various levels in the grid. These levels, formed by computers and clusters of computers with execution nodes, have private addresses, make impossible the transparent communication of the applications allocated in each of these computers at different levels in different domains. Focused on these problems, this thesis presents an environment for distributed and parallel object-oriented programming in Java, called J4GE. In this environment, the object-oriented model is the basis for the distribution of classes, methods and attributes in an existing application. Moreover, the environment offers transparency in objects access around the grid through a Message Service, regardless the level where is the resource, or the computer, or the execution node. This transparency also allows the programmer to use the Java platform without knowing or learning new libraries or paradigms, reducing the effort in developing applications for grid. The resources of the Java platform and the environment J4GE together can create distributed objects with parallel and concurrent behavior, bringing greater efficiency to the application.

Grades Computacionais (grid computing) já é uma realidade tanto no meio acadêmico quanto no meio empresarial. Seu uso se tornou popular principalmente devido à divulgação dos trabalhos nesta área e pela propaganda de produtos e softwares que oferecem essa idéia. Apesar disso, ambientes para o desenvolvimento de aplicações orientadas a objetos em Java para uma infra-estrutura de grid ainda é escasso. Algumas iniciativas oferecem bibliotecas para este desenvolvimento. Outras utilizam paradigmas diferentes, como o de passagem de mensagem, para o desenvolvimento de aplicações. Além disso, a própria infra-estrutura de grid, formada por diferentes domínios administrativos com diferentes políticas de segurança e uso, impede que as aplicações sejam executadas nos diversos níveis existentes no grid. Estes níveis, formados por computadores e clusters de computadores com nós de execução, possuem endereçamento privado, impossibilitando que as aplicações alocadas em cada um desses computadores/nós, em diferentes domínios e diferentes endereços, se comuniquem de forma transparente. Visando uma solução para esses problemas, esta tese apresenta um ambiente para programação orientada a objetos distribuídos e paralelos, em Java, denominado J4GE. Nesse ambiente, o modelo orientado a objetos é base para a distribuição das classes, métodos e atributos existente em uma aplicação. Além disso, o ambiente oferece transparência no acesso aos objetos espalhados pelo grid através de um Serviço de Mensagem, independente do nível onde o recurso, computador ou nó, se encontra. Essa transparência permite também que o programador utilize a plataforma Java sem a necessidade de aprender ou conhecer novas bibliotecas ou paradigmas, diminuindo o esforço no desenvolvimento de aplicações para grid. E, juntamente com os recursos da plataforma Java e do ambiente J4GE, é possível criar objetos distribuídos com comportamento paralelo e concorrente, trazendo maior eficiência para a execução da aplicação. / Grid computing is already a reality both in academic and business world. Its use has become popular mainly because of the projects in this area and the advertising of products and software that offer this idea. Nevertheless, environments for development of object-oriented applications in Java for grid infrastructure are still scarce. Some initiatives offer libraries for this development. Others use different paradigms such as the message-passing for development of applications. Moreover, the infrastructure of grid, formed by different administrative domain with different security policies, prevents the execution of applications at various levels in the grid. These levels, formed by computers and clusters of computers with execution nodes, have private addresses, make impossible the transparent communication of the applications allocated in each of these computers at different levels in different domains. Focused on these problems, this thesis presents an environment for distributed and parallel object-oriented programming in Java, called J4GE. In this environment, the object-oriented model is the basis for the distribution of classes, methods and attributes in an existing application. Moreover, the environment offers transparency in objects access around the grid through a Message Service, regardless the level where is the resource, or the computer, or the execution node. This transparency also allows the programmer to use the Java platform without knowing or learning new libraries or paradigms, reducing the effort in developing applications for grid. The resources of the Java platform and the environment J4GE together can create distributed objects with parallel and concurrent behavior, bringing greater efficiency to the application.

A Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm (WMRA) was designed to aid people with limited or no upper-limb usage to accomplish activities of daily living (ADLs). The primary objective of this research was to enhance the performance of the WMRA by improving the communication protocols and functions between the hardware and software used for its control. Previously, the control algorithm of the robotic arm was tested in simulation and in the physical arm. These implementations required a combination of Matlab and C++ language and introduced some software instability under Windows operating system. To improve the performance of the WMRA, the programs for hardware control were separated from the ones intended for simulation. The control algorithm of the arm was rewritten using C++ language to facilitate the communication with the controller boards and to make the system more stable and reliable. As a result, the communication delays were decreased since the interfaces between different programs is no longer needed. Preliminary tests were performed to demonstrate the stability and reliability of the new control algorithm. The overall response of the control implementation was enhanced and the algorithm routines and optimization procedures achieved the same goals with more efficiency. Accuracy and repeatability tests were performed, and data was collected and analyzed.

Syftet med denna studie är att få mer kunskap om vilka egenskaper lärare anser att en blockprogrammeringsmiljö bör ha för att elever ska utveckla sina generella matematiska kunskaper. I denna studie har vi först gjort en induktiv tematisk analys för att hitta teman och sedan en deduktiv analys med hjälp av TPACK och konstruktivism. Studiens data har samlats via semistrukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer över Zoom och Microsoft Teams. Resultatet baseras på sju intervjuer med behöriga lärare som undervisar i grundskolans årskurs fyra till sex i Sverige. Resultaten visade att lärare använder blockprogrammeringsmiljöer i sin undervisning för att eleverna ska konstruera ny kunskap utifrån redan befintlig kunskap, antingen via tidigare matematiska kunskaper eller tidigare programmeringskunskaper. Blockprogrammeringsmiljöer behöver vara visuellt motiverande för eleverna och gärna ha en tydlig koppling till verkligheten. Dessutom vill flera lärare se att blockprogrammeringsmiljön erbjuder elever möjligheten att arbeta kreativt med variabler och algoritmer. Blockprogrammeringsmiljöer kan utveckla elevers generella matematiska kunskaper genom att beröra innehåll som relaterar till traditionell matematik. / The purpose of this study is to acquire more knowledge of what characteristics teachers find necessary for block programming environments so that students can develop general mathematical knowledge. We used an inductive thematic analysis in this study to find themes followed by a deductive analysis with the help of TPACK and constructivism. The data of the study has been gathered by semi-structured qualitative interviews over Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The findings are based on seven interviews with licenced teachers that teach in primary school year four till six in Sweden. The findings show that teachers use block programming environments in their education so that students can construct new knowledge out of prior knowledge, either by using prior mathematical knowledge or prior knowledge of programming. Block programming environments need to be visually pleasing for pupils and have a clear connection to reality as well. In addition, more teachers are demanding that block programming environments offer the students the possibility to work creatively with variables and algorithms. Block programming environments have the possibility of developing students’ general mathematical knowledge by touching on content that relate to traditional mathematics.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1989 / Town & Country Hotel & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The difficulty of incorporating custom real-time processing into a conventional telemetry system frustrates many design engineers. Custom algorithms such as data compression/conversion, software decommutation, signal processing or sensitive defense related algorithms, are often executed on expensive and time-consuming mainframe computers during post-processing. The cost to implement such algorithms on real-time hardware is greater, because programming for such hardware is usually done in assembly language or microcode, resulting in: * The need for specially trained software specialists * Long and often unpredictable development time * Poor maintainability * Non-portability to new applications or hardware. This paper presents an alternative to host-based, post-processing telemetry systems. The Loral System 500 offers an easy to use, high-level language programming environment that couples real-time performance with fast development time, portability and easy maintenance. Targeted to Weltek's XL-Serles 32 and 64 bit floating point processors, delivering 20 MFLOPS peak performance, the environment transparently integrates the C programming environment with a parallel date-flow telemetry processing architecture. Supporting automatic human interface generation, symbolic high-level debugging and a complete floating point math library the System 500 programming environment extends to parallel execution transparently. It handles process scheduling, memory management and data conversion automatically. Configured to run under UNIX, the system's development environment is powerful and portable. The platform can be migrated to PC's and other hosts, facilitating eventual integration with an array of standard off-the-shelf tools.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1989 / Town & Country Hotel & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The difficulty of incorporating custom real-time processing into a conventional telemetry system frustrates many design engineers. Custom algorithms such as data compression/conversion, software decommutation, signal processing or sensitive defense related algorithms, are often executed on expensive and timeconsuming mainframe computers during post-processing. The cost to implement such algorithms on real-time hardware is greater, because programming for such hardware is usually done in assembly language or microcode, resulting in: The need for specially trained software specialists Long and often unpredictable development time Poor maintainability Non-portability to new applications or hardware This paper presents an alternative to host-based, post-processing telemetry systems. The Loral System 500 offers an easy to use, high-level language programming environment that couples real-time performance with fast development time, portability and easy maintenance. Targeted to Weltek’s XL-Serles 32 and 64 bit floating point processors, delivering 20 MFLOPS peak performance, the environment transparently integrates the C programming environment with a parallel date-flow telemetry processing architecture. Supporting automatic human interface generation, symbolic high-level debugging and a complete floating point math library the System 500 programming environment extends to parallel execution transparently. It handles process scheduling, memory management and data conversion automatically. Configured to run under UNIX, the system’s development environment is powerful and portable. The platform can be migrated to PC’s and other hosts, facilitating eventual integration with an array of standard off-the-shelf tools.

Big data has received a great deal attention from many sectors, including academia, industry and government. The Hadoop framework has emerged for supporting its storage and analysis using the MapReduce programming module. However, this framework is a complex system that has more than 150 parameters and some of them can exert a considerable effect on the performance of a Hadoop job. The optimum tuning of the Hadoop parameters is a difficult task as well as being time consuming. In this thesis, an optimisation approach is presented to improve the performance of a Hadoop framework by setting the values of the Hadoop parameters automatically. Specifically, genetic programming is used to construct a fitness function that represents the interrelations among the Hadoop parameters. Then, a genetic algorithm is employed to search for the optimum or near the optimum values of the Hadoop parameters. A Hadoop cluster is configured on two severe at Brunel University London to evaluate the performance of the proposed optimisation approach. The experimental results show that the performance of a Hadoop MapReduce job for 20 GB on Word Count Application is improved by 69.63% and 30.31% when compared to the default settings and state of the art, respectively. Whilst on Tera sort application, it is improved by 73.39% and 55.93%. For better optimisation, SDN is also employed to improve the performance of a Hadoop job. The experimental results show that the performance of a Hadoop job in SDN network for 50 GB is improved by 32.8% when compared to traditional network. Whilst on Tera sort application, the improvement for 50 GB is on average 38.7%. An effective computing platform is also presented in this thesis to support solar irradiation data analytics. It is built based on RHIPE to provide fast analysis and calculation for solar irradiation datasets. The performance of RHIPE is compared with the R language in terms of accuracy, scalability and speedup. The speed up of RHIPE is evaluated by Gustafson's Law, which is revised to enhance the performance of the parallel computation on intensive irradiation data sets in a cluster computing environment like Hadoop. The performance of the proposed work is evaluated using a Hadoop cluster based on the Microsoft azure cloud and the experimental results show that RHIPE provides considerable improvements over the R language. Finally, an effective routing algorithm based on SDN to improve the performance of a Hadoop job in a large scale cluster in a data centre network is presented. The proposed algorithm is used to improve the performance of a Hadoop job during the shuffle phase by allocating efficient paths for each shuffling flow, according to the network resources demand of each flow as well as their size and number. Furthermore, it is also employed to allocate alternative paths for each shuffling flow in the case of any link crashing or failure. This algorithm is evaluated by two network topologies, namely, fat tree and leaf-spine, built by EstiNet emulator software. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of a Hadoop job in a data centre network.