A identificação de focos de transmissão pode ser de grande utilidade no controle da malária. Por esse motivo, hospitais em regiões endêmicas buscam saber os locais que foram visitados anteriormente por pacientes. No entanto, tais informações, obtidas através de questionários fornecidos aos pacientes, são geralmente vagas e muitas vezes imprecisas. Isto torna o processo manual, lento e de pouca valia em estudos epidemiológicos de larga escala. Baseando-se no fato de que uma parcela significativa da população possui celulares com GPS, o objetivo deste projeto é melhorar a acurácia, organização e dinâmica do processo de coleta de dados de geolocalização de pacientes infectados. Um sistema (https://sipos.fcf.usp.br) foi desenvolvido para que pacientes que chegam aos hospitais possam, sob consentimento voluntário, fornecer os dados de GPS dos seus celulares. Os dados dos usuários, que são tratados de forma anônima, são automaticamente processados e armazenados de forma segura. Através do sistema SiPoS Explorer, epidemiologistas e especialistas em saúde pública podem explorar e analisar os dados de geolocalização, permitindo, desta forma, que regiões vulneráveis sejam priorizadas durante campanhas de controle. / The identification of regions with high rates of infection can be of great use in the control of malaria. For this reason, hospitals in endemic regions seek to know the places previously visited by patients. However, such information, obtained through questionnaires provided to patients, is usually vague, inaccurate and not integrated into databases. This makes the process manual, slow and of little value in large-scale epidemiological studies. Based on the fact that a significant portion of the population has smartphones equipped with GPS, this project aims to improve the accuracy and organization of the process of collecting geolocation data from infected patients. The Sickness Positioning System (https://sipos.fcf.usp.br) was developed so that patients who arrive at hospitals can, with voluntary consent, provide the GPS data collected by their smartphones. User data, which is handled anonymously, is automatically processed and securely stored. Through the SiPoS Explorer system (https://sipos.fcf.usp.br/explorer), epidemiologists and public health experts can explore and analyze geolocation data, thereby allowing vulnerable regions to be prioritized during control campaigns.

Mobile Attendance Application is a cross platform mobile application where students can mark attendance from their smartphones. This application takes multiple parameters into consideration to determine if the student is physically present in the class or not. i.e. the GPS location, Coyote login ID. This application also has the functionality to generate the attendance sheets in excel format to the instructor. The application is aimed to save class time at no extra cost of purchasing any special peripheral devices. User authentication is one of the important factors in this proposed system. Every student is authenticated based on his/her unique user identification number. If a student does not have access to a mobile device or if the device battery is dead, then he/she can indicate to the instructor who can mark the attendance in the instructor’s smartphone.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: indoor geolocation; indoor positioning; wireless networks. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-145).

Thesis (M.S.) -- Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Performance Evaluation; RSS-based fingerprinting algorithm; Testbed; Indoor Geolocation; Indoor Positioning. Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-76).

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: indoor radio propagation; time of arrival estimation; indoor geolocation; super-resolution algorithms. Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-110).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Ranging Error, Ranging, Positioning, Indoor Geolocation, Distance Measurement Error. Includes bibliographical references (p.168-171).

Thesis (M.S.F.S.) / Positive identification of skeletonized human remains is a difficult task when dental records and/or DNA are unavailable. Through archaeological research, strontium (Sr) isotope analysis has successfully been used to trace an individual back to their place of birth using cortical bone and tooth enamel. This method has the potential, in forensic anthropological science, to help narrow down the search for missing persons to a specific geographical location. It has not been tested thoroughly on modern populations though, which is needed before applying in a forensic setting. This study used dental enamel from teeth of 78 individuals in the New England region of the United States (U.S.). The birthplaces represented by these individuals include New England and the greater Northeast of the U.S., Northwest region of the U.S., Central America, Caribbean Islands, West Africa, and Europe. Local faunal and water samples were also collected for local range comparisons. The samples were cleaned, approximately 10 mg of enamel removed from each tooth, acid washed, dried, and dissolved in nitric acid before analyzing the samples using a thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS) for analysis of 87Sr/86Sr ratios. The human 87Sr/86Sr ratios were grouped by geographical region. An analysis of variance was used to test for regional variation and significant differences were found. The samples from the U.S. (excluding those from the Northwest) were significantly different from the samples in Central America, Caribbean Islands, West Africa, and Europe. Central American samples were also significantly different from the other groups. No significant differences were observed between the Caribbean Islands, West Africa and Europe. A significant difference was seen between the strontium ratios in the West Africa group based on bottled water vs. tap water that individuals reported drinking. The faunal samples from Pembroke, MA and water sample from Braintree, MA were not significantly different from the New England human samples, but the Brighton, MA water sample was significantly different. Based on the data, regional differences in 87Sr/86Sr ratios are detectable using strontium isotope analysis, yet a larger sample size for each of the regions is needed to strengthen the statistical results. The results suggest that the differences observed are due to a combination of geological effects and influences from the globalization of food. Further research is warranted by combining the analysis of hydrogen (δ2H) and oxygen (δ18O) isotopes to the strontium analysis. This will complement the strontium data by providing more insight to the local drinking water and potential effects of an increasingly homogenous diet within cultural regions.

Mobile devices with wireless networking capabilities are used in a wide range of environments. Geolocation information increases the value of the data generated by a device and is vital in the development of a wide range of applications from autonomous vehicles to the Internet of things. Systems that generate signals specifically for geolocation have become widely adopted but, due to fundamental constraints, lack coverage and accuracy in complex urban and indoor environments. In addition to this, the reliance on a single signal source is not desirable in many applications that value the integrity of the geolocation estimate. A direction of research aiming to improve geolocation in indoor and urban environments measures signals of opportunity in order to generate a more robust estimate. While this approach improves signal availability, the unpredictable nature of these variable and uncontrolled signals leads to poor geolocation estimates, which are typically not suitable for use in many applications. This project aims to improve on the accuracy, resilience and integrity of a geolocation estimate obtained from signal of opportunity measurements in indoor and urban environments while reducing hardware requirements. This has been achieved by efficiently coupling signals of opportunity within the radio environment with other system signals, such as those from an inertial measurement unit. Research has been carried out to optimise the coupling of these data sources resulting in techniques to allow the identification and removal of key error drivers from both the radio environment and other system sensors. This thesis proposes a specifically designed extended Kalman filter to improve on the signal coupling. The filter aims to optimise the accuracy of radio environment measurements while also providing the ability to identify signal error sources in urban and indoor environments, leading to both greater accuracy and resilience of the geo-location estimate. Further, the proposed extended Kalman filter may use the radio environment as a source of geolocation data. The ability of the filter to recognise and mitigate leading radio environment error sources such as multipath and interference allowed the design of filters to obtain detailed and accurate signal strength and time of arrival information. The thesis also presents a thorough set of simulation and modelling experiments to investigate and optimise the efficiency of the proposed solutions in a range of environments. Validation testing confirmed that in the urban and indoor environments, the average error of geo-location estimates has been reduced from 10 m to 3 m without improvement to the hardware surrounding infrastructure. The improvements presented in this thesis allow networked devices to improve the value of their data by incorporating the context that comes from increased geolocation accuracy and resilience. In turn, this allows the development of a wide range of new location based applications for mobile devises in indoor and urban environments.

Title: Framework for geolocation-based Android applications using Linked Data Author: Bc. Matej Snoha The aim of this thesis is to design and implement a framework for geolo- cation based mobile applications using Linked Data. Introduced are Linked Data technologies in the context of mobile application develop- ment, data modeling, and geographical queries. This work follows the software development lifecycle from requirement gathering, software analysis, design of the application framework and its individual compo- nents, up to the implementation of required functionality and subsequent deployment and evaluation of the functional application framework. The resulting implementation of the framework consists of a mobile applica- tion that displays nearby places from Linked Data datasets on a map and a cloud service with a repository of required definitions. It serves to demonstrate functionality of the theoretical part of the work in real-life scenarios.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:54:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo1953_1.pdf: 1722836 bytes, checksum: 2be769931d2befdf5a296cf78a205f34 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Baseado, por exemplo, na localização geográfica de um determinado host na Internet, podese oferecer serviços especializados, como: a) páginas web com preferências regionais (e.g. usuários online podem receber propagandas direcionadas ou ter a linguagem para apresentação de conteúdo selecionada automaticamente); b) controle de disponibilidade de dados, de acordo com a localização do usuário (e.g. pode-se restringir o acesso a determinados dados através de políticas regionais e autorização de transações a partir de localidades pré-estabelecidas), c) estudo e análise de tráfego geolocalizado para entender quem se comunica com quem no nível de usuários, regiões e países e identificação de anomalias de roteamento. Os aspectos comuns destas aplicações são a sua dependência em relação a estratégias, denominadas geolocalização. Contudo, alguns destes mecanismos apresentam uma baixa acurácia ou uma estimativa de localização geográfica não-aceitável para determinadas aplicações. Portanto, torna-se de grande importância estudos que melhorem a precisão, bem como a completude das estratégias utilizadas para inferir a geolocalização de hosts na Internet. Este trabalho tem como principais objetivos o estudo sobre as estratégias de geolocalização existentes; a proposta de uma estratégia que melhore a precisão das inferências de localização geográfica de hosts na Internet e a completude dos resultados; e o estudo de tráfego geolocalizado de uma base de dados da rede acadêmica do Estado de Pernambuco. A estratégia desenvolvida, denominada WBG (Whois Based Geolocation), é baseada em buscas whois online e possui uma heurística baseada na ferramenta traceroute