Brazil

Conversational user interfaces have been an increasingly popular way to obtain quick information in natural language, especially with advances in the area of natural language processing (NLP) fueled by the surge of deep neural networks. Real-world cases include IBM Watson and Azure Microsoft chatbots, among others. Such examples, however, are most present in the commercial spectrum, with few being actively used by the scientific community. In this work, we develop an Interactive Question Answering System (IQA) for the Sucupira platform, Brazil&#39;s biggest open platform of postgraduate content, deployed as conversational interfaces for two popular messaging platforms: Telegram and Discord. We also propose the use of multilingual embeddings for ordering answers by a language-independent measuer of semantic similarity. Our IQA was evaluated with an study with 16 participants. The results were mostly positive, indicating that the use of conversational user interfaces, along with NLP techniques, may be a valid alternative for retrieving scientific information from the Sucupira plataform.

WebMedia 2020

SucupiraBot: An Interactive Question-Answering System from Sucupira Platform Data

interactive question-answer

embedding

chatbot

natural language processing

The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR) is the main event in the area of human language processing that is focused on theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken Portuguese and Galician. The meeting has been a very rich forum for the exchange of ideas and partnerships for the research and industry communities dedicated to the automated processing of Portuguese, promoting the development of methodologies, resources and projects that can be shared among researchers and practitioners in the field.

Find more information and pay the registration fee on [event organizer’s website](https://sites.universidadedefortaleza.com/propor2022/?page_id=401)

PROPOR 2022

The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR) is the main event in the area of human language processing that is focused on theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken Portuguese and Galician.

Conversational user interfaces have been an increasingly popular way to obtain quick information in natural language, especially with advances in the area of natural language processing (NLP) fueled by the surge of deep neural networks. Real-world cases include IBM Watson and Azure Microsoft chatbots, among others. Such examples, however, are most present in the commercial spectrum, with few being actively used by the scientific community. In this work, we develop an Interactive Question Answering System (IQA) for the Sucupira platform, Brazil's biggest open platform of postgraduate content, deployed as conversational interfaces for two popular messaging platforms: Telegram and Discord. We also propose the use of multilingual embeddings for ordering answers by a language-independent measuer of semantic similarity. Our IQA was evaluated with an study with 16 participants. The results were mostly positive, indicating that the use of conversational user interfaces, along with NLP techniques, may be a valid alternative for retrieving scientific information from the Sucupira plataform.

technical paper

Promoted by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web (WebMedia) is the main event of the theme in Brazil and an excellent opportunity for scientific and technical exchange among students, researchers and professionals in the areas of Multimedia, Hypermedia and Web. This year we will be celebrating to 26th edition of WebMedia, which will be held online from november 30th to December 4th .

Webmedia 2020’s programming includes:

– Technical sessions for the presentation of scientific papers
– National and international keynotes
– Panel with companies
– Workshops
– Short Courses
– Open community meetings

The topics of interest for submitting papers are:

– Web and Social Networks
– Multimedia
– Digital TV, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing

Besides the main track, WebMedia 2020 will have in parallel the Tools and Applications Workshop, works Tools and Applications Workshop, the Workshop on Undergraduate Research Work and the Workshop The Future of Interactive.

The WebMedia 2020 organization is under the responsibility of the Programa de Pós-graduação Doutorado em Ciência da Computação – Associação UFMA/UFPI (DCCMAPI), do Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação/ CCET (PPGCC), do Laboratory of Advanced Web Systems/UFMA (LAWS) e do Laboratório de Sistemas Multimídia/UFMA (TELEMÍDIA).).

#PartiuWebMedia2020 #WebMedia2020

Promoted by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web (WebMedia) is the main event of the theme in Brazil and an excellent opportunity for scientific and technical exchange among students, researchers and professionals in the areas of Multimedia, Hypermedia and Web.

Like the spoken languages, sign languages are not universal and vary in different countries. LIBRAS (Brazilian Sign Language) is the second official language of Brazil and it is the language adopted by Brazilian Deaf's community to communicate. The signs of LIBRAS are composed of hand configurations, facial expressions and are affected by space and intensity modifiers, which makes their recognition more complicated than the simple identification of hand signs. The signs are arranged, according to a grammar, respecting form phrases, clauses, and sentences like any other spoken or sign language. The automatic machine translation of a sign language typically includes an initial phase for detecting sign boundaries. In this paper, we apply a crowdsourcing method to identifying signs boundaries present in pre-recorded videos those features LIBRAS interpreters. The limits or boundaries of the signs in the videos were established from the processing of contributions from workers from different countries, who have supposedly never heard of LIBRAS nor any other sign languages. To evaluate the segmentation process, we compared the sign boundaries identified by the crowd with the ground truth provided by a team of LIBRAS experts, who also assessed the quality of the delimitation of the identified signs. Our analysis showed that our crowdsourcing method was able to get 93.75% of the sign boundaries successfully.


A Crowdsourcing Method for Sign Segmentation in Brazilian Sign Language Videos

Um paradigma emergente que tem se mostrado uma materialização do conceito de computação ubíqua é a Internet das Coisas (do inglês, Internet of Things - IoT). Porém, para que a IoT se torne uma realidade para todos os tipos de usuários, é necessário encontrar soluções para superar alguns desafios presentes neste paradigma computacional. Dentre os desafios presentes, pode-se citar: a heterogeneidade das informações geradas nestes meios; o considerável volume de dados trafegados; dispositivos potencialmente executando em redes com largura de banda reduzida, ou que possuam links de comunicação saturados. Neste trabalho é apresentado o EXEHDA-DEP, uma arquitetura de processamento de eventos complexos distribuída para a IoT, apta a lidar com a heterogeneidade proveniente destes meios e de executar em ambientes que possuam ou não restrições de conexão. Os resultados obtidos demonstram a capacidade do EXEHDA-DEP escalar o processamento horizontalmente, aplicando estratégias que favoreçam a concepção de uma arquitetura com um consumo de rede estável, onde nos testes executados é demonstrado uma redução considerável do consumo médio de rede.

EXEHDA-DEP: An Architecture to Distributed Complex Event Processing

Due to its continental size, Brazil is one of the countries with the largest territorial extension in theworld, with a total of 27 federative units, and prominent cultural diversity. Brazil is also among the five countries with the largest social inequality according to the UN, which may stimulate the interstate migration process. This process contributes to an increase in cultural diffusion across the states of origin and destination of migrants since they move with all their habits including food and drink preferences. In our work, we measured the similarity among Brazilian states, analyzing food and drink preferences as a cultural indicator. By leveraging the Facebook advertising platform, which allows us to obtain an estimate of the total number of users who satisfy a set of attributes provided, we collected the audience for food and drinks in Brazil to conduct our analysis. In order to validate our results, we compared the cultural similarity of the states with the rate of migrants they received in a given period. Our results reveal a positive correlation between cultural similarity and the rate of migration.

Inferring cultural similarity among Brazilian states based on data from social media advertising platforms

A SaaS (Software as a Service) can transparently consume a DaaS
(Data as a Service). However, heterogeneous DaaS and its evolution
can disrupt the SaaS execution. In such cases, a middleware can
provide such interoperability and monitor the DaaS trackback and
its evolution by retrieving its metadata. For instance, the middleware MIDAS manually provides such interoperability. Considering
the Web and the number of web pages and DaaS available, this task
may be time-consuming and unfeasible. To automate this task, it
is firstly important to distinguish a DaaS from a typical web page.

Classifying Web page features to detect DaaS

Worldwide, the composition of the population registers an increase in life expectancy and a reduction in the birth rate. The creative use of technology and the omnipresence of sensor-based devices allow the development of software solutions and platforms that offer services to older people towards increasing quality of life,reducing expenses, and promoting aging in place while preserving autonomy and security: a case in point is wearable sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Given that previous work ob-served the lack of attention given to older people by the researchers investigating HAR systems, we conducted a systematic mapping aiming at identifying resources, as variables and associated values,used in the development of HAR systems for older people. The systematic mapping selected 21 papers published between 2010 and 2019, which exposed the use of 16 variables and associated values.

Recognition of Human Activities via Wearable Sensors: Variables Identified in a Systematic Mapping

Several cities around the world face security problems, such as vehicle theft. Locate and recover these vehicles are challengers for authorities. In smart cities, citizens can collaborate with authorities by sensing urban and environmental data, so-called crowdsensing. This work introduces Crowd-Auto, a crowdsensing approach that
utilizes a crowded camera network from houses and commerce to identify vehicle plates, query on official databases and inform the authorities when stolen vehicles are identified. We’ve developed a prototype and demonstrated that Crowd-Auto is viable for allowing citizens to cooperate and improve security in cities.

Crowd-Auto: Locating Theft Vehicles Through Urban Crowdsensing

Na área de Sistemas de Recomendação existe uma predominância histórica para algoritmos colaborativos em relação à baseados em conteúdo. No entanto, o último pode apresentar melhores resultados com usuários e ser mais transparente que o primeiro. Dessa maneira, será apresentado o algoritmo de recomendação baseado em conteúdo WordRecommender, que calcula proximidade de itens a partir da similaridade semântica entre os aspectos mais importantes de cada um, extraídos a partir de revisões de usuários. Para produzir explicações textuais, o algoritmo pode utilizar a mesma métrica semântica considerando um filme de perfil e um outro recomendado. Como resultado, o método proposto apresentou um desempenho melhor que os baseline em contextos de pouca quantidade de dados e vizinhos, evidenciando que dados semânticos são uma fonte importante para representação de informação e explicações em sistemas de recomendação.

WordRecommender: An Explainable Content-Based Algorithm based on Sentiment Analysis and Semantic Similarity

Distinct Data as a Service (DaaS) and Database as a Service (DBaaS) providers can store and manage heterogeneous data in the cloud. Data are accessed from the Software as a Service (SaaS) through an automated solution named MIDAS (Middleware for DaaS/DBaaS and SaaS), which is an intermediate communication layer between SaaS and DaaS/DBaaS. During the providers' evolution, a SaaS query may be affected by DaaS attributes' change. The challenge is to ensure data cloud services consistency for consumers can access the correct attribute when querying a DaaS. Thus, we propose a method to match semantic similarity among DaaS attributes. The method combines two steps to track semantic similarities of DaaS attributes. The first step is done by Cosine and Jaccard measures (edge-counting approach) to identify the number of edges linking two attributes to find the syntactic or lexical similarity, and the second step performed by Information Content (IC)-based measures with WordNet to assess the semantic similarity if edge-counting measures are unable to provide parity between DaaS attributes. Our method is implemented in MIDAS middleware as a proof of concept, and we perform some experiments to evaluate three criteria: overhead, performance, and correctness of our approach. Results showed that we are in a potential direction to provide semantic interoperability between SaaS and DaaS.

Semantic similarity attributes for Data Cloud: A case study in MIDAS

The candidate's thesis is within the emerging topic of mulsemedia systems, which encompass audiovisual content associated with multisensory effects, users' quality of experience, and human-computer interaction. It presents a conceptual architecture and a framework that take into account the challenges and requirements for mulsemedia delivery systems identified from the gaps and shortcomings in related work. Furthermore, the work's outcome brings multiple and valuable contributions relying on a complex and solid experimental setup, which have been shared and published in relevant journals and conferences.

A Conceptual Architecture and a Framework for Dealing with Variability in Mulsemedia Systems

In this work, we present the platform Boca a Boca Virtual, a kind of virtual catalog that aims to help self-employed professionals and small businesses to start their presence in the digital environment, promoting their services and products in a simple and fast way. The idea emerged during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially with social isolation, whose concern, from an economic and social point of view, was to allow autonomous service providers and establishments, in general, to continue offering their products and/or services. Through the platform, a consumer can search for a specific product and service within his own neighborhood and city, strengthening the local economy. In addition, Boca a Boca Virtual is integrated with Google Maps, in such a way that registered developments are also indexed by the Google search engine, improving their visibility and potentially increasing more customers. The platform is fully responsive, combining several recent web development technologies. Today it has more than 140 registered enterprises, from more than 30 Brazilian cities.

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