44575256
An X-Ray of the Brazilian e-Gov Web Sites
The digital inclusion promotes the reduction of social inequalities. Based on this principle, the Brazilian Government has been setting up an increasing number of Web access locations to render virtual support to its citizens. However, there are no guidelines for the construction and assessment of these electronic Government (e-Gov) sites. In this article we measure the web site quality in the e-Gov domain with the following proprieties: usability, accessibility, interoperability, security, privacy, information reliability, and service agility. We implemented our method, by using a checklist tool, in the evaluation of 127 Brazilian government sites (federal, state and municipal). Our method proved itself efficient in the diagnosis and identification of specific problems in the e-Gov site domain.
29246421
Sharing design perspectives through storytelling
Design consists of analyzing scenarios and proposing artifacts, obeying the initial set of requirements that lead from initial to goal state. Finding or creating alternative solutions, analyzing them, and selecting the best one are expected steps in the designer’s decision making process. Very often, not a sole designer, but a team of them is engaged in the design process, sharing their expertise and responsibility to achieve optimum projects. In a design team, most conflicts occur due to misunderstanding of one’s assessment of specifications and contexts. Decision explanations play a key role in teamwork success. Designers are rational agents trained to follow rational methods. Acceptable justifications include value function, requirements, constraints, and criteria. Generally, explanations are delivered in a multimedia fashion, composed of text, graphics and gestures, to provide the audience the ability to perceive what was contextually imagined. The more spatial the reasoning is, the richer the explanation channel should be. This paper presents CineADD, a design explanation generation model based on cinema techniques such as animation, scripting, editing, and camera movements. The idea is to provide designers with a tool for describing the way their projects should be visually explained, as in a movie. Designers develop their projects in an active design document environment. Rationale is captured as a design model, so explanations can be generated instead of retrieved. The captured design model serves as a base to visually reconstruct design, giving emphasis and guidance by using movie storytelling techniques. CineADD was implemented for the domain of oil pipeline layout showing the feasibility of this approach. We expect CineADD to become a commodity attachable to any intelligent CAD system.
13425018
Lithofacies recognition hybrid bench
Well offshore petroleum exploration is a risky, but very profitable task. Determining the rock formation of each layer of a given reservoir diminishes the risks of expending a great deal of money drilling dry wells. Since collecting offshore rock samples is difficult and expensive, geologists must decide upon drilling based on indirect measures called well log. Traditional statistical methods have been used to assist this task. Neural networks have also been successfully used. As an alternative fuzzy logic based systems have an extra appeal of intuitive comprehension of some uncertainties. This paper presents a hybrid tool that combines neural networks, fuzzy logic and neuro-fuzzy logic to improve human intuition when analyzing the potential of oil fields.
18526386
A Systematic Approach for Including Machine Learning in Multi-agent Systems
Large scale multi-agent systems (MASs) in unpredictable environments must use machine learning techniques to perform their goals and improve the performance of the system. This paper presents a systematic approach to introduce machine learning in the design and implementation phases of a software agent. We also present an incremental implementation process for building asynchronous and distributed agents, which suppors the combination of machine learning strategies. This process supports the stepwise building of adaptable MASs for unknown situations, improving their capacity to scale up. We use the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) environment as a case study to illustrate the suitability of our approach.
9474173
Improving modularity of reflective middleware with aspect-oriented programming
Reflective middleware has been proposed as an effective way to enhance adaptability of component-oriented middleware architectures. To be effectively adaptable, the implementation of reflective middleware needs to be modular. However, some recently emerged applications such as mobile, pervasive, and embedded applications have imposed more stringent modularity requirements to the middleware design. They require support for the conception of a minimal middleware while promoting finegrained modularity of reflective middleware features. The key problem is that fundamental mechanisms for decomposing reflective middleware implementations, such as object-oriented ones, suffer from not providing the proper means to achieve the required level of localizing reflection-specific concerns. This paper presents a systematic investigation on how aspect-oriented programming scales up to improve modularity of typical reflection-specific crosscutting concerns. We have quantitatively compared Java and AspectJ implementations of an OpenORB-compliant reflective middleware using separation of concerns metrics.
13430499
A Unified Meta-Level Software Architecture for Sequential and Concurrent Exception Handling
8265478
MIRA: A Distributed and Scalable WAN/LAN Real-Time Measurement Platform
In this paper we describe MIRA, a distributed and scalable architecture for flow-based monitoring and traffic analysis. MIRA relies on data inspection to provide advanced monitoring services such as Acceptable User Policy auditing. It is based on a low cost hardware platform that can be deployed in both LAN and WAN environments. The distributed architecture of the measurement platform is designed to provide real-time global results from a complex network. Processing rate can be seamlessly increased by the addition of new hardware elements. The MIRA architecture has been thoroughly tested in a field trial on RedIRIS, the Spanish National Research Network.