Headquartered at the ICMC/USP-São Carlos, the center (CPA-IARA - Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence Recreating Urban Spaces) is among the six proposals selected in a call launched in partnership by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (FAPESP) and the Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) A new artificial intelligence center, with researchers from all regions of Brazil, will be installed at USP's Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (ICMC), in São Carlos. The objective of the initiative is to encourage the emergence of smart cities in Brazil and abroad, with a focus on five aspects: education, mobility, environment, health and cybersecurity. IARA's main premise is to encourage the creation of inclusive and sustainable cities, in strong line with the sustainable development objectives defined by the United Nations. For this, the responsible use of artificial intelligence models will be advocated in an ethical, fair, non-prejudiced and transparent way. IARA Network has the participation of scientists from the three state universities in São Paulo (USP, UNESP and UNICAMP) and from other states, and from several federal universities (including those based in São Paulo: UFABC, UFSCar, Unifesp), as well as national research institutes (Inatel, INPE and ITA) and Centro Universitário Facens. What are the best ways to deal, efficiently and respecting privacy, with data from sensors and cell phones that come in streams, in great volume and with different formats? Answering this question is one of the challenges that are within the scope of IARA's operations. The project intends to implement, analyze and validate solutions in cities willing to be open laboratories. The starting point for the actions of the IARA Network is a municipality located in the southeastern region of Pará, which has the largest iron mining province in the world: Canaã dos Carajás. An agreement has already been established between the City Hall of the city and the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), with the participation of researchers from USP. The initiative aims to contribute resources, in the amount of R$ 6.2 million, from the Municipal Fund for Sustainable Development, for the implementation of a sophisticated smart city infrastructure.
In addition, the IARA Network already has the collaboration of the following cities: Fortaleza (CE), Juazeiro (BA), Monteiro Lobato (SP), Niterói (RJ), Recife (PE), São Carlos (SP), São José dos Campos (SP) and Sorocaba (SP). The center will also seek to develop mechanisms to deal with large-scale machine learning applications quickly and effectively in order to meet the large number of models required in the various applications in smart cities. Resources and partnerships - FAPESP, MCTI and CGI.Br will provide R$ 1 million per year for each of the new six centers for a period of up to ten years. At least the same amount will be contributed by the partner companies. In the case of CPA IARA, in the first five years, the expected private investment is approximately R$ 7 million. The IARA Network will have more investments, as several companies and institutions have confirmed a partnership, among them: Intel, TIM, Ericsson, Vale, Grupo Splice, Cidade dos Lagos, Jacto, Axxonsoft, Stellantis (which includes brands such as Fiat, Chrysler, Jeep , Peugeot and Citroën), NESSHealth, Compesa, Eldorado Institute, Inova Institute, Inatel, FITec, CRIE and ATI.
June 2021 - To date
Within the context of Blockchains, Smart Contracts are codes to ensure agreement among the parties. The main essence of Blockchain concept is that such codes are unchangeable. This means, if the code has some flaw, there is no option to fix it. Therefore, this leads to the importance and validation (tests) and verification (correctness) of such codes besides looking into code vulnerabilities (security). The project will develop a Systematic Mapping (SM) to understand what the available methods and/or tools are to validate, verify and ensure removing vulnerabilities. The second step, based on the results of the SM, is to adopt or develop a method/tool for the proposed purpose.
February 2021 - To date
The project focuses on the final development of the Pauliceia 2.0 digital historical cartographic platform of São Paulo city, including its publication on the worldwide web. Pauliceia 2.0 covers the period of São Paulo's urban and industrial modernization (1870-1940). The back-end database will be linked to an interface to allow interaction among interested researchers with the opportunity to feed the database with events that can be spatially represented. This interaction enables researchers to produce maps and visualizations of their own research while providing data to all users. This project will enrich approaches to analyze the past while using new digital humanities technologies to foster collaborative work and free knowledge flow. The first phase of the project, focusing on a pilot area corresponding to São Paulo's city center, was carried out from February 2017 to January 2019. The beta version of the platform is available on the internet for testing. The second phase will expand the spatial coverage, the platform functionalities, and community engagement. It will also create a guide to allow other researchers to replicate the approaches in other cities
February 2021 - To date
Software Testing, within the cycle of Software Engineering, has become an important asset to qualify software, in particular, critical software, such as those of space applications. Once the Software is modeled as a Finite State Machine (FSM) or Statecharts, it is possible to apply criteria or methods to generate test cases or test sequences. These test cases are then exercised on the implementation to verify whether there is a conformance between the implementation and the specification. However, depending on the criteria, a large number of software test cases are generated and depending on the budget and time constraints, it may not be possible to exercise all the generated test cases. This project has an objective to rank the test cases based on steady-state probabilities of the Finite State Machine (of the specified software). Such steady-state probabilities are obtained by means of solving a Markov Chain. Based on the steady-state probabilities of every state of an FSM, it is possible to rank the test cases and it is up to the test manager to exercise as many test cases as possible based on the available budget and time constraints.
July 2019 - To date
Datacenters are computational infrastructure for both storage and processing purposes with a fast and efficient communication technologies. Such infrastructure must be dependable and continuously available. Setting up a Datacenter takes into consideration parameters such as expenses with rent, electricity, water, network facilities, climate among others. Companies are looking into alternatives to set up their Datacenters and in several locations in order to guarantee dependability and continuous availability. This project has an objective, first, to collect several parameters, already mentioned above, for important cities, according to IBGE, within the so called meso-regions (mesorregiões). Secondly, exact methods and/or heuristics will be developed to locate cities which attend the criteria of expenses incurred based on the parameters so that the company interested in setting up a Datacenter is able to make a decision on the location.
July 2018 - July 2020
This Project is part of the CAPES Procad Program involving the following Graduate Programs: UFPA-Federal University of Pará (Electrical Engineering), ITA-Aeronautical Institute of Technology (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) and INPE-National Institute for Space Research (Applied Computing). The project foresees the strengthening of cooperation between the research groups of INPE, ITA and UFPA, with a focus on investigating the feasibility of access technologies under Differentiated Conditions, in the Amazon region. This investigation takes place through the use of several analytical modeling techniques (Markovian processes and queuing theory), simulation and computational intelligence models (Bayesian networks and genetic algorithms), in order to provide a decision support framework for capacity planning. access networks in the Amazon.
2005 to 2009
Due to high design costs and maintenance difficulties, satellites are considered critical systems. Software embedded in a computer on board satellites is usually complex, as it acts directly on the computer hardware, performs sensor data acquisition, calculates the correct orientation of the satellite in space, among other aspects. Testing on systems with these characteristics requires considerable effort throughout the software development cycle. Generating test cases based on non-formal specifications can result in low test coverage, as different interpretations can occur. The purpose of this proposal is to use Statecharts to model software embedded in scientific satellite instruments and, based on this modeling, automatically generate test cases and analyze them for consistency. The basis of the proposal will be the use of the PerformCharts tool. In a first approach, the specification in Statecharts, derived from the non-formal specification of the software, will be converted to a Finite State Machine, from which test cases will be generated using the Transition Tour method. In a second approach, test cases will be generated directly from PerformCharts without the need to convert to a Finite State Machine. The main benefit that this proposal will bring will be the consolidation of a methodology for the automatic generation of test cases based on Statecharts for software embedded in scientific satellite instruments.
2006 to 2008
This project proposes cooperative scientific and technological research activities in response to calls for proposals from the Virtual Research Institute FAPESP/Microsoft Research, mainly seeking the objective of developing and applying instruments and techniques of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in subjects related to Environmental Sciences. The activities are mainly framed in the first thematic line of interest of the call: Introduction of instruments and computational techniques in the modeling / review of climate changes (for example climate, hydrology, oceanography, ecology), proposing the development of environmental sensors with the capacity to measurements in temporal resolution of seconds and at a relatively low cost, enabling the formation of sensor networks with high spatial resolution, in addition to computational products for the integration and visualization of these environmental data, which will create great potential for applications in studies of the interaction of the terrestrial biosphere with the environment.
2009 to 2011
INPE-National Institute for Space Research generates an enormous amount of data of various kinds such as satellite images and products of these (eg, fires, vegetation cover, land use), data from weather and climate forecasting models, data from land and sea platforms; environmental sensor data, among others. All of these data have spatial and/or temporal characteristics, consisting of a very rich database that can be combined with other products from INPE or other institutions to create new products and services. However, this data cannot always be easily accessed, manipulated, reprocessed or visualized by methods other than those intended for specific applications. This project aims to create a framework that facilitates the creation of new products from data collected from different sources with minimal effort, so that the user can develop applications that use data sources transparently; that is, without worrying about the way in which data from these sources are made available. The framework architecture will consist of protocols for data access and applications for conversion, interoperability and federation of large volumes of data stored in a distributed manner, avoiding the need for replication as much as possible. In addition to the framework itself, examples and training material will be developed so that end users, with basic knowledge of computing and the Web, can develop their specific solutions for environmental, meteorological, and analysis and visualization applications in general.
2010 to 2014
This Project is part of the CAPES Procad Program involving the following Graduate Programs: UFPA-Federal University of Pará (Electrical Engineering), ITA-Aeronautical Institute of Technology (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) and INPE-National Institute for Space Research (Applied Computing). The project continues the cooperation established between the research groups of UFPA, INPE and ITA, with the purpose of creating a framework (based on measurement, modeling and computational intelligence techniques) that supports decision making for implementation of new access technologies aimed at making strategic applications feasible to the country and strongly to the Amazon region, using the NAVEGAPARÁ Program as a case study. Specific objectives include: Human resource training (at the Graduate level (UFPA, INPE and ITA) and Undergraduate level (UFPA and ITA)) in the various areas related to the project, such as: performance evaluation, optimization , access network technologies, decision support and computational intelligence; Maintain the integration and approximation of researchers and research groups from UFPA, INPE and ITA, in addition to several other groups from the country and internationally, who have common interests in the areas studied, with a focus on providing sustainable development; Study and analysis of the performance of the NAVEGAPARÁ network, using modeling and measurement, in order to assess the network capacity and the quality of the applications currently running on the network and of future applications to be made available on this network; Development of algorithms and methods for network management and control in order to allow priority applications such as tele-health and tele-education to be fully served, providing satisfactory levels of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) ; Feasibility study of technological alternatives, such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and Power Line Communication (PLC), for the future.
2010 to 2014
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