Papers by Ricardo Herrmann
A Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Bounded Multitasking
IFAC Proceedings Volumes, Sep 1, 2013
ABSTRACT
Smarter board
ABSTRACT In this demo we present the Smarter Board, a platform designed to facilitate the creatio... more ABSTRACT In this demo we present the Smarter Board, a platform designed to facilitate the creation of a community-focused social network, with a special focus on groups of people with disabilities. The communication is based on text messages, which makes the system easy to use and more accessible to communities where network connections are not well-developed and where the people do not have much experience with more advanced technological tools. The solution also provides a manage interface, through which administrators are able to mediate the messages and the users. We also implemented a matching procedure for the identification of related posts (e.g., it can check if there are compatible car ride offers and car ride requests) in order to make users aware of what is being posted and, even more important, adopt the technology.
A crowdsourcing platform for the construction of accessibility maps
ABSTRACT We present in this article a crowdsourcing platform that enables the collaborative creat... more ABSTRACT We present in this article a crowdsourcing platform that enables the collaborative creation of accessibility maps. The platform provides means for integration of different kind of data, collected automatically or with user intervention, to augment standard maps with accessibility information. The article shows the architecture of the platform, dedicating special attention to the smartphone applications we developed for data collection. The article also describes a preliminar experiment conducted on field, showing how the analysis of data produced by our solution can bring novel insights in accessibility challenges that can be found in cities.
Citizen sensing for collaborative construction of accessibility maps
ABSTRACT In this demo we present IBM Sidewalks, a mobile application designed to facilitate the i... more ABSTRACT In this demo we present IBM Sidewalks, a mobile application designed to facilitate the identification of accessibility issues in a city via crowdsourcing. This application connects to our Citizen Sensing platform, providing to city administrators an integrated view about issues in the city, such as sidewalks that are obstructed or in bad condition. If a representative amount of data is collected through people engagement, a significant number of issues will be registered, and analytics tools can be used to identify the impact these issues have on people with disabilities' lives. Consequently, we can use such information to build accessibility maps, and possibly to define an appropriate action plan to address the issues, optimizing resource allocation.
Watchboard
ABSTRACT Traditional microblogging in the enterprise is known to increase work environment awaren... more ABSTRACT Traditional microblogging in the enterprise is known to increase work environment awareness, but is also coupled with information overload and privacy issues. We address these challenges by introducing the concept of curated microblogging, which proposes the addition of social curation and access control to such platforms. We also present Watchboard, a prototype tool incorporating these ideas, and discuss highlights of a preliminary user study delineating crucial factors of the proposed concept.
Marker-assisted recognition of dynamic content in public spaces
ABSTRACT In this work we present an image processing-based assistant for helping visually impaire... more ABSTRACT In this work we present an image processing-based assistant for helping visually impaired citizens with the task of recognizing dynamic content within fixed layouts of displays in public spaces. Our solution relies on the placement of markers, in order to facilitate the location and recognition of target objects and, at the same time, provide hints to users about how to better position their mobile device's cameras to capture the whole information contained in the display.
Flower Classification for a Citizen Science Mobile App
This work describes an efficient approach for flower classification that is suitable for deployme... more This work describes an efficient approach for flower classification that is suitable for deployment in mobile devices, allowing its use in a citizen science application for biodiversity monitoring. In the proposed system, geo-located images are uploaded by the user and segmented semi-automatically. We propose a classification method based on histogram comparison of color, shape and texture cues, using metric learning for feature weighting. Our method is tested on the Oxford Flower Dataset and we are able to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, while proposing an approach that can run efficiently in mobile devices.
Communications in computer and information science, 2015
Shared Message Boards foster communication practices within restricted groups that typically do n... more Shared Message Boards foster communication practices within restricted groups that typically do not emerge in traditional social networks. In this article, we describe an experiment in which a Shared Message Board technology was employed to support carpooling activities in a large company in Brazil. Based on the results extracted from the platform and from two user studies, we identified important elements influencing the adoption of this technology as well as other activities where it can be effectively used in order to promote the development of smart enterprises.
IBM journal of research and development, Nov 1, 2015
Vocational training can bring significant benefits for people with disabilities (PwD), particular... more Vocational training can bring significant benefits for people with disabilities (PwD), particularly in terms of self-esteem and autonomy. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of Brazilians with disabilities actually work, due to lack of job qualifications. In this paper, we report on the early progress of an ongoing research agenda that investigates new educational and social engagement technologies to facilitate the qualification and inclusion of PwD in the Brazilian labor market. Based on our experiences working with multiple disability populations in a series of exploratory studies, we discuss relevant aspects to be considered in the design and implementation of a vocational training platform targeted at PwD.
Methods that learn the structure of Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams (PSDD) from data h... more Methods that learn the structure of Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams (PSDD) from data have achieved state-of-the-art performance in tractable learning tasks. These methods learn PSDDs incrementally by optimizing the likelihood of the induced probability distribution given available data and are thus robust against missing values, a relevant trait to address the challenges of embedded applications, such as failing sensors and resource constraints. However PSDDs are outperformed by discriminatively trained models in classification tasks. In this work, we introduce D-LearnPSDD, a learner that improves the classification performance of the LearnPSDD algorithm by introducing a discriminative bias that encodes the conditional relation between the class and feature variables.
A learning feature engineering method for task assignment
Multi-domain IT services are delivered by technicians with a variety of expert knowledge in diffe... more Multi-domain IT services are delivered by technicians with a variety of expert knowledge in different areas. Their skills and availability are an important property of the service. However, most organizations do not have a consistent view of this information because creation and maintenance of a skill model is a difficult task, especially in light of privacy regulations, changing service catalogs
This paper describes a citizen science system for flora monitoring that employs a concept of miss... more This paper describes a citizen science system for flora monitoring that employs a concept of missions, as well as an automatic approach for flower species classification. The proposed method is fast and suitable for use in mobile devices, as means to achieve and maintain high user engagement. Besides providing a web-based interface for visualization, the system allows the volunteers to use their smartphones as powerful sensors for collecting biodiversity data in a fast and easy way. The classification accuracy is increased by a preliminary segmentation step that requires simple user interaction, using a modified version of the GrabCut algorithm. The proposed classification method obtains good performance and accuracy, by combining traditional color and texture features together with carefully designed features, including a robust shape descriptor to capture fine morphological structures of the objects to be classified. A novel weighting technique assigns different costs to each feature, taking into account the inter-class and intra-class variation between the considered species. The method is tested on the popular Oxford Flower Dataset, containing 102 categories and we achieve state-of-theart accuracy while proposing a more efficient approach than previous methods described in the literature.
Sistemas Humano-Computacionais
A learning feature engineering method for task assignment
2012 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium, 2012
Multi-domain IT services are delivered by technicians with a variety of expert knowledge in diffe... more Multi-domain IT services are delivered by technicians with a variety of expert knowledge in different areas. Their skills and availability are an important property of the service. However, most organizations do not have a consistent view of this information because creation and maintenance of a skill model is a difficult task, especially in light of privacy regulations, changing service catalogs
Watchboard
CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2014
ABSTRACT Traditional microblogging in the enterprise is known to increase work environment awaren... more ABSTRACT Traditional microblogging in the enterprise is known to increase work environment awareness, but is also coupled with information overload and privacy issues. We address these challenges by introducing the concept of curated microblogging, which proposes the addition of social curation and access control to such platforms. We also present Watchboard, a prototype tool incorporating these ideas, and discuss highlights of a preliminary user study delineating crucial factors of the proposed concept.
System, method and program product for providing populace centric weather forecasts
Emergency response system, comprising: a plurality of provider computers that provide data proces... more Emergency response system, comprising: a plurality of provider computers that provide data processing functionality for a geographical area, said geographical area comprises a plurality of regions, wherein one or more provider computer to provide a data processing functionality for each region, at least one provider computer for each region a is emergency response computer, which provides in emergencies emergency response resources; a plurality of client computers in the geographical area, wherein providing the plurality of provider computers computing resources for the plurality of client computers; and a network, wherein the plurality of client computers and the plurality of client provider computers belonging to the network and communicate with each other via the network, the respective emergency response computer during each local emergency selectively capacity of emergency response resources to clients in the local area available provides and will notify other emergency response computer for regions that may be drawn from the local emergency affected, each computer having an emergency response history database with the history of the previous cases of emergency and an emergency response model database with models for capacity, service- and data processing requirements in emergencies.
System, method and program product for flood aware travel routing
System, method and program product for proactively provisioning emergency computer resources using geospatial relationships
Marker-based image recognition of dynamic content for the visually impaired
Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference on - W4A '14, 2014
ABSTRACT The access to information displayed in public spaces is a challenge faced by visually im... more ABSTRACT The access to information displayed in public spaces is a challenge faced by visually impaired people for which image processing techniques have the potential to deliver satisfactory solutions. However, object recognition algorithms must initially locate possible candidates in the images, which is a hard task in complex scenes. In this article, we introduce an image processing technique that relies on the incorporation of markers to panels and boards with fixed layouts displaying dynamic content. The markers allow: a) locating the objects to be recognized; b) correcting perspective in the input images; c) limiting the training set size for supervised learning; and d) guiding the visually impaired by indicating how they should position their devices for adequate pictures. The proposed technique can be used for automatic recognition of texts and images and is suitable for deployment on mobile devices, providing more independence to the citizens. Results of preliminary tests on vending machines show that this method is robust enough to be used in practice.
Marker-assisted recognition of dynamic content in public spaces
Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference on - W4A '14, 2014
ABSTRACT In this work we present an image processing-based assistant for helping visually impaire... more ABSTRACT In this work we present an image processing-based assistant for helping visually impaired citizens with the task of recognizing dynamic content within fixed layouts of displays in public spaces. Our solution relies on the placement of markers, in order to facilitate the location and recognition of target objects and, at the same time, provide hints to users about how to better position their mobile device's cameras to capture the whole information contained in the display.
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Papers by Ricardo Herrmann