FCT Relatório Científico 2008 [LABORATÓRIO
DE INTELIGÊNCIA ARTIFICIAL E CIÊNCIA DE COMPUTADORES]
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Group Description |
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Title of Research
Group: |
(RG-COMP-Norte-Porto-27-1031) |
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Principal Investigator: |
Ana Paula
Nunes Gomes Tomás |
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Main Scientific Domain: |
Engenharia
Electrotécnica e Informática |
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Group Host Institution: |
Universidade
do Porto |
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Funding, source, dates |
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Funding, source,
dates |
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32072 FCT Plurianual 2008 59917 FCT Project JEDI 2008 9394 FCT Project Myddas 2008 + salaries of team members,
University of Porto 2008 + grants,
FCT, Gulbenkian, others 2008 |
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Objectives
& Achievements |
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Objectives |
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The "Advanced
Programming Systems" group was formed in June 2007 with the mission of
developing systems that put fundamental research to practical use. Research carried
out by APS members falls within four general topics: - Logic Programming and
Spatial Data Processing - Automatic Complexity
Analysis of Software - Collaborative Knowledge
Management Systems - Algorithm Design and
Constraint Solving Objectives for 2008 were to
continue previous work on: * Intelligent transportation
systems: platforms for traffic simulation exploiting emerging communication
technologies * Spatial-Yap, extending Yap
Prolog and MYDDAS deductive database system to handle vectorial spatial data * Extensions of Yap Prolog
for a full integration in a single programming environment of an Inductive
Logic Programming system and a spatio-deductive database system, such as
Spatial-Yap (in the scope JEDI project) * GPS data mining for
automated map generation * GPSMan, a user-friendly
graphical environment for preparation, inspection and edition of GPS data * Spatial data
representation: vectorial and constraint models. * Exploring sequence types
for building XML schemas in a collaborative way (with M. Florido, FMC/LIACC
and T.Kutsia, RISC, Linz) * Models and solvers for
discrete constraint and algorithmic problems: geometric problems (visibility
and surveillance; random generation of geometric objects), matching under
preferences, and symbolic solvers for computer assisted learning. * Tools for the translation
of mathematical texts to and from the special Braille systems used for
Mathematics (with M. Arala Chaves, Atractor, Project MATINV: Interactive
Mathematics for Blind People) A new line of research,
"Declarative Technology for Information Systems", was started in
October when António Porto joined APS group. Work is on COMPASS, a powerful
information system development platform. It is based on declarative
programming techniques centered on the conceptual modeling of application
domains, and is being developed in collaboration with SQIMI, a spin-off
company co-launched in 2007 by him. |
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Main Achievements |
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Main results obtained by APS
members during 2008: * DIVERT (http://divert.ncc.up.pt)
traffic simulator, developed mainly by Luís Damas, member of the APS group,
definitely contributed to the visibility of LIACC during 2008, raising great
interest from academia and industry. It led to the creation of a spin-off, GeoLink,
and industrial partnerships and was selected as the basis of the major
prototype of the DRIVE-IN (CMU-PT/NGN/0052/2008, led by Michel Ferreira and
Ozan Tonguz, CMU/USA, as PIs) project (http://drive-in.cmuportugal.org),
approved in 2008. It is also being used in the European CIVITAS ELAN project
(http://www.civitas-initiative.org/measure_sheet.phtml?lan=en&id=472) * An algorithm for automated
generation of highly detailed and accurate vectorial road maps from GPS
traces. * New indexing mechanisms
for Prolog predicates for improving support for vectorial spatial databases. * Pedro Vasconcelos got his
PhD from St. Andrews University, with the thesis "Space cost analysis
using sized types" (supervised by Kevin Hammond). A web interface to a
prototype implementation of the size and costs analysis framework developed
in the thesis is available at http://www.ncc.up.pt/~pbv/cgi/cost.cgi * Extensions of previous
work on the generation of permutominoes by size led to the design of a new
algorithm for exact generation of generic polyominoes. The construction
technique underlying these algorithms provides a simpler tool for the
characterization of some well-behaved classes of permutominoes (e.g., convex,
directed, row convex). Some efforts were put also on their characterization
by formal languages. This work has application to the generation of
orthogonal polygons. Prototypes developed at LIACC are being used also by
researchers in national and foreign institutions for testing geometric
algorithms. * Work on tools for the
translation of mathematical texts to Portuguese Braille resulted in the
implementation of a translator that is publicly available as a Web service * A thorough revision was
started of the high-level languages for conceptual scheme definition and database
interaction that are part of the Compass architecture. The first step was to
ground them on sound theoretical principles, reported in a paper accepted for
publication in PADL 2009 * GPSMan, work in 2008
resulted in new improvements and led to a new release (6.4) that was made
public in October * The final project reports
of AGILMAT (POSI/CHS/48565/2002) and MYDDAS (POSC/EIA/59154/2004) were
submitted in 2008 and approved by FCT. |
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Group Productivity |
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Publications in peer review
Journals |
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n/a |
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Other publications
International |
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Pedro Vasconcelos. Space
cost analysis using sized types. PhD thesis, School of Computer Science,
University of St Andrews, November 2008. (supervisor: Kevin Hammond)
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/546 Hugo Conceição, Luís Damas, Michel
Ferreira and J. Barros. Large-Scale
Simulation of V2V Environments. 23rd Annual ACM Symp. on Applied Computing
(SAC 2008), ACM Press. Vol I, pp 28-33, Brasil, March 2008. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1363686.1363694 Hugo Conceição, Michel
Ferreira and J. Barros. On the
Urban Connectivity of Vehicular Sensor Networks. 4th Intern. Conf. on
Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS'08). Springer-Verlag. Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 5067, pp 112-125, Greece, June 2008.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69170-9_8 Fernanda Lima and Michel Ferreira. Mining
Spatial Data from GPS traces for Automated Map Generation. Presented at
FOSS4G 2008. South Africa (abstract available at
http://www.osgeo.org/ocs/index.php/foss4g/2008/paper/view/328 Revised paper submitted to
the 6th Intern. Symp. on Mobile Mapping Technology Mobile Mapping Serving the
Information Society (MMT09), São Paulo, Brasil, 2009 (to appear) Jorge Coelho and Luís
Pinho. Functional Languages: Hume. In Alan Burns (Ed) ARTIST Survey of
Programming Languages, European Network of
Excellence on Embedded Systems Design, 2008. Brief survey available online at
http://www.artist-embedded.org/artist/ARTIST-Survey-of-Programming Jorge Coelho and Luís
Pinho. Functional Languages: Erlang. In Alan Burns (Ed) ARTIST Survey of
Programming Languages, European Network of Excellence on Embedded Systems
Design, 2008. Brief survey available online at
http://www.artist-embedded.org/artist/ARTIST-Survey-of-Programming Hugo Conceicao, Michel Ferreira, João Barros. Cautionary
View of Mobility and Connectivity Modeling in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. IEEE Vehicular Technology
Conference (VTC2009-Spring), Barcelona, Spain, April 2009,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VETECS.2009.5073286 (poster; submitted in 2008) Ricardo Fernandes, Hugo Conceição, Michel Ferreira, and Rogério
Reis. Locating Cars through a Vision Enabled VANET. 2009 IEEE Intelligent
Vehicles Symposium (IV'09), China (poster; submitted in 2008) |
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Other publications
National |
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Jorge Coelho and Mário
Florido. Sequence Disunification and one Application to Collaborative Schema
Construction. Encontro "Days in Logic 2008", IST, Lisboa, Portugal,
January 2008 (based on work presented at ICIW 2007; abstract available at
http://www.math.ist.utl.pt/~dil2008/index_files/jcoelho.pdf) Jorge Coelho and Mário
Florido. XCentric: Constraint based XML Processing. Actas da 6ª Conferência Nacional de XML: Aplicações
e Tecnologias Associadas (XATA 2008), Portugal, Fevereiro 2008, pp 64-75, ISBN 978-972-99166-5-6 (based on paper presented at
WISE 2007)
http://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/7708/1/final-20080201_2123.pdf |
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Patents/propotypes |
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Prototypes: DIVERT: Development of
Inter-VEhicular Reliable Telematics, 2007-2008. http://divert.ncc.up.pt/,
http://drive-in.cmuportugal.org GPSMan version 6.4: a
graphical manager of GPS (Global Positioning System) data, 1998-2008,
distributed and used world-wide. http://www.ncc.up.pt/gpsman/ MYDDAS: a deductive database
system coupling YapTab and MySQL, 2005-2008. http://myddas.ncc.up.pt/ Spatial-Yap: a
spatio-deductive database system, 2006-2008. http://myddas.ncc.up.pt/software/spatial-yap-0.3.tar.gz GENPOLY: generators of
orthogonal polygons, 2004-2008. http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~apt/genpoly/ AGILMAT: a web application
for mathematics education, 2003-2008. http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt:8080/Agilmat/ MTB: a text to Portuguese
Braille translator accepting mathematical denotations, 2008 http://www.ncc.up.pt/~mig/tb/trad.html Size and cost analysis for
Core Hume: a web interface to a prototype implementation of the size
and costs analysis developed in Pedro Vasconcelos' PhD thesis http://www.ncc.up.pt/~pbv/cgi/cost.cgi |
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Industry contract
research |
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NDrive, a global player in
the Portable Navigation Systems market, is the industrial partner of the
DRIVE-IN project (CMU-Portugal Program) |
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Internationalization |
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Luís Damas is member of the
team of project DRIVE-IN "Distributed Routing and Infotainment through
Vehicular Inter-Networking" (CMU-PT/NGN/0052/2008), funded by FCT, under
CMU-Portugal program (http://drive-in.cmuportugal.org) A.P.Tomás is member of the
team of the CRUP Spanish-Portuguese Bilateral Action "Approximate
Resolution of Geometric Optimization Problems", coordinated by Belen
Palop (Universidad de Valladolid) and A. Leslie Bajuelos (CEOC/Universidade
de Aveiro), 2009-2010. This collaboration is fostered also by discussions and
intensive working sessions during the Iberian Workshop on Computational on
Computational Geometry, organized by CEOC/UA unit
(http://srv-ceoc.mat.ua.pt/conf/wcg2008/). In 2008, the workshop was
dedicated Computational Geometry Algorithms and Heuristics. David Vaz gave a
talk about Spatial-Yap. GPSMan, developed by
M.Filgueiras, is distributed and used world-wide with several collaborators
abroad. J. Coelho has been
collaborating with Temur Kutsia, from RISC, Linz (with M. Florido, FMC/LIACC) |
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Future Research |
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Objectives |
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We plan to continue ongoing
work on: - traffic and transportation
systems, with emphasis on the development of Divert2.0 platform for traffic
simulation - methodologies for
efficiently handling spatial data in logic programming systems - geometric problems, in
particular the side-trip location problem for GPS-related applications - declarative conceptual
models for information systems - decentralized coordination
models in cooperative open real-time systems We also intend to
investigate applications of functional programming to software testing based
on specifications. This semi-formal testing methodology emerged in the
academic community in the last decade and has recently started to be applied
in industrial settings. We have initiated some contacts with partners
interested in collaborations (namely, Critical Software SA). These activities will be
pursued in the scope of the new Computer Science Group that results from the
merge of the APS, FMC and LCC groups. |
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Funding, source,
dates |
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expected 15065 FCT Plurianual 2009, depends on outcome of pending evaluation Project proposal under
evaluation: PTDC/EIA-EIA/101701/2008
"Gilgamesh - improving eLearning using service oriented
architectures" (Principal investigator: José Paulo Leal, CRACS-UI) |
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