Portal de Programas de Pós-Graduação (UFRN)

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PPGTI/UFRN PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM TECNOLOGIA DA INFORMAÇÃO DIRETORIA DE ENSINO - IMD Phone: Not available E-mail: ppgti@imd.ufrn.br https://posgraduacao.ufrn.br/ppgti

Dissertations/Thesis

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2025

	Dissertations
1	BRUNA ALICE OLIVEIRA DE BRITO Development of an Intelligent System for Analysis and Management of Medical Texts about Cancer in Electronic Medical Records with Natural Language Processing Advisor : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AMALIA CINTHIA MENESES DO REGO ELIAS JACOB DE MENEZES NETO ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO JEAN MARIO MOREIRA DE LIMA Data: Jan 28, 2025 Show Abstract With the advancement of technology in healthcare sector in Brazil, Electronic Health Records (EHRs)have become an essential means in the management of clinical data, especially in themonitoring of chronic diseases like cancer, one of the main causes of mortality in the country.EHRs store a large amount of relevant information about the patient, including clinicalhistory, diagnoses, and treatments. However, much of this data is in free-text format and lacksstandardization, which makes its analysis and interpretation difficult. In this context, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML)techniques emerge as effective solutions for analyzing this information, enabling, forexample, the automation of data extraction and text summarization. Thus, the objective of thiswork is to develop an intelligent system capable of extracting and organizing clinicalinformation related to cancer present in EHRs, in order to allow efficient analysis andevaluation by the clinical team and management. This work will utilize models based on transformer architectures, such as BERT andGPT, to identify medical entities and automatically summarize patient information. Theapplication of these models aims to overcome the challenges associated with the complexityof clinical data and the scarcity of labeled datasets. The methodology will include theapplication of NLP techniques, the validation of the models, and the creation of dashboardsfor the visualization of processed data. It is expected that the results will contribute toimproving the management and care of oncology patients by automating processes,optimizing the time of health professionals, and promoting a more precise analysis based onclinical evidence.
2	MARCELO MARTINS PINTO Development of a System to Support the Adoption of DevSecOps Advisor : RAMON DOS REIS FONTES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO RAMON DOS REIS FONTES RODRIGO ROCHA GOMES E SOUZA ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH Data: Feb 25, 2025 Show Abstract The Brazilian Judiciary, made up of ninety-four Courts and their respective Information andCommunication Technology departments, faces the crucial challenge of unifying its judicialsystems. Despite the efforts of the National Justice Council (CNJ), a significant disparitybetween administrative and support systems still persists. This diversity of solutions,combined with different personnel structures, technical capabilities and infrastructures,makes it difficult to control the applications in use, meet deadlines and, especially, softwaresecurity. To address these challenges, it is proposed to implement software that supportsIT areas in adopting the DevSecOps methodology, integrating development, security andoperations. This approach aims to break down knowledge silos, distribute responsibilitiesand information more efficiently, increase transparency in the IT area, improve qualityand reduce development time, in addition to optimizing software maintenance throughoutits life cycle. . The development of the solution was based on a literature review to identifybest practices and tools for vulnerability analysis, elicitation of minimum functional andnon-functional requirements, choice of appropriate technology for programming language,development tools and database. Use cases and tools for proof of concept were defined,focused on application security assessments, using calls to the application programminginterface (API) and presenting results through a web interface. Key benefits identifiedinclude centralized visualization of information about applications and their dependencies,effective vulnerability analysis, flexible integration of security tools, and expanded visibilityinto application security for the entire IT team.
3	LUIS FHELIPE RIBEIRO GOMES NETTO MARINHO Architecture for Network Configuration Automation Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Advisor : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AUGUSTO JOSE VENANCIO NETO MARCOS CESAR MADRUGA ALVES PINHEIRO RAMON DOS REIS FONTES RODOLFO IPOLITO MENEGUETTE ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH Data: Mar 27, 2025 Show Abstract The demand for communication infrastructure has increased drastically in recent years, driving the adoption of new technologies with a focus on automation, reconfiguration, error detection, and high availability. This shift is leveraged through increasingly programmable networks, particularly with the use of technologies like Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and methodologies such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), allowing networks to be managed as software and opening up a range of possibilities for controlling network traffic flows. These processes require network assets to support protocols that enable this programmability, such as OpenFlow, and the transmission of telemetry information through structured data formats like YAML. However, these new methodologies are not easily applied to a legacy equipments, which often lacks adequate support for these new protocols. In this context, this work aims to develop an architecture that allows both legacy and modern network equipment to be managed through an IaC methodology, enabling the automation of routine tasks, fault detection, early identification of potential network issues, and configuration checks in a production corporate environment. The focus of this work is on network access equipment, as they are more numerous and geographically dispersed, allowing for standardized configuration of assets and better control over access to connectivity resources. The architecture consists of eight modular and independent components, enabling individual modification and inclusion according to the needs of the network equipment. As partial results, the configuration of a family of network equipment was consolidated and standardized based on a model, avoiding human configuration errors and allowing for periodic validations in the configuration of these assets, with the architecture ready for the development of automation methodologies.

2024

	Dissertations
1	THIAGO DE ABREU LIMA Integrated service management solution with orchestration Advisor : RAMON DOS REIS FONTES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : JOSÉ CASTILLO LEMA RAMON DOS REIS FONTES ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH UIRA KULESZA Data: Apr 2, 2024 Show Abstract The management of services offered in a computer network demands a manual effort to maintain the infrastructure. Typically, network administrators need to access multiple servers, install multiple software, and configure numerous files. This manual approach often results in errors and impacts the availability of services, as well as increasing the response time for change requests. The approach of infrastructure as code emerges as a solution to minimize the errors associated with traditional service management, but it requires network administrators to acquire programming skills, which are generally not part of their curriculum.In this context, this work presents the development of an integrated platform that uses infrastructure as code to automate service management. This platform allows network administrators to use a graphical interface to access servers and perform settings that were previously done manually. As a result, it is possible to reduce errors caused by configuration deviations, speed up the delivery of changes and promote greater consistency in the services offered.
2	JOELDSON COSTA DAMASCENO REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING AIDED BY SMART CHATBOTS: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE QUALITY OF ARTIFACTS Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO EDUARDO HENRIQUE DA SILVA ARANHA ISABEL DILLMANN NUNES GEBER LISBOA RAMALHO Data: Apr 9, 2024 Show Abstract Requirements Engineering is an essential process of collecting, documenting, and maintaining software requirements aligned with business objectives. The requirements elicitation phase is the starting point of software development, and it is a crucial, complex and time-consuming activity. To perform this role, professionals require specific skills such as effective communication, analytical reasoning, empathy, conflict resolution skills, moderation, self-confidence and persuasion. Unfortunately, there is a significant shortage of specialized professionals that has negatively impacted production, especially the quality of deliveries. Statistics reveal a considerable number of failures in software products due to problems in the requirements engineering stage. However, recent research points to the promising use of generative artificial intelligence as a solution to improve requirements engineering. Artificial intelligence tools have the potential to automate tasks such as requirements gathering and analysis, as well as assist in identifying and correcting ambiguous or incomplete requirements. In this study, our objective was to evaluate how requirements professionals perceive the application of a generative AI chatbot in requirements specification, taking into account the exploration of the ideal approach for preparing the prompt and evaluating the quality of the resulting artifacts. As a result, despite the prompt strategies developed by the participants, the experiment did not result in the production of artifacts with satisfactory quality for application in real projects in the context of requirements specification. However, the tool proved to be useful for professionals to explore previously unconsidered requirements, highlighting its usefulness for brainstorming in requirements elicitation. And as a major contribution, the experiment generated relevant practical recommendations for formatting prompts for requirements specification. It is expected that this modest contribution will serve to improve practices in the area of Requirements Engineering when employing new AI technologies.
3	VICTOR HUGO FREIRE RAMALHO Assessing the EvoMaster Tool for the Generation of Automated Test Cases for REST Applications Advisor : UIRA KULESZA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : UIRA KULESZA EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ROBERTA DE SOUZA COELHO ELDER JOSÉ REIOLI CIRILO Data: Apr 25, 2024 Show Abstract Software testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the quality and reliability of software systems. In recent years, medium and large-scale systems have been developed based on REST APIs. REST APIs stand out in this scenario due to their simplicity, scalability, and platform independence. In this context, a tool called EvoMaster stands out for its ability to effectively generate automated test cases. This dissertation evaluates this tool's effectiveness in generating test cases for REST applications, particularly in large-scale web systems. The evaluation was conducted on the SigSaude web system, and the results were evaluated in collaboration with one of its developers. Our results show that EvoMaster uncovered a significant number of defects. However, it revealed challenges related to its adoption, such as difficulty configuring the tool and regression testing with low code coverage.
4	MIGUEL DE OLIVEIRA ATAIDE Integrando Tecnicas de Recuperacao de Informacao e Agrupamento de Relatorios de Erros para Melhorar a Localizacao de Bugs para Sistemas Web Advisor : UIRA KULESZA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : UIRA KULESZA EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ROBERTA DE SOUZA COELHO RODRIGO BONIFACIO DE ALMEIDA Data: Apr 29, 2024 Show Abstract Bug localization is a challenging and costly task that involves massive amounts of data, especially for large projects. Many natural language information retrieval-based bug localization techniques have been proposed and applied. However, only a few of them investigated industrial projects. Furthermore, current state-of-the-art studies rely too much on the quality of the involved software artifacts, particularly the bug reports and the source code files. Another approach for bug localization is the use of crash report grouping, which consolidates a considerable number of crash reports into clusters to help find the causes of a bug. Our key insight is that the combination of the ideas of these approaches can enable and improve bug localization, especially for scenarios of industrial projects with realistic software artifacts. In this work, we propose LucyBug, a technique that integrates natural language information retrieval and crash report grouping to locate the buggy files of a reported bug. We perform a study on a large web-based system, focusing on reducing the dependency on high-quality software artifacts. Our best results show that our approach can find the buggy files on 69.20\% of the cases for a top 10 ranking. We also present an alternative that performs less than the complete method but does not depend on the textual similarity between source code classes and bug reports
5	MIKE JOB SANTOS PEREIRA DA SILVA AMIA: a monitoring tool of adverse reactions in patients during chemotherapy Advisor : ANNA GISELLE CAMARA DANTAS RIBEIRO RODRIGUES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANNA GISELLE CAMARA DANTAS RIBEIRO RODRIGUES FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES EDILMAR DE MOURA SANTOS Data: Apr 29, 2024 Show Abstract Cancer is one of the main causes of death in the world, with chemotherapy being one of the most frequently used treatments. Despite its effectiveness in eliminating cancer cells, this approach negatively impacts healthy cells, triggering considerable side effects, both physical and psychological. Therefore, it is common to develop some degree of depression and abandon treatment, making the development of support strategies for patients crucial. Coping with these symptoms at home is challenging for patients, especially considering the scarcity of tools in Brazilian Portuguese that offer support. In this context, the proposal to develop the AMIA tool arises, a chatbot that uses a structured dialogue based on a flowchart prepared by a medical team from the League Against Cancer. Patients can choose pre-defined symptoms and receive corresponding guidance. Additionally, the tool allows patients to enter free text, using natural language processing to identify symptoms and offer appropriate guidance based on a previous list of symptoms with their respective management strategies. The proposal aims to improve the quality of life of patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment, enabling more effective self-management of adverse symptoms in their daily environment.
6	ÍTALO OLIVEIRA FERNANDES Prediction of purified water quality parameters for use in the pharmaceutical industry Advisor : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR HEITOR MEDEIROS FLORENCIO THAIS GAUDENCIO DO REGO Data: Jul 22, 2024 Show Abstract Purified water plays a crucial role in the pharmaceutical industry, impacting the quality of processes and end products. Therefore, strict parameters must be followed to certify the quality of the purified water produced. Thus, monitoring the purified water production process is essential to ensure that quality parameters are maintained and complied with, and anticipating behavior and possible quality deviations can significantly help with this task. This study proposes a machine learning model based on LSTM networks to predict multiple steps for the conductivity of purified water in a treatment plant intended for industrial pharmaceutical use. For the development of the research, a pipeline was proposed that involved the stages of data collection and understanding, analysis and pre-processing, modeling and evaluation of the results. Real data from a pharmaceutical laboratory's water treatment plant, NUPLAM, was used. LSTM networks were chosen as the basis for prediction due to their efficiency in predictive tasks, thanks to their ability to memorize short- and long-term data. The results obtained showed that the choice of appropriate parameters and hyperparameters was essential for the efficiency of the proposed model. Furthermore, LSTM-based models are able to predict water conductivity, especially for short prediction horizons, while they lose accuracy as the horizon increases. This work contributes to the improvement of monitoring and control processes in pharmaceutical industries, including NUPLAM, as well as making an academic contribution to the study of time series prediction for water treatment systems.
7	GABRIEL CALDAS BARROS E SÁ Jaguar: A Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning approach with Transfer Learning for StarCraft II Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO MARCELO AUGUSTO COSTA FERNANDES VINCENT CORRUBLE Data: Nov 7, 2024 Show Abstract Real-Time Strategy Games are environments that generally simulate real military situations and present a series of challenges for the field of Artificial Intelligence, such as high complexity, large action and state spaces, partially observable maps, dealing with multiple units at the same time, and also the fact that tasks can be performed within the scope of micromanagement or macromanagement. In particular, Reinforcement Learning has stood out in the application and evolution of techniques capable of dealing with these challenges. A systematic review of the literature was then carried out to understand the state-of-the-art use of Deep Reinforcement Learning in Real-Time Strategy games. Some of the most relevant information raised were the use of StarCraft II as the main simulation environment, the need for more studies addressing macromanagement, the good performance of hierarchical architectures, and the importance of using action masking and transfer learning techniques, which can reduce the complexity of the problem and the computational cost. Given this and the challenges in this field, this work proposes Jaguar, a hierarchical architecture capable of handling both macro and micromanagement, while requiring few resources during training. Jaguar implements techniques for action and state shaping, invalid action masking through the state and the communication between hierarchical levels, different types of rewards, and uses the DQN model for micro decisions and DDQN for strategic decisions. The agent was trained in a base scenario and transfer learning was applied to two other scenarios. The results show that the agent was able to perform both micromanagement and macromanagement, presenting good learning in the base scenario and promising results in subsequent scenarios, demonstrating that the proposed approach was able to deal significantly well with the complexity of StarCraft II scenarios using few computational resources, leaving room for future improvement.
8	JONATHAN JALLES SILVA BATISTA Recommendation of Financial Products Using Machine Learning Advisor : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO ELIAS JACOB DE MENEZES NETO THAIS GAUDENCIO DO REGO Data: Dec 17, 2024 Show Abstract Recommendation systems play a crucial role across various sectors, including finance, by providing personalized suggestions to clients based on their histories and preferences. In the financial and credit industries, such systems have the potential to revolutionize how institutions engage with clients, particularly through personalized recommendations for financial products like investments, insurance, and loans. This study analyzed 208,570 customer records from three types of financial insurance services to develop a solution capable of supporting marketing strategies for offering these services to the clients of a Fintech. Clustering with K-Means, tested with 2 to 6 clusters, revealed significant customer segmentation patterns. While the two-cluster configuration achieved the highest Silhouette Score (0.4169), the four-cluster approach provided more informative segmentation for strategic purposes. For predictive modeling, after initial tests and random hyperparameter search with 5-fold and 10-fold cross-validation with different models, XGBoost and LightGBM both reported 82% recall. LightGBM was selected for final evaluation due to its lower computational cost and comparable performance to XGBoost in this context. When applied to the validation set, which had a significantly different insurance distribution from the training data due to covariate shift, the model's performance dropped significantly to 43.1% recall. The model performed best with Insurance C (63.7% recall) but struggled with Insurances A (45.8% recall) and B (2.6% recall). When trained on 80% of the combined dataset and validated on the remaining 20%, LightGBM showed substantial improvements in accuracy and F1-score metrics for Insurances A and C, achieving recalls of 83.33% and 81.66%, respectively. Although the model's performance with combined data was significantly better, covariate shifts remain a critical challenge in modeling a solution for the purposes of this study.

2023

	Dissertations
1	PEDRO HENRIQUE RODRIGUES EMERICK Proposal of an architecture for multilevel (pseudo)anonymization of healthcare data Advisor : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO PATRÍCIA RAQUEL VIEIRA SOUSA DIEGO LUIZ KREUTZ Data: Feb 27, 2023 Show Abstract In recent decades, technological evolution has brought numerous advances allowing intensive collection, processing, and storage of personal data. There is much evidence, mainly revelations, about the operations and data breaches of large companies with data as their most significant asset, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Uber. Due to this finding, there is a growing concern about using these data, evidenced by the profusion of laws worldwide that aim to protect individuals' privacy. The various legislations point to the need to implement processes and techniques that guarantee data privacy, among which is the (pseudo)anonymization of data. It is in this context and seeking to contribute to the protection of privacy that, in this work, an architecture is proposed for the multilevel (pseudo)anonymization of health data. Multilevel, as data is pseudonymized at two levels, one local and one global, thus ensuring that data from multiple providers can be related yet (pseudo)anonymized. The focus on the health area is, on the one hand, a challenging application, given the sensitivity of the data.The architecture proposed in this work was implemented as a proof of concept and evaluated from a set of tests. Test results suggest that the architecture enables correct anonymization at the source, secure linking of (pseudo)anonymized data across multiple sources, and even allows reidentification for cases involving the security of the individuals involved.
2	DEGEMAR PEREIRA DA SILVA Authentication Scheme and Key Agreement for Internet of Things Using MQTT Protocol Advisor : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : LOURENCO ALVES PEREIRA JUNIOR GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA RAMON DOS REIS FONTES ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO Data: Feb 28, 2023 Show Abstract The Internet of Things is passing for a large growth, allowing that more devices be connected in the Internet and so, taking to a increase volume data. This technology pass through several challenges and one of the main is the information security. In IoT environments the security is essential for not permit the entrance of bad intentional devices, offer secure communication and data protection. Exist a lot of factors that are connected to a good security system, for exemple, athentication, criptography, secure communication canal and users identification. This work apresent a authentication scheme for Internet of Things that can be use with MQTT protocol. The propose scheme was developed using a set of tecniques like, logic port XOR, symetric criptography and hash functions. Other than that, is propose the use of PUF tecnique for unique identification of devices in IoT. The algorithm was tested using a tool for formal validation of security protocols, the scyther. In addition, the schema was implemented in a test environment using virtual machines. Therefore the python language was used to develop the schema and the Mosquitto service, with the MQTT protocol. During the performance evaluation, it was evident the existence of a commitment in the computational resources depending on of the provides security, existing a space to improve of the algorithm. On the other hand, the results showed that the schema own the necessary requirements to provide safe authentication and protection to data sended and received by devices.
3	LUCAS NOVAIS ASSUNÇÃO Lnowledge loss in software projects due to turnover of IT professionals: A study at the Federal University of Viçosa – UFV Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA FERNANDO MARQUES FIGUEIRA FILHO AWDREN DE LIMA FONTAO Data: Apr 20, 2023 Show Abstract Knowledge is considered one of the most important strategic assets for contemporary organizations. Prusak (1997) highlights that ‘knowledge and intelligence are connected: intelligence is necessary to generate knowledge and knowledge provides the basis through which intelligence can be applied.’ Intelligence comes from people that, supported by Information Technology (IT), execute, manage, and make the best decisions for good performance of organizations, whether public or private. Research shows that the turnover of IT professionals has become a critical problem and the deficit may reach half a million by 2025, reflecting a significant acceleration of the demand in that sector. Furthermore, 53,000 people graduate every year in Brazil - a third of the projected demand - and almost 50% of those already hired in the last 12 months have had two additional job offers, which are considered and may represent the voluntary departure from the current organization in the short or medium term. The turnover of IT professionals brings several costs, minimizing and containing its damage has become a difficult and recurrent challenge for Human Resources, not only for economic reasons, but especially for the management and preservation of the main immaterial asset directly responsible for the success of any organization: knowledge. This paper will present a study about knowledge loss and retention at Federal University of Viçosa, where the turnover phenomenon for the position of Information Technology Technician in the last two years was considered relevant in order to ensure software development, preserving the institutional memory, and avoiding possible loss of public resources. A handbook for knowledge retention in software projects will be elaborated in this study in order to support managers and team members in implementing such actions in their work routine. The goal is to ensure good work progress, preserve institutional memory and avoid eventual public resource loss.
4	WILLIE LAWRENCE DA PAZ SILVA Impact of Database Schema Evolution on Software Availability Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA UIRA KULESZA RODRIGO BONIFACIO DE ALMEIDA Data: Apr 28, 2023 Show Abstract In the software’s life cycle that uses relational databases to store data, we observed thatthe natural evolution of the application takes to changes in the database schema, thatis the structure that defines how the data is stored. During the execution of operationsresponsible for changes in the database schema, the database can interrupt the dataaccess until the schema change operation finishes. We call these operations that causeinterruptions in data access “blocking operations”. The blocking operations are a problem,particularly in systems that need high availability as monitoring systems, sale systemswith high traffic volume, government systems, etc. In this work, we study the databaseschema evolution of a real-world application to understand the schema change operation’sblocking nature. Moreover, we performed a series of controlled experiments aiming toanalyze the impact of schema change operations in the availability of an application beingused during the the schema evolution. Finally, our work implements suggestions fromindustry practitioners to solve the data unavailability problem during the schema evolution.Thus, the same experiment set was repeated in a new scenario where the practitioner’ssuggestions were applied. Our results show that the suggestions from practitioners areefficient until a limit, in such a way that databases with a high number of registries canhave an evident decrease in the duration of database unavailability, but not enough to thefinal user.
5	ARYCLENIO XAVIER BARROS A Proposal of Bad Smells in React Systems Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ELDER JOSÉ REIOLI CIRILO LEONARDO DA SILVA SOUSA Data: Jun 23, 2023 Show Abstract The Javascript language is one of the most famous development tools today, gaining visibility in several areas such as web games, three-dimensional renderings, artificial intelligence and, mainly, the development of web applications, with its major role in the construction of interfaces through front end development. In this ecosystem, several libraries and frameworks were built, the most famous being the React library, developed and published by Meta (Facebook). Applications built on React, like any other system, need to remain usable and relevant over time. As empirical evidence shows, the presence of bad smells in the code might compromise the software evolvability. Based on this context, this work presents, based on mapping studies of the academic and gray literature, a proposal of bad smells oriented to the React library, integrating them to a code detection tool called ReactLint, which will flag code flaws and will indicate possible solutions to developers who use it. This work aims to validate the proposed smells, as well as the built tool, in order to identify whether they can affect the performance of a React application in the short and long term
6	IURI JANMICHEL DE SOUSA LIMA Development of a machine learning-based tool for predicting participants in evaluation processes Advisor : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : DIEGO SILVEIRA COSTA NASCIMENTO ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR Data: Jun 23, 2023 Show Abstract This work was developed within the Núcleo Permanente de Concursos (Permanent Center of Contests) of UFRN, the Comperve. All the management of the appraisal processes that are organized by this Center derive directly from the number of participants enrolled in its appraisal processes. Based on these assumptions, this work presents a model for the use of machine learning techniques on the logistical organization of the evaluation processes organized by Comperve. The model presented here was created from the data bases available in the Center, which contained information about the evaluation processes carried out by Comperve since the beginning of the 2000s. In order to carry out this work, the execution context of the activities where this Center is currently located was investigated, analyzing how the logistic organization of its processes is done, integrating the data that was decentralized and de-standardized, and creating the training model that achieved more than 98% of accuracy in the classification of the quantity of participants enrolled in its processes. For the application of this model, an application using the infrastructure of the management system of the appraisal processes, which is currently being developed, was developed.
7	CEZAR MIRANDA PAULA DE SOUZA A Process for Performance Evaluation and Change Management of Machine Learning Models in Healthcare applications Advisor : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ADRIAO DUARTE DORIA NETO ANNA GISELLE CAMARA DANTAS RIBEIRO RODRIGUES CICILIA RAQUEL MAIA LEITE ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO Data: Jun 26, 2023 Show Abstract Fostered by hardware and software advances, Machine Learning (ML) started to ramp up exponentially in the last few decades, and has become instrumental for advancing the work in the most varied areas of knowledge. Though generally restricted to controlledspace experiments, over previously obtained and curated data samples, results have been outstanding, which gave rise to such levels of popularity for ML applications that it’s hard to find an area of human knowledge left untouched by Machine Learning. In such context, establishing minimum performance guarantees over unknown, real-world data, becomes paramount, especially in Healthcare applications, where errors can lead to life-threatening situations. There’s an ML discipline, called Machine Learning Operations (or MLOps, for short), which concerns itself with ML Models’ lifecycle management, from conception to deployment in production (real-world) environments, including monitoring its real-world behavior. Once deployed, models are subject to performance decay issues, such as drift, which has motivated recent studies on continual learning and Continuous Monitoring of ML models. The present work focuses on identifying state-of-the-art techniques for evaluating model fitness in real-world usage scenarios, and on how to establish a feedback-loop to include continuous monitoring and change management in the models’ lifecycle. Finally, the present work aims to apply evaluation techniques in a case study of ML models applied to Healthcare, and establish a process for evaluating models. The target models were developed as part of the Remote Assistance Platform (PAR), and is currently in effective use in an oncologic ICU.
8	INÁCIA FERNANDES DA COSTA NETA A Study on Energy Consumption in Supercomputers. Advisor : GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO IVAN SARAIVA SILVA SAMUEL XAVIER DE SOUZA Data: Oct 31, 2023 Show Abstract The recent technological revolution and the exorbitant increase in data required invest- ments and improvements in the IT area. There are several activities that require increased processing and the indispensability of high availability. One of these activities is research, carried out by academic centers, for example, which lack high-performance equipment for highly complex tasks. Their energy consumption becomes huge and expensive, requiring studies of different strategies in the area. This document presents an initial study for improving server energy management in order to save energy consumption and financial expenses. A supercomputer is appointed as the object of study, from which data on com- putational and energy consumption was collected, generating specific and comparative analyzes between them. Finally, a strategy is suggested to reduce the energy consump- tion of this equipment as a proposal for an opportunity to save energy and consequently financially.
9	ALEX AUGUSTO DE SOUZA SANTOS Towards an architecture for supporting computer network configuration based on natural language and device discovery Advisor : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : Bruno Dalmazo ELIZAMA DAS CHAGAS LEMOS RAMON DOS REIS FONTES ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH Data: Nov 24, 2023 Show Abstract The internet is becoming increasingly accessible and available to a larger number of people. However, internet users nowadays are no longer enthusiasts or academics as they were in its origin; they are ordinary people. Consequently, users who need to manage a local network under their responsibility are not technically skilled individuals with knowledge of computer network Niche language. In the context of a residential local network, the growing presence of devices and the need to control network access demand solutions that are accessible and intuitive for common users who want greater control over their network.However, home router configuration interfaces are currently limited, unintuitive, and unfriendly to the general public. Consequently, they hinder access control and customization of advanced settings as they require specialized technical knowledge. Moreover, the lack of standardization in these interfaces creates accessibility barriers for users. As a result, users face difficulties in effectively configuring their residential routers, limiting their ability to control network access and customize settings. The use of natural language, whether through voice or text, becomes an interface that presents an advantage in this context due to its simplicity and accessibility for this audience.This work addresses this issue and proposes a layered architecture that utilizes natural language and automation resources to facilitate the configuration of residential networks, particularly focusing on device access control and device class control. This approach aims to eliminate the need for specialized technical knowledge from the user. To achieve this goal, this work reviews the state of the art regarding the use of natural language in the context of intent-based network configuration and contributes with a systematic mapping of the use of natural language for network configuration in the domestic context, along with existing strategies for device identification and classification in a network with heterogeneous devices. By using natural language processing tools facilitated by artificial intelligence and features such as automatic device identification and classification, it is expected to offer common users a more intuitive and efficient experience in configuring their residential networks.To validate the proposed solution, a prototype in the Python language will be developed, establishing a hierarchy of device types and a hierarchy of configuration intentions, both compatible with the residential environment. The prototype will utilize communication between APIs and the SSH protocol to provide interoperability between the proposed layers.The research results indicate that the use of natural language for network configuration is still underexplored in the residential context, particularly concerning automatic detection of device types present in the network. At this point, the proposed hierarchies and the necessary descriptors for the prototype's functioning have been established.
10	RIVALDO FERNANDES DE ALBUQUERQUE PEREIRA An Anomaly Detection Architecture in SDN using computational intelligence Advisor : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : DOUGLAS D. J. DE MACEDO MARCOS CESAR MADRUGA ALVES PINHEIRO ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH UIRA KULESZA Data: Nov 29, 2023 Show Abstract Emerging technologies such as the Cloud, 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing encompass controlling and networking millions of devices every day. Managing traditional networks with millions of devices is a complex task as it requires configuring data traffic routes on each device in the network. With it centralized network controller, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can help simplify the configuration and management of a network with this many devices. Many studies have researched the use of different computational intelligence (CI) methods to detect anomalies in SDN, this work defines a framework to validate, promote and explain, using Explainable AI, any of these CI methods that best detects each of the different types of anomalies, and also define architecture based on hexagonal microservices and with a unique data model based on the application and information framework, Open Digital Architecture, from the TM Forum
11	YVES DANTAS NEVES Clustering Techniques Applied to Profile Creation on 5G Radio Access Networks Datasets Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANNE MAGALY DE PAULA CANUTO ARAKEN DE MEDEIROS SANTOS DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR Data: Dec 8, 2023 Show Abstract The Internet arising and the Information and Communication Technologies development expanded the volume and diversification of data sources, thus opening up new opportunities in the industry and academic fields for Machine Learning Techiniques and Big Data related applications. In the same perspective is the extensive amount of data generated by mobile networks infrastructures worldwide. The Radio Access Networks (RAN), crucial for the telecommunications infrastructure, work as a really important layer for the wireless communications and produce a significant data volume due to the network counters measurements which stand as the enablers for the monitoring and visibility on network performance indicators and service quality. The present work consists of applying clustering algorithms to create profiles on datasets related to 5G Radio Access Network Indicators regarding traffic, volume and channel quality so the labeled data can get used on classification problems and as a support tool for identifying improvements, performance management and operational efficiency of Radio Access Networks.
12	ORMAZABAL LIMA DO NASCIMENTO Comparative study between transformers models applied to the development of chatbots Advisor : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR THAIS GAUDENCIO DO REGO Data: Dec 15, 2023 Show Abstract Models based on trasformer architecture have shown promising results in areas of study such as natural language processing (NLP). In this same area of study, chatbots are tools widely used in customer service tasks. This work will use RASA and its DIET classifier to perform a comparative study of the impact of pre-trained trasformer models in the development of a chatbot. As a scenario for this study, the case of the Court of Auditors of Rio Grande do Norte (TCE/RN) and its need to implement a chatbot aimed at improving the efficiency of its public service sector was analyzed.
13	IURI CABRAL PAIVA Exploring loan patterns: a predictive perspective in the Zila Mamede university library Advisor : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ARAKEN DE MEDEIROS SANTOS DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO ISMENIA BLAVATSKY DE MAGALHÃES JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR Data: Dec 22, 2023 Show Abstract The university library has become a longstanding institution within universities, playing a crucial role in supporting the teaching-learning process, research, and university extension. One of its most significant aspects is the loan of informational materials, especially books, to its users. Understanding the profile of users who make these loans and contextualizing their needs is essential for effective planning and optimized resource management within the library. In this context, this study aims to investigate the dynamics of book loans in the circulating collection of the Zila Mamede Central Library (BCZM), with the goal of anticipating user demands through the analysis of historical loan data. Initially, Exploratory Data Analysis was employed to understand relevant aspects of the interaction between students and the library, using loan data and information associated with students' academic lives. Clustering, performed through KNN and Hierarchical Clustering algorithms, allowed the identification of distinct student profiles, enriching the understanding of the specific needs of each group. Finally, to fully achieve the proposed objective, the Random Forest and SARIMA models were used to predict loans for the year 2019, using data grouped on a weekly and monthly basis. The results indicate that students who use loan services tend to have a higher academic completion rate and a lower incidence of withdrawals and cancellations. Regarding prediction models, both SARIMA and Random Forest proved promising in identifying trends in loans, highlighting their applicability to the Zila Mamede Central Library. This study not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of book loans but also provides valuable insights for the library to proactively anticipate user needs, thereby improving the effectiveness of its operations.

2022

	Dissertations
1	DIOGO EUGÊNIO DA SILVA CORTEZ DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTELLIGENT TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEM BASED ON COMPUTATIONAL VISION Advisor : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ALUISIO IGOR REGO FONTES DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO Data: Mar 4, 2022 Show Abstract A vehicle fleet in Rio Grande do Norte has increased by approximately 250 thousand vehicles in the last 5 years, or 7% per year. Considering that 80% of the population lives in urban areas, traffic management is becoming one of the most important issues. Traffic lights that operate with fixed time (STF) to control the flow of vehicles are not efficient in all databases. At this time, in the literature, many studies have advanced traffic light control based on vehicle density as a solution to improve traffic flow. With the advancement of Computer Vision (VC) technologies, such as detection and classification techniques for moving objects and the requirement of little computational power to perform these tasks, it was possible to develop an intelligent traffic control system based on VC. This low-cost solution was implemented to take advantage of the FTS system, cameras and logical network infrastructure already present in municipalities in Brazil. An application developed and implemented on a computer was used to capture photo(s) of the traffic light(s), count the vehicles and calculate the time needed for them to make the crossing. The Raspberry Pi 3 controlled like traffic lights. Compared to the STF, there was a gain of up to 33% in the fluidity of traffic. The VC was used to count the vehicles crossing or traffic lights, thus, it was possible to warn about traffic jams and also to create a database that can be used for decision-making by the bodies with circumscription about the lanes.
2	HONORE VICENTE CESARIO Towards an architecture for device management through voice-controlled virtual assistants Advisor : ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : André Figueira Riker Bruno Dalmazo GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH Data: Apr 12, 2022 Show Abstract The number of IoT devices in the world grows exponentially and is expected to exceed 75 billion in the coming years. Its use in home automation processes has grown and, as a result, an increasing number of users without technical knowledge (or with reduced technical knowledge) have made use of these devices. The wide variety of manufacturers and the lack of standardization in the features available can generate doubts among users and lead them to make wrong settings, harming the management of these equipment. Performing these settings can be even more challenging for people with disabilities. According to data presented by IBGE, more than 45 million people have some type of disability, which corresponds to almost 24% of the population. Faced with these challenges, this work proposes a layered architecture, based on independent modules, where this architecture will allow, through voice commands or text and using natural language, a user can perform complex configurations, without the need for advanced technical knowledge regarding infrastructure or specifics of the network device used. For this purpose, among other technologies, natural language processing, machine learning and text-to-speech conversion will be used. A survey of the state of the art regarding solutions aimed at configuring, activating and monitoring devices is presented, as well as a prototype for validation and evaluation of the functioning of the architecture proposed in this research. For future improvements can be implemented in the chatbot, its design was submitted to an evaluation to identify possible existing problems. Finally, in the quantitative tests carried out to verify the assertiveness of the prototype developed, its accuracy was greater than 83%.
3	DIOGO CIRNE NUNES A Platform to Promote Interoperability between Public Safety Agencies Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO LENARDO CHAVES E SILVA Data: Jun 27, 2022 Show Abstract With technological advances facilitating more and more existing processes, it is common to seek the development of techniques that help in the automation of procedures previously performed entirely manually. However, it is common that some services are already used to being done in an analogical way, making it difficult for a change in the already ingrained practices. The difficulty increases even more when the procedures involve the action of more than one entity from different organizations, each with its own practices already used for years and different from the others. Interoperability between systems is a technique that is increasingly being sought on services that involves different agencies. It aims to allow the involved entities to operate together, bringing little or no change to the practices already used and acting in a transparent way for the user. Therefore, this work proposes a middeware platform to provide interoperability between police and forensic agencies of public safety, aiming at improving the service provided by them and a faster response for society in the services of investigation of life crimes.
4	RAMON SANTOS MALAQUIAS An HL7 FHIR-based middleware for Health Information Systems Advisor : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO ROSSANA MARIA DE CASTRO ANDRADE Data: Jul 15, 2022 Show Abstract The provision of health services is increasingly being supported by different technological solutions, such as Health Information Systems (HIS), Electronic Health Records (EHR), or solutions based on eHealth and mHealth. These solutions aim to support decisions and optimize processes in the provision of health services through the collection, processing, and availability of health data. Therefore, the use of digital solutions in the health context brings benefits both from the point of view of the management of health facilities and the clinical team that deals directly or indirectly with patients. Digital solutions for the health context are used in different environments, such as hospitals, clinics, laboratories, among others. Thus, it is common that different solutions are created and used to solve specific problems, with different characteristics and for different environments, but still in the health context. For example, a hospital may use different systems in its day-to-day activities, such as an Electronic Patient Record (PEP) to manage information regarding patient consultations and treatments; a system for monitoring patients admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU); and a system for managing outpatient examinations. These different systems deal with different types of data, resulting in an ecosystem of heterogeneous solutions that are not easily integrated, making interoperability between these solutions difficult. Interoperability consists of the ability of an application to transfer data to another application (syntactic interoperability) and the ability to interpret the data that is transferred (semantic interoperability). Considering the diversity of types of solutions that can be used in the health context and the potential gain that can be obtained by integrating data from different solutions in this context, the interoperability requirement becomes important to be contemplated by Health Information Systems solutions. Health and that is why Middleware-based solutions emerge as an option for solutions that support interoperability between health systems. A Middleware consists of the layer of software that is between the technological and application levels, being above the operating system and below the application level, providing a common programming abstraction and aiming to facilitate the integration between systems through strategies of abstraction of the schedule. By promoting high-level abstractions for programmers, middlewares facilitate integration steps between heterogeneous systems, making code more portable. In the health context, there are a series of middlewares that propose to support the integration between already used applications. However, the review of the state of the art carried out in this work shows that the solutions are focused on different areas (such as image exams, sensing, and mobile computing solutions) and do not use open interoperability standards that facilitate the exchange of information from different clinical data, such as HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources - HL7 FHIR). It is based on this context that this work describes a Middleware Based on HL7 FHIR for Health Information Systems. The proposed solution aims to promote interoperability between different applications and health information systems, making the details of their implementations clearer become invisible to developers, focusing only on the communication layer and enabling integration between these different solutions. In this sense, throughout the work, the requirements of the solution will be described, as well as details of its architecture and implementation, resulting in the realization of a Proof of Concept carried out with 5 applications integrated through Middleware, namely: the Remote Assistance Platform (PAIR); the Clinical Data Platform (SigSaúde); the Information System for the Management of ICU Beds (Beds); the System for the Management of Notifications of COVID Cases in RN (SUVEPI); and the Testing Management System for Suspected COVID-19 Patients in RN (Exams).
5	SAMUEL ALVES DA COSTA Evaluation and improvement of the STI/UFRN Process of System Tests Advisor : SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ROBERTA DE SOUZA COELHO RODRIGO BONIFACIO DE ALMEIDA SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS UIRA KULESZA Data: Jul 18, 2022 Show Abstract All stages of a software production cycle are important in order to guarantee the quality of the final product. In the context of Superintendência de Tecnologia da Informação - STI, the stage of system testing occurs at the end of the process and many times with a short deadline. Thus, this study makes an approach of creation and monitoring of automated system tests with a tool denominated UI.Visão in the context of Sistema Integrado de Gestão de Atividades Acadêmicas - SIGAA of UFRN. The follow-up consists of the inclusion of automated regression tests, based on equivalence classes, in the process of continuous integration and assessment processes; from this point, test reports with graphs are generated. This strategy aims to enable an improvement in visibility on the part of test leadership/management in order to assist in decision-making, such as, for example, evaluating automated system tests that should or should not be continued, as well as evaluating the benefits of automation using the metrics of number of system tests performed at each execution and number of automated tests in use. This strategy has positive impacts on the software production process, by lowering costs and increasing testing capacity. Therefore, an intervention was made in the current system testing process in order to add the new approach and be able to improve the follow-up.
6	WALLINSON DE LIMA SILVA Using Metamorphic Tests to Verify a Chatbot Application Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ROBERTA DE SOUZA COELHO FABIANO CUTIGI FERRARI Data: Jul 26, 2022 Show Abstract Chatbots are software that make use of Artificial Intelligence (IA) to provide interaction between humans and machines through Natural Language (NL), resembling a conversation between two people. It is a current topic that has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, this type of application presents a behavior that is sometimes unpredictable, as different users can request the same set of actions in different ways and the application can return something different to each of the users. This makes the software testing activity somewhat complex, since it is not simple to define the test oracle. The test oracle is the process that verifies the test result, judging the response of the application, program or function as correct or incorrect through specification and planning. In this scenario, an appropriate testing technique to deal with the oracle problem is Metamorphic Testing (MT). This technique was proposed as a solution to minimize the oracle definition problem, since the application response verification process is performed by the definition of Metamorphic Relations (MRs), elements that assume the role of the oracle. Metamorphic relationships are properties of the test object application that define the behavior that the application must maintain when submitted to a given test case. However, despite Metamorphic Testing being a well-established technique to deal with the problem of the lack of a test oracle, it is still little explored in the context of chatbots. Thus, the objective of this work was to investigate the applicability and effectiveness of the MT technique in a chatbot application developed by a public company. Therefore, it was necessary to develop a tool to automate the test process by applying the MT concepts. For the evaluation of the technique we selected 22 Source Test Cases (STCs) divided into 3 Intents and input this information into the automation tool to run the tests of the 20 Metamorphic Relations. Through the execution of the tool, it was possible to generate more than 4100 Follow-up Test Cases (FTCs), derived from the STCs. The verification took place in two test batteries using two versions of the same application with 3 months of development difference. With the application of the MT technique, it was observed that 25% of the FTCs revealed defects, representing more than 900 disapproved FTCs, per version tested.
7	EDILSON LOBO DE MEDEIROS JÚNIOR A PLATFORM FOR THE MULTIANNUAL PLAN: PROPOSAL FOR MODERNIZING A BUSINESS PROCESS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF RN Advisor : ANNA GISELLE CAMARA DANTAS RIBEIRO RODRIGUES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANNA CLAUDIA DOS SANTOS NOBRE ANNA GISELLE CAMARA DANTAS RIBEIRO RODRIGUES GUSTAVO BEZERRA PAZ LEITAO Data: Jul 28, 2022 Show Abstract The Multiannual Plan is the instrument that defines the Government's priorities for a four years period. Its elaboration process involves government dimensioning strategic actions, scenarios analysis, thematic programs elaboration, goals dimensioning, financial resources allocation and precedes the Annual Budget Law elaboration. Although the current legislation defines what should be included in these budget pieces and there is literature that guides the elaboration of strategic plans and projects, there is a weakness in the planning and execution of the state public budget, which can be proven by the low level of reach. of goals exposed in the annual evaluation reports. This work brings a survey of the Process of Elaboration of the Multiannual Plan of Rio Grande do Norte State current situation, a proposal of modernization of this business process and the prototype of a Platform of Elaboration of the MPA to support in the execution of some activities of the referred process, offering an environment for monitoring the design of programs and contributing to the construction of more efficient plans.
8	FÁBIO ARRUDA MAGALHÃES A proposal of an architecture for managing prices registration Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AWDREN DE LIMA FONTAO EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA EVERTON RANIELLY DE SOUSA CAVALCANTE Data: Jul 29, 2022 Show Abstract The purchasing and contracting processes are essential to meet the operational needs of any organization, thus enabling it to reach its goals. This reality is also common to all the agencies that make up the Public Administration. Unlike the private sector, public purchasing and contracting must be carried out through competitive biddings, ensuring wide disclosure and transparency of information. Over the years, the Brazilian legislation dealing with this issue has been improved several times. The electronic auction and the Price Registration System (SRP), for example, were important instruments that contributed to the modernization of this important process. The supply contracts (Acts of Price Registry) that have their origin in the electronic bidding conducted by SRP require an efficient information management process from public managers, so that the public budget is executed optimally. However, some information related to this domain, contained in the System for the Administration of General Services (SIASG), are dispersed in different modules, favoring the use of parallel controls, prone to problems such as redundancy and inconsistency in the data. Without a trusted place to consult this information, managers' decision-making can be compromised. Although the literature on the themes and methods covered in this work is extensive, no solution to the problem was found. In this master dissertation, we present the specification, design, and evaluation of a software architecture that aims to structure the essential information for the management of price registration minutes, which aims to contribute to the decision-making process related to the application of budget resources. The execution of these steps was based on a process model widely experienced by the industry, with some adaptations. Design Science Research (DSR) was the research method that guided the conception of the proposed artifact. The results of the evaluations show that future instances of the proposed architecture have the potential to solve the problems identified.
9	RENAN DE SOUZA DOS SANTOS Procedural Generation of Puzzles for Game Development Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : HELIDA SALLES SANTOS RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS Data: Jul 29, 2022 Show Abstract Puzzle games are known for having a low replay factor. One way to increase the replay factor of a puzzle game is to use Procedural Content Generation (PCG). This research analyzes several PCG and artificial intelligence methods, and its applications in different types of video games to identify the best way to create a PCG solution for puzzle games. A 2D path-building puzzle game was developed without guaranteeing the solvability of all levels. A new game will be developed with an new approach in PCG to resolve this problem and apply good practices in puzzle game design in a way that generated puzzles are unique, solvable and engaging.
10	WALTER LOPES NETO DC Health: Online Anomaly Detection in Datacenters Advisor : ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ADRIAO DUARTE DORIA NETO ANDRÉ GUSTAVO DUARTE DE ALMEIDA GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO ROGER KREUTZ IMMICH Data: Aug 30, 2022 Show Abstract Datacenters are critical environments for the availability of technology-based services. Aiming at the high availability of these services, performance metrics of nodes such as Virtual Machines (VM) or VM clusters are widely monitored. These metrics, such as CPU and memory utilization, can show anomalous patterns associated with failures and performance degradation, culminating in resource exhaustion and total node failure. The field of early detection of anomalies, that is, patterns in data with different behavior than expected, can enable remediation measures, such as VM migration and resource reallocation before losses occur. However, traditional monitoring tools often use fixed thresholds for detecting problems on nodes and lack automatic ways to detect anomalies at runtime. In this sense, machine learning techniques have been reported to detect anomalies in computer systems with online and offline approaches. This work proposes the application called DC Health, as an approach to anticipate the online detection of anomalies in datacenter nodes. The purpose of DC Health is to detect anomalies in the behavior of hosts and alert datacenter operators so that investigation and remediation measures can be taken. For this, this research was conducted from i) Systematic Literature Mapping, ii) problem modeling from real VM data and iii) DC Health evaluation using the prequential method in 6 real-world datasets. The results showed that DC Health excelled in constant memory usage and detection accuracy above 75%. As future work, it is mainly expected to evaluate the detection tool in cloud computing scenarios and develop automated mechanisms for diagnosis and remediation.
11	LUIZ DE FRANÇA AFONSO FERREIRA FILHO SCAD - A Proposition for the Design of Skills-centric Assessments Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO MÁRIO JORGE FERREIRA RODRIGUES Data: Aug 31, 2022 Show Abstract Computational intelligence has revolutionized the way many human activities take place. In the field of education, a promising branch concerns adaptive education. This model uses computer systems to orchestrate the interaction with students and provide resources and personalized learning activities that aim to meet the unique demands of each individual. Inspired by the Knowledge Space Theory (KST) and Evidence-Centered Design (ECD), this work presents a new approach to competence-based adaptive education. The proposal consists of a framework for creating skills-centered assessments, a method for tailoring these activities, and a computational system that embeds the framework and the proposed method to promote adaptive education centered on skills development. At the end, we suggest a qualitative analysis to assess the benefits of the system and whether its return is more indicative than a traditional approach.

2021

	Dissertations
1	CARLOS ANTONIO RAMÍREZ BELTRÁN Portability of Models by using Transfer Learning to predict undergraduate students performance Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO ADJA FERREIRA DE ANDRADE MARCELO DAMASCENO DE MELO Data: Mar 24, 2021 Show Abstract In recent years, one of the major challenges in education has been to predict students’ performance in a certain and reliable way in order to apply different strategies toimprove their academic deficiencies. In this way, there are many works focused on finding Machine Learning (ML) models individually, but few use the knowledge acquired from student data of a course degree to predict the students’ outcome of other curses’s degree. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to analise the portability of ML models by using Transfer Learning (TL) in students’ logs extracted form the Moodle system, aiming to predict undergraduate students performance in different courses. Through the applied experimental methodology, each of the two types of groupings formed by the disciplineswill be evaluated: those formed according to the undergraduate course and those according to the activities used in Moodle. The data extraction of each group will be performed from the Moodle logs, using the following evaluation methods: cross-validation and hold-out. With this, it will be possible to know whether these evaluations, all performed on the predictive models with the J48 algorithm, tend to show different results in relation to the portability of forecasting models. For evaluation, two scenarios were developed for the execution of experiments, so that each experiment consists of two parts: the choice of models, using the AUC ROC index for Experiment 1 and the F-Measure for Experiment 2; and the validation of the models, using the Precision index for Experiment 1 and the Recall for Experiment 2. The results, even in the evaluation phase, allow us to affirm that it is possible to apply transfer learning between models of the same group in some cases.
2	FERNANDO DA CRUZ LOPES OpenData Manager: a tool to manage the procees of creation and monitoring the Open Data Plan Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO ANDRÉ GUSTAVO DUARTE DE ALMEIDA FELLIPE ARAÚJO ALEIXO Data: Mar 30, 2021 Show Abstract O acesso a informações públicas vem se mostrado de grande importância no estreitamento da relação sociedade e governo, possibilitando à sociedade uma maior interatividade nas ações públicas. O desenvolvimento de sistemas que utilizam essa informação a favor do bom uso dos recursos públicos é um dos vários exemplos que podemos utilizar para mostrar como é importante o acesso a esses dados. A partir do Decreto nº 8.777 que regulamentou a abertura dos dados públicos do Poder Executivo Federal, vários órgãos e entidades iniciaram suas atividades para disponibilizar seus dados. Todos os passos para a abertura desses dados são especificados no manual de implementação da Política de Dados Abertos disponibilizado pela Controladoria Geral da União (CGU). Um dos passos para abertura dos dados é a escrita de todas as ações realizadas até a catalogação dos dados nas plataformas de dados abertos. O documento em que é registradas essas ações é chamado de Plano de Dados Abertos, ou PDA. A CGU considera que um órgão público tem seus dados abertos apenas quando o seu PDA é publicado seguindo a vários critérios de organização e qualidade. Atualmente, a CGU mantém um painel de monitoramento de dados abertos, onde é possível verificar quais entidades públicas tem seus dados disponibilizados seguindo esses critérios. Ao realizar uma consulta a esse painel, percebemos que menos da metade dos órgãos públicos tem um PDA publicado, onde, dos 221 órgãos do Poder Executivo Federal, apenas 67 tem um PDA em execução. Dos PDAs em execução, grande parte não disponibilizam um sistema de monitoramento das ações e metas definidas ao longo de sua elaboração, pois foram escritos em formato de texto simples, sem automatização alguma no processo de monitoramento, como a própria CGU sugere. Para resolver o problema de elaboração do Plano de Dados Abertos seguindo as recomendações da CGU de qualidade e o monitoramento durante e posteriormente a elaboração do PDA, neste trabalho será desenvolvida uma aplicação que irá abarcar todos os passos descritos nos manuais de desenvolvimento de um PDA, assim como irão monitorar todas as ações que precisam ser realizadas durante e depois da catalogação dos dados abertos. Para testar a aplicação, vamos usar informação do IFRN para reescrever seu PDA nos moldes exigidos pela CGU.
3	LEANDRO SILVA MONTEIRO DE OLIVEIRA MPRN em Dados: development of a platforms for data organization on Ministério Público do Rio Grande do Norte Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA NELIO ALESSANDRO AZEVEDO CACHO ANDRÉ GUSTAVO DUARTE DE ALMEIDA Data: Mar 31, 2021 Show Abstract This work was conceived from experiences in the Public Ministry of Rio Grande do Norte (MPRN) regarding the creation of a platform to organize products open and closed MPRN data. Thus, firstly, a systematic mapping of the literature, in order to seek the best practices related to data publication, as well as existing processes or methodologies, such as other initiatives developed by other Public Ministries. The results were then analyzed.After doing the analysis, it was found that there is a need to improvement of data sharing processes by the Public Ministry. Therefore, we are developing a new process to support sharing open and closed data through the MPRN platform in Data. After that, some case studies were carried out in order to verify the usefulness of the process proposed, as well as to identify the difficulties faced, evaluating its general efficiency and if it can really contribute to improving productivity within the Ministry Public of RN.
4	ADRIANO MAGNO GOMES REGINALDO IFC WEB - Providing data from IFC-SPF files to Web applications Advisor : SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES REYMARD SAVIO SAMPAIO DE MELO SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS Data: Jun 18, 2021 Show Abstract The building information models (BIM) have been growing to play a significant role during the entire life cycle of an enterprise in civil construction, generating a large number of data and information as digital representations of the physical and functional characteristics of a building, ie , involving all project information, including construction, maintenance and even demolition. BIM is already a reality and its future tends to be improved with the insertion of new technologies generating high frequency all over the world. In countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and the USA already require the use of BIM in projects funded by the government. In Brazil, a new Decree, No. 9,983, entered into force on August 22, 2019, which provides for the National BIM Dissemination Strategy and establishes the BIM Strategy Management Committee (CG BIM). The communication of this data by the various participants is complex. These BIM models can be shared in file formats specific to each BIM modeling software or in a neutral format (Industry Foundation Classes - IFC). Developed by buildingSMART, IFC aims to allow data exchange, regardless of the software or manufacturers chosen by each designer. However, several participants in the construction of an enterprise, generally do not have technical knowledge to use this software and still want to have access to the project data. In order to bring inclusion of all participants in a work to the projected data, we developed a research to facilitate the exchange of BIM information, through the extraction of data from the IFC file and provided through routes of a Restfull API. We believe in the democratization of BIM, and making it somehow more accessible, starting with uncomplicated access to information, is our main desire. This research begins with a more elaborate review on the collaboration of this research, motivations, objectives and concepts involving BIM and interoperability with Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). Then we address the related works and the differentials that this research solved. In the third chapter we discuss the development of the parser in TypeScript and present the grammar for the IFC format. In the fourth chapter we will discuss about structuring the Restfull API in nodeJs. In the fifth chapter, we model a project in the Revit application in IFC format and show the results of the tests performed. Finally, we will discuss the steps taken and what the next steps will be.
5	CARLOS EDUARDO MORAIS VIEIRA Assessing irace for automated machine and deep learning in computer vision Advisor : LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : LESLIE PÉREZ CÁCERES JOAQUIN VANSCHOREN DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA Data: Jun 29, 2021 Show Abstract Automated machine learning (AutoML) is a field of great interest to both industry and academia. AutoML has allowed developers working on machine learning (ML) applications to achieve satisfactory results with little to no ML expertise. More recently, AutoML tools focused on deep learning (DL) models have proven especially useful to applications where domain-specific algorithms are predominant, as in computer vision (CV) tasks. Still, AutoML tools focused on simpler ML pipelines remain an important alternative, since DL models have high computational resource requirements and offer reduced model interpretability.Among the main AutoML approaches, AutoML based on an algorithm configurator (AC) is commonly used to produce simpler pipelines, whereas neural architecture search (NAS) is used to produce deep learning models. These two approaches also intersect, since an AC can be used as a NAS algorithm. In this work, we study the application of the irace AC to both these AutoML methods. The irace configurator has been successfully applied to design effective algorithms for optimization problems, but it has not yet been applied to AutoML. Our assessment is performed in two stages. First, we propose an irace-based AutoML tool to produce simple and effective ML pipelines. The tool is dubbed iSklearn, for which we define a configuration space and setup. We demonstrate that iSklearn is able to produce effective ML pipelines using irace as its AC, with comparable performance to more complex ensembles produced by AutoSklearn, an established configuration-based AutoML tool. Moreover, we show the benefits of the configuration space and setup proposed for iSklearn, even when coupled with another AC. In the second part of our work, we assess irace as a NAS algorithm. To do so, we evaluate irace on NAS-Bench-101, a recent NAS benchmark for the CIFAR-10 CV dataset. We benchmark irace not only as to final-quality assessment, but also as to anytime performance through a bi-objective formulation. Results demonstrate that irace can be used a NAS algorithm, obtaining comparable results to the best NAS algorithms included in NAS-Bench-101 in terms of final quality. However, further work is required to improve its anytime performance in this context. Finally, we discuss other design choices made in the original benchmark, showing how they affect the relative performance of NAS algorithms, and provide guidelines for improving the assessment of NAS algorithms through the use of NAS-Bench-101.
6	ANDRÉ VIEIRA DOS SANTOS C0NTR0LL: Gesture Recognition and Action Management System in Digital Games Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANNA GISELLE CAMARA DANTAS RIBEIRO RODRIGUES RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS SAMUEL OLIVEIRA DE AZEVEDO Data: Jul 29, 2021 Show Abstract In digital games, control is the element that integrates the player into the virtual world. With the emergence of recent input devices, it has become possible to capture human pose gestures through sensors, allowing a new form of interaction between manmachine. The application of machine learning techniques in the context of human posecapture is highlighted and has been addressed in several areas. Pose recognition techniquesand devices have demonstrated great artifice when used in simulation in rehabilitation.However, many of these devices have their limitations, which normally do not include thehealth profile, often making their use in the context of rehabilitation unfeasible. Basedon this context, this work presents or creates a system that allows players and healthprofessionals the possibility to manage movements in games using a complete corporategesture experience, allowing these games to be adapted to the objectives expected by eachuser profile. The results of this research contribute to future innovations, in the theoreticaland practical fields, promoting the development of serious digital games with differentobjectives. In view of the results presented, consider whether C0NTR0LL shows the resultspotentially used.
7	WELLERSON VIANA DE OLIVEIRA A case study on customer segmentation using a supermarket customer database Advisor : LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA MARCUS ALEXANDRE NUNES THAIS GAUDENCIO DO REGO Data: Dec 6, 2021 Show Abstract In order to obtain commercial advantages over competitors, companies in all segments are improving their relationship with customers. The supermarket segment is no different and investments in customer relationship management (CRM) are increasing over the last years. The first step towards a successful CRM strategy is to know customers better, for which customer segmentation plays an important role.In this work, we segment customers from Nordestão, the third largest supermarket chain in the Northeast of Brazil. To do so, we adapt the recency-frequency-monetary model, enrich it with new features, and use Gaussian mixture models to clusterize the data. Furthermore, we employ a well-established a priori segmentation from the Brazilian supermarket literature. For each a priori segment, customer groups were obtained for each retail store, with each group representing a different customer profile. Among the most interesting are prime and opportunity customers, who respectively focus on high-end and on sale products. Importantly, most of the behaviours are consistent across the different stores, varying only as to store-specific parameters. We conclude our work with a further algorithmic validation and interpretabilityanalysis of our findings.
8	FERNANDA MONTEIRO DE ALMEIDA Sales forecasting for a supermarket chain in Natal, Brazil: an empirical assessment Advisor : LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ALLAN DE MEDEIROS MARTINS DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA MARCUS ALEXANDRE NUNES THAIS GAUDENCIO DO REGO Data: Dec 20, 2021 Show Abstract Time series forecasting is a consolidated, broadly used approach in several fields, including financing and industry. Retail can also benefit from forecasting in many areas, such as stock demand, and price and sales optimization. This study addresses retail sales forecasting in Nordestão, a large Brazilian supermarket chain. Though located in a state with a low gross domestic product (GDP), Nordestão respectively ranks 3rd and 27th in regional and national sales. The data considered here spans five years of daily transactions from eight different stores. Different machine learning techniques, knowingly effective for forecasting, are adopted, namely random forests and XGBoost. We further improve their performance with feature engineering to address seasonal effects.The best algorithm varies per store, but for most stores at least one of the methods is proven to be effective. Though we model transactions daily, the best models achieve above 90% R2 scores for 7-day forecasts. Besides the traditional relevance of sales forecasting, our work is a means for Nordestão to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sales.

2020

	Dissertations
1	DEYVISSON CARLOS BORGES DE MELO Design Smells in Batch Processing Applications using Spring Batch Framework Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA UIRA KULESZA BALDOINO FONSECA DOS SANTOS NETO Data: Aug 31, 2020 Show Abstract To meet the constantly changing of requirements and needs for new features, software systems always remain in a state of constant evolution. The control of the software evolution and maintenance process is crucial and one of the most complicated phases of software development. If this control is not managed, systems are at risk of degradation of important quality attributes, that consequently directly affect the degree of maintainability of applications. Factors such as inexperience, lack of knowledge and pressure in relation to the time to complete tasks lead to the adoption of bad practices of software design and are the origin of Design Smells. In order to obtain a better control of the software evolution and maintenance process, it is important to know how to identify the occurrence of Design Smells in projects, and new studies indicate that the use of information specific to the context of the application, such as the nature of the programs or architectural roles used, can influence the detection process and the identification of problems that only exist in the studied context. This work carries out a study to define and identify Design Smells specific to the context of batch applications, and proposes the definition of a catalog with 7 Design Smells and the implementation of a tool to automate the detection process. The implemented tool was used in a case study in which the codes of 40 systems were analyzed. In this study, it was observed that smells specific to the context of batch processing applications affected almost 20% of the classes and more than 30% of the lines of code of the systems analyzed. It was also possible to observe, through the application of the tool in several versions of two systems, that the number of smells remained constant throughout the versions, and in some cases it even grew. What can evidence the lack of knowledge about the existence of the smells and the negative impacts that they can incorporate in the applications.
2	DIEGO HENRIQUE PEGADO BENÍCIO Application of Text Mining and Natural Language Processing in Electronic Patient Records for text extraction and transformation into structured data Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ALEXANDRE CESAR MUNIZ DE OLIVEIRA DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR Data: Sep 29, 2020 Show Abstract The patient's medical record is the essential document to ensure comprehensive and continuous care to the patient, providing the history of their health. Over the course of technological evolution, the patient's therapeutic records have shifted from paper records to the electronic medical record. However, the anamnesis is usually inserted through free text fields, leaving to the health professionals the way information is entered. In this way, traditional Structured Query Language queries are unable to retrieve this data. In order to overcome this problem, we apply Text Mining and Natural Language Processing aiming to extract understandable and standardized data. In this sense, the objective of this work is to evaluate and define the appropriate techniques for the Text Mining process on clinical data of adult patients of the Januário Cicco Maternity unit, aiming to retrieve clinical terms and structure them in order to relate them to the pathological diagnosis patterns.
3	EDUARDO LUIZ GOMES BPM2DDD: Identifying domains from business processes Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA PAULO DE FIGUEIREDO PIRES Data: Oct 27, 2020 Show Abstract Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is in creasingly adopted as a particular way of modeling systems. Among DDD’s strategic design patterns is the context map, a powerful tool that helps development teams understand the business domain. Context maps are usually created from the analysis of existing systems, initial requirements or based on the experience of the team, which can lead to the construction of domain models that do not reflect the reality of the organization. In this sense, the analysis of business process models is presented as an alternative to extract domain information and create context maps, since these models capture the logic of organizations’ operations, providing a comprehensive and high-level view of the business. However, approaches for creating context maps from domain knowledge extracted from business process models are lacking. Thus, this research aims to propose the BPM2DDD technique, an approach to support the identification of information domains and the creation of context maps, which can be used in the stages of analysis and modeling of systems, even serving as an alternative for identifying possible software services. The technique allows the identification of domains, subdomains and limited contexts, based on the analysis of BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) models. The technique was developed and applied in real business processes of the Urban Mobility Secretariat of the city of Natal (STTU), using the action research methodology, during the years 2019 and 2020, in the context of the development of new urban mobility systems. To evaluate the technique, multiple applications were carried out by business and systems analysts, using one of the STTU business processes, in addition to validations by the domain experts of the generated context map. The results indicate that the techniqueis applicable to software processes adopted by the industry, allowing the discovery of information that enables the creation of a context map more aligned to the organization’s domain.
4	MARCOS ALVARENGA OLIVEIRA API-ResultEduc: A communication between the result of digital educational games and for a better assessment of learning Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AQUILES MEDEIROS FILGUEIRA BURLAMAQUI ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS SAMUEL OLIVEIRA DE AZEVEDO Data: Nov 30, 2020 Show Abstract While the educational digital games progress in the pedagogical and institutional area to assess the results of students and clients, despite the educational merit that has been given to these digital games, there is a large obstacle for this credit to expand out because of the few affordable resources to check on the learning obtained. This project studies a better strategy for a better integration between the result of these assessments of digital games and the collaborative gaming platforms.Game platforms are systems for collaborative development system for virtual learning objects, but also often imagined, that creates an environment whereby professionals from different areascan collaborate, develop and share their learning objects, then collaborating with an improving evaluation of education professionals to their students, in order to they understand what needsto be improved in their learning and how they can also improve it, by the reconfiguration of games, during the developmental stage, through the analysis of student performance, as wellas the analytical drafting reports for your teachers.Implementing reliability, compliance and security conditions in the exchange of these informations, by following safe and organized storage data route to the platform.To study these platforms, case studies were created to validate this architecture. We used the educational digital games platform, ColabEduc as an experiment for this project.
5	MARCO ANTONIO SILVA E ARAÚJO Beyond Star: A Learning Architectural Model to the Generalization of Strategies in RTS Games Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA GEBER LISBOA RAMALHO LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA Data: Dec 16, 2020 Show Abstract One of the main research fields under Artificial Intelligence, on the context of Digital Games, is the study of Real-Time Strategy Games (RTS), which are commonly considered the successors of classic strategy games such as Checkers, Chess, Backgammon and Go, and impose great challenges to this area’s researchers due to the great complexity involved. Currently, the field aims to study the RTS using StarCraft I and II as stage of experimentation. The main feature sought in artificial agents developed to this kind of game is high performance, having as its main objective to defeat specialist human players. On this context it is inserted the generalization problematic, that is the capacity of an artificial agent of reusing previous experiences, from different contexts, to a new environment. Generalization is a very studied field by the scientific community, but still poorly explored on the context of RTS. By this reason, this work proposes the Beyond Star model, which consists in an architecture to generically represent the state-space of Real-Time Strategy Games, using as base deep reinforcement learning techniques aiming to learn effective strategies to be applied in several RTS environments. As a basis to the architecture, it was developed a platform titled URNAI, a tool that integrates several learning algorithms and environments, such as StarCraft II and DeepRTS. To analyse if the solution is capable of allowing agent generalization, trainings were done in DeepRTS and tests were carried out in StarCraft II. It was verified that the trained agents were capable of generalizing their knowledge from one environment to the other, showing a promising result that allowed to validate this work’s proposal.
6	MARCELO LUIZ DE FRANÇA TEDA-Guardian: Detecting DDoS Attacks on Internet Service Providers Advisor : SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ERICO MENEZES LEAO ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO RODRIGO SIQUEIRA MARTINS SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO Data: Dec 18, 2020 Show Abstract A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is an organized technique of distributed packet sending with the aim of overloading network devices and the communication channels between them. In general, its main objective is to prevent legitimate users from accessing networks, servers, services or other resources of the network system. Although it is clear the importance of mechanisms to protect or mitigate the effects of this type of attack, its correct detection is still a challenge due to the dynamics and volume of current communications and network connections. Although the specific literature is abundant in proposed solutions to the problem, most of them are based on Artificial Intelligence algorithms that involve learning based on training or reinforcement, and it is necessary to extract traits of previously collected traffic. As a result, these techniques need to “look to the past” to understand network traffic. Because of this, many of these solutions are not applicable to more dynamic environments with high traffic volume, such as internet providers. In this dissertation, we propose an approach to detect DDoS attacks using the TEDA (Typicality and Eccentricity Data Analytics) algorithm, called TEDA-Guardian. TEDA is a recursive and non-parametric method, initially proposed for the general problem of detecting anomalies in data flows. With the use of TEDA-Guardian it is possible to analyze the current traffic on the network, reducing the detection delay, since it is based on the concept of data eccentricity, without the need for prior knowledge of the network traffic pattern. Thus, TEDA-Guardian allows you to "look at the present", that is, the data that is currently being transferred, thus guaranteeing a more punctual detection. This approach was tested on different datasets containing network traffic with moments of DDoS attacks. Its effectiveness was evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity, false positive rate and detection accuracy.
7	ARI BARRETO DE OLIVEIRA An intelligence module for Health Care IoT Applications Advisor : GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO MONICA MAGALHAES PEREIRA IVAN SARAIVA SILVA Data: Dec 28, 2020 Show Abstract The Internet of Things is booming and more and more devices are connected, generating massive amounts of data. Usually this large amount of data is not used to discover additional information. This is also a reality in healthcare, where large amounts of data can already be generated from devices that use open protocols or connected open source hardware sensors, such as environment sensors or human body sensors. This dissertation aims to propose an intelligence module that can, obtaining data from IoT sensors in health, return categorization and prognostic information of medical complications, thus bringing direct benefits to the patient's health as well as streamlining the patient's health. hospital care and cost reduction.
8	ANDRE SANTIAGO DA FONSECA SILVA Software documentation in agile processes: an approach based on Behavior-Oriented Development Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ELDER JOSÉ REIOLI CIRILO UIRA KULESZA Data: Dec 28, 2020 Show Abstract The growing demand for software resulting from the popularization of devices and technologies, such as the smartphone and the Internet of Things, means that development teams have to deliver new software resources more and more frequently. System users, now very familiar with various types of software solutions, have increased their quality standards: utility, usability and interoperability are increasingly required. In this context, agile development processes with their strong adaptability characteristics are able to support development activities in order to allow software to evolve in an appropriate manner, growing in a sustainable manner. However, many development teams that work with agile processes end up underestimating the importance of software documentation as an important tool to support the scalability of their solutions. Leaving aside the fact that, according to the agile values, although software in operation is highly valued, having a comprehensive documentation may also be necessary. What we often observe are development teams trying to adapt Requirements Engineering activities and software documentation of the so-called traditional development processes, which ends up generating inappropriate documentation artifacts to the characteristics of adaptability to new requirements and frequency of delivery of agile processes. Based on this conjuncture, this research work proposes an approach to support the generation of a type of documentation appropriate to agile processes. Bringing the activities of Requirements Engineering closer to the software tests, through the use of the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) strategy, thus generating living documentation - which accompanies the behavior of the software in operation.

2019

	Dissertations
1	CESIMAR XAVIER DE SOUZA DIAS SmartNode Dashboards: a framework front-end based on Node-RED for Smart City Dashboards development Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANDRÉ GUSTAVO DUARTE DE ALMEIDA FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES GUSTAVO GIRAO BARRETO DA SILVA JAIR CAVALCANTI LEITE Data: Jan 28, 2019 Show Abstract Nowadays several cities have been involved in research in order to provide the city's data and information to the population through dashboards (so-called City Dashboards). These solutions enable citizens to follow the events of the city in real time, enabling these people to plan their routines based on the knowledge generated about their local context. Even with the growing number of projects being developed for this purpose, there are no jobs that are aimed at creating reusable structures or methodologies that use other open source software products to standardize the production of dashboards. Therefore, this work was proposed in creating a framework based on Bootstrap. The framework was intended to implement standards projects and web interface, focused on content with reusable structures, using Node-RED as an execution platform. As a result of this work, it was possible to design SmartNode Dashboard, a framework for creating standardized and customizable interfaces. In addition to offering dashboard developers a methodology for using SmartNode Dashboard with Node-RED to facilitate and extend teams' ability to perform, time and quality in the development of dashboards.
2	JACKSON MEIRES DANTAS CANUTO Semiautomatoc derivation of software products in the context of Secretaria de Estado da Agricultura, da Pecuária e da Pesca do RN Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ELDER JOSÉ REIOLI CIRILO FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES UIRA KULESZA Data: Jan 31, 2019 Show Abstract The engineering of Software Product Line (SPL) has the products derivation as one of its areas, which uses the strategy of products implementation from features previously selected. The artifacts developed, can be generated or compound during the step of domain implementation. Despite its importance, the activity of product derivation continues to be costly and error prone, and it is still difficult to automate and have support by means of tools. Furthermore, few papers have been dedicated to the product derivation process and the strategies of applying it in practical context. Thus, there is a lack of empirical reports describing the product derivation in industrial environment, in general. This Master’s dissertation, proposes the systematization of the process of system distribution of cloned web application, through the semiautomatic product derivation of existing softwares, refactoring to SPL. A well as, the use of a support tool to realize the implementation of the instance of the system previously configured, making the software product available and ready to be used in a server. Furthermore, a controlled experiment was conducted to qualitatively and quantitatively analyse product derivation process, before and after the use of this approach with and without the support tool. This approach specifies a set systematic and well-defined activities that help which will assist the system analysts and programmers to do the product derivation of the product refactored to a SPL, from a existenting system. Through the use of an approach supported by a tool, it will be possible to manage the product and its features, leaving it ready to be semiautomatic configured product, ready to be derived end deployed. The study carried out through a controlled experiment, provides information about of the concepts and actions explored in the literature, such as: derivation of softwares products, software deployment, cloning of the SPL, software reengineering of SPL, refactoring of SPL and source-code generation. IT professionals can use this work as a basis for define, adapt or evaluate theirs own derivation approaches with product deployment. While researchers can use this work, as a starting point for new industrial reports, showing yours experiences with in product derivation. The results obtained in this study showed that when using the proposed approach, it was possible to contribute with the derivation and implantation of software products in more agile, productive and satisfaction way. Even in situations where the user has few experiences with derivation and deployment of software, the actions taken to do so will occur in less time and with a good corretude during this process.
3	ISAAC DANILO SANTOS BATISTA SMARTBUFFET:A software platform for real-time food monitoring in the context of a mid-sized restaurant. Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES IDALMIS MILIAN SARDINA MARTINS RAFAEL VIDAL AROCA RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS Data: Aug 22, 2019 Show Abstract The food and restaurant sector are segments that are facing challenges to adapt to a new reality that requires less food waste, quality food and efficient management. Consumers in rich countries are estimated to waste around 222 million tonnes of food products and most of them are from restaurants. In Brazil, ANVISA requires restaurants to be monitored by nutritionists, one of whose tasks is to control the temperature of food preservation to verify compliance with its resolutions. In order for restaurants to avoid both food waste and working within these regulatory standards, efficient management is needed to optimize internal processes and make more accurate decisions. Therefore, the objective of this work is to create a smart platform for monitoring the quantity and temperature of a self-service restaurant buffet in order to minimize food waste, improve the handling of nutritional information and optimize its management. The system will be able to check the temperature consumption of food exposed in tanks of a buffet and that the data will be sent to restaurant sectors like cooking, nutrition and management in real time. The system will be created using the concepts and features of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Web Programming in JavaScript. Finally, software like Node-red, ThingSpeak, Arduino IDE among other tools will compose the framework of technologies used to develop this platform.
4	JAIME BRUNO CIRNE DE OLIVEIRA System of psychophysiological support with the use of digital games Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ALBERTO SIGNORETTI CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA SELAN RODRIGUES DOS SANTOS SIDARTA TOLLENDAL GOMES RIBEIRO Data: Sep 27, 2019 Show Abstract Psychophysiological analyzes are powerful tools that have revolutionized neurosciences since 1929 with the creation of electroencephalography (EEG). These tools made it possible to perceive the behavior of the brain under different stimuli, providing a better understanding of psychological processes by evaluating the physiological reactions, being widely used in behavioral studies. Digital games are included in this context because they are used to provide sensorial stimuli, requiring a cognitive processing at different levels of interpretation. However, this emerging research area faces major challenges since game events need to be computed with high temporal resolution to achieve a greater understanding of the experience. To contribute to this context, this work proposes a tool to make the research that uses psychophysiological analysis easier by using digital games in the process of behavior analysis, through the automatic registration of events with the frequency and precision required to follow systems of psychophysiological records. By experimenting this solution, we hope that neuroscience researchers will be able to analyze psychophysiological data more effectively when using digital games in their research.
5	IURI GUERRA DE FREITAS PEREIRA Evaluating the effectiveness of a suite of system tests applied to the context of the Ginga Middleware Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : BRUNO BARBIERI DE PONTES CAFEO EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA UIRA KULESZA Data: Dec 16, 2019 Show Abstract Software quality has become a key factor in the software development process today. To be able to measure the quality of different types of tests is today an important challenge to be met. The research conducted in this study considered the evaluation of the effectiveness of systems tests performed by MOPA Embedded Systems in the use of Ginga middleware for Digital TV. To perform the system test suite evaluation performed by the company, it was proposed a methodology to evaluate it through the code coverage criterion, followed by an exploratory study to investigate possible reasons for the results obtained from the coverage. Finally, exploratory tests were conducted to confirm the findings from the exploratory study phase. Through these steps, it was possible to establish an opinion on the quality of the tests performed, as well as the automation performed by the company.
6	JACYANA SUASSUNA NUNES Deploying the observability of the SigSaude systemusing service mesh Advisor : SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO COMMITTEE MEMBERS : SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO ITAMIR DE MORAIS BARROCA FILHO ERICO MENEZES LEAO Data: Dec 18, 2019 Show Abstract The architectural standard of microservices has been widely adopted by several companiesin the market of web application development due to its several advantages, for example,facilitating the use of clouds infrastructures and containers for the development of distri-buted, scalable and available systems. An example of this type of solution is the SigSaudeproject which provides a platform for the management of health data in Clinical-Schoolenvironments based on electronic medical records. In the specific case of SigSaude, if on theone hand the use of microservices provides scalability and availability, on the other hand itrequires a high degree of observability of the operations, however, traditional monitoringtools are ineffective in dealing with this distributed scenario. Thus, this work proposes anintegrated and scalable architecture based on service mesh solutions to be incorporatedinto the SigSaude project. The main objective is to increase the observability capabilitiesof the system, allowing the contextual monitoring of the transactions between the variousmicroservices. In order to validate this proposal, controlled environment testing will beconducted to evidence the gains and limitations of the use of service mesh, confrontingthem with the specific monitoring, tracking and logging needs of SigSaude.

2018

	Dissertations
1	ALAN KLINGER SOUSA ALVES TeamBridge: A Middlwware to adapt games and controls for motor rehabilitation . Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AQUILES MEDEIROS FILGUEIRA BURLAMAQUI RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS TATIANA AIRES TAVARES Data: Apr 16, 2018 Show Abstract This work will present an interface for non-invasive adaptation of Virtual Reality inputdevices, for use with desktop platform games incompatible with such devices, with a focuson games for rehabilitation, since the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte has aongoing research on application and development of new controller devices for therapeuticgames. In addition to being a tool for adapting joysticks, it will also contain a module fortherapy, this module besides collecting information can help the patient to correct themovements performed, artifice useful when therapy is performed at home, away from thetherapist’s supervision.
2	ALLYSON BRUNO CAMPOS BARROS VILELA Processo Automatizado de ETL para Dados Abertos: Um Estudo de Caso do SUAP e CKAN Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANDRÉ GUSTAVO DUARTE DE ALMEIDA FRANCISCO DANTAS DE MEDEIROS NETO FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES GIBEON SOARES DE AQUINO JUNIOR Data: Jul 30, 2018 Show Abstract Public access to government information is an important aspect of modern society that allows the active participation of the population in monitoring government actions. Decree No. 8777, signed by the president on May 11, 2016, establishing the Open Data Policy of Brazilian’s Federal Government. From it, the entities of the federal public administration, autarchic and foundational are obliged to make the data available in the open format. However, so far, of the 210 institutions only 75 of them are fulfilling the commitments defined in the Decree. One possible explanation for this low number is the need for technical staff to have a good knowledge of their information systems and current legislation allied with the difficulty in extracting the data since in most of the institutions the entire process of extraction, treatment and publication of the open data is done manually. In this sense, this work proposes the development of an automation tool for the ETL process for open data in the scope of the Federal Institutions that use the Unified System of Public Administration since this automation brings a greater agility in the publication and periodic updating of the open data, time saving and ease of management of open data portals
3	JONAS JORDÃO DE MACÊDO OpenEasier: A CKAN Extension to Enhance Open Data Publication and Management Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : BERNADETTE FARIAS LÓSCIO FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES JAIR CAVALCANTI LEITE NELIO ALESSANDRO AZEVEDO CACHO Data: Aug 7, 2018 Show Abstract Open Data is an important concept for our society, and it is being adopted by public and private entities. When embracing Open Data, the companies generate more transparency and collaboration in our society, this enables the enhancement and creation of services, helping to improve many aspects of our lives. Despite the existence of data catalogue platforms to support Open Data, e.g. CKAN, the complexity and costs of achieving the publication of Open Data are still a challenge, hampering the adoption of the activity of publishing Open Data. The existing tools that support Open Data publication demands deep knowledge of IT tools to publish the data, leaving this important task in the hands of few. Hence, the existing tools are not able to properly achieve the main goal which is to make anyone able to publish and maintain Open Data. In this context, this work aims to design and implement a new tool to decrease the complexity and costs, and to make possible non-IT technicians to publish and manage their Open Data. We believe that this strategy will engage the real data producers in the Open Data movement, helping to improve the quality of Open Data.
4	YAN DE LIMA JUSTINO From legacy monolith to microservices: a case study applied to the Secretariat of State of Taxation of Rio Grande do Norte Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA NABOR DAS CHAGAS MENDONÇA Data: Aug 7, 2018 Show Abstract Service-orientation provides a design paradigm based on a set of strategic goals towards the alignment between information technology and business, promoting efficiency, agility and productivity. In this context, the reengineering of legacy systems to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be justified to solve problems such as the demand for interoperability and the need to provide a robust high-availability service interface. However, the deployment of SOA into an enterprise environment is challenging task, as it may involve the use of different techniques, such as the modernization of systems with high technical debt and high maintenance costs. To this end, a process is required that provides an appropriate set of techniques that minimize risks and at the same time ensure the quality of the systems during the migration process. In this sense, this work presents the application of a process for the reengineering legacy systems to support the implementation of an SOA project. This process has been identified during a real software reengineering project for evolution of legacy systems of a Secretariat of State for Taxation. The SPReaD (SOA Process for Reengineering and DevOps) is an instantiation of the mainstream SOA methodology focusing on the reengineering of legacy systems integrating DevOps aspects for targeting SOA. The use of SPReaD have presented significant results regarding the achievement of important quality goals. The use of SPReaD has presented significant results in relation to achieving important quality goals such as the standardization of service contracts for interoperability purposes; technical debt management, for better maintainability and portability of components; scalability and performance improvement to support a large load of requests.
5	DAVID COELHO DOS SANTOS IMAM - A Machine Learning based monitoring tool for criticals IoT infrastructures. Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR GIBEON SOARES DE AQUINO JUNIOR MARCOS CESAR MADRUGA ALVES PINHEIRO CARLOS NASCIMENTO SILLA JÚNIOR Data: Aug 24, 2018 Show Abstract For a variety of reasons, when there is a monitoring system that allows analyzing and correlating data so that relevant information can be extracted, even the smallest problem can be detected and corrected efficiently, reducing downtime.Thus, effective monitoring helps applications and services be available as long as possible. This work specifies the design and development of a monitoring system for software and hardware components for IoT based platforms.The hypothesis describes the proposed monitoring system will help to maintain the guarantee of the availability and reliability of IoT based platform components.
6	CEPHAS ALVES DA SILVEIRA BARRETO Use of Machine Learning Techniques to Define Driver Profiles Based on Automotive Data Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS NASCIMENTO SILLA JÚNIOR DANIEL SABINO AMORIM DE ARAUJO IVANOVITCH MEDEIROS DANTAS DA SILVA JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR Data: Aug 24, 2018 Show Abstract Traffic has killed many citizens, and above all, it has caused great losses. The vast majority of traffic accidents are caused by drivers' recklessness (90%). In addition to recklessness, car defects (5%) and poor road conditions (5%) also contribute to the loss of lives and financial resources years after years. One of the alternatives to alleviate these problems is to understand how car drivers behave when they are behind the wheel. Recently, researchers have concentrated efforts to store and analyze data from drivers and automobiles to obtain or possible indication of different driver profiles. Thus, the main objective of this work is to use Machine Learning techniques on vehicle data obtained through OBD-II (On Board Diagnostics II) to identify possible profiles among car drivers.
7	PEDRO VITOR LIMA RODRIGUES MOTUS: A PLATFORM FOR SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND FEEDBACK BASED ON INDICATORS ANALYSIS Advisor : GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EDUARDO HENRIQUE DA SILVA ARANHA GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA HERMANO PERRELLI DE MOURA UIRA KULESZA Data: Aug 29, 2018 Show Abstract Increasingly, companies have cherished well-being, motivation and satisfaction of their employees since they are the most valuable resource of organization. Motivated employees tend to produce with more quality and productivity, helping to solve problems with better performance. When companies acts successfully to positively influence motivation and better work environment, receives in exchange not just greater engagement but also makes a good external marketing to attract new talents, being seen by external community as a company where “many others want to work”. To make this possible, it is necessary recognize and provide a feedback to employees on their performance. Depending on hierarchical complexity and quantity of employees and diversity of company positions, evaluate their performance may represent a big challenge, being necessary the use of many resources to make it happens in acceptable time. This work presents software that provide a performance feedback to the teams of a company by use of performance indicators, in addition to implement a public recognition model of employees in a view of good attitudes. To measure the impact of the software utilization, a study will be conducted before and after use this software, to measure their influence on the motivation of members of development teams and what the variation of satisfaction of them within the work environment.
8	WELKSON RENNY DE MEDEIROS SecAuthAPI: An approach for supporting self-adaptation of authorization infrastructures Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO GUSTAVO HENRIQUE MATOS BEZERRA MOTTA Data: Oct 30, 2018 Show Abstract Access control mechanisms have been used in information systems to restrict access to sensitive information.Such mechanisms are able to deal with external agent threats, but they are ineffective when considering attacks involving internal users. Access control policies are often static and unable to deal with anomalous behavior of malicious users who have access permission to the system. Self-adaptive systems have been shown as a possible response for this situation, since they are able to analyze themselves and the environment in which they are deployed, modifying themselves over various and unpredictable conditions. For this, a set of well-defined operations that can be used in the definition of adaptation plans is required. In this sense, this work proposes the SecAuthAPI, an approach to support self-adaptive authorization infrastructures, by exposing a set of operations for manipulating ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control) access control policies. The defined operations are based on a formal functional specification of the ABAC model and are exposed through a REST API. They aim to enable the dynamic adaptation of access control policies. Considering the application of this approach in a real system, this work also proposes and implements the externalization of authorization mechanisms for the SUAP system, which has been developed and used at IFRN. In this context, access restrictions that were previously fixed directly in the code (hard-coded) are now defined through an authorization server, decoupling access control concern from the business logic of the application. Additionally, when SecAuthAPI is applied on the authorization server, policies can be dynamically manipulated. SecAuthAPI operations were evaluated through a series of unit tests that attest its adherence to the formal functional specification, while separation of access control from SUAP had its performance evaluated and compared to the legacy approach. The results show that, although it has an additional computational cost, the impact on application performance is negligible. In addition, the solution is highly feasible in view of the benefits brought due to the decoupling of concern from access control from the source code of the application.
9	TARSO LATORRACA CASADEI Architectural Evaluation of SUAP System: A Systematic Analysis on Performance Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANDRÉ GUSTAVO DUARTE DE ALMEIDA CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA Data: Dec 7, 2018 Show Abstract Information systems have become increasingly robust, working with high volumes of data, objects and data processes. In the context of the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN), a system was developed to attend all the administrative and academic activities of the institution: SUAP, Unified System of Public Administration. Over the course of 11 years, the application has evolved from just one module to over 40, in addition to the dizzying growth of users -- which today permeates the number of 35 thousand. These aspects often impact directly and negatively on systems performance, leading software architects to seek alternatives to better scale their applications. In the case of the IFRN, even after high investments in infrastructure, SUAP performance problems persist. In order to make better use of the available hardware structure, it is necessary to understand the reasons for these performance problems, so that these computational resources are used dynamically and incrementally, managed more efficiently and able to withstand surplus loads without prejudice to application stability. Thus, the need to evaluate more comprehensive aspects of the current architecture of the application is presented, so that elements that impair its performance can be known. This work aims to perform a systematized analysis of the SUAP performance through the application of the Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM). Based on the analysis performed, a set of load tests were identified that allow the identification of its main points of slowness. With this, it is hoped to contribute to the definition of a strategy for tests of performance in the SUAP that can be incorporated by the development team.
10	DIEGO SOARES DOS SANTOS A distributed data mining platform for Big Data: a case study applied to the Tax Office of Rio Grande do Norte Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS ALBERTO SIGNORETTI Data: Dec 7, 2018 Show Abstract The volume of data stored and accessed daily is growing on a geometric scale. About 2.5 billion gigabytes are generated every day. In addition, 90 \% of the world's data has been produced in the last two years. Many terms have been used to describe this giant volume of stored data in a structured or non-structured way. Big Data is one of these terms. For many researchers, Big Data is the phenomenon where data is produced in various formats and stored by a large number of devices and equipment. Some efforts have been done to offer open source tools and frameworks that can handle or provide capabilities that can handle and mine this huge amount of data. However, as the nature of the data is quite diverse, choosing or developing tools to deal with such data becomes a non-trivial problem. In addition, few tools are able to extract knowledge from the data. In this sense, knowledge extraction becomes more difficult due to specific characteristics of the data, such as: the description of a product which is totally flexible and without validation. For this reason, in certain problem domains, it is necessary to apply data mining techniques in text attributes to extract standardized values. The main objective of this paper is to propose a distributed data mining platform for the Tax Administration of Rio Grande do Norte, which can extract knowledge in a varied way, considering the specific characteristics of electronic invoices (NFC-e's).
11	RENIERI RAYRON DA SILVA CORREIA Detecting design problems in model-template-view applications Advisor : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA UIRA KULESZA FRANCISCO DANTAS DE MEDEIROS NETO Data: Dec 10, 2018 Show Abstract The software architecture represents a set of design decisions, often taken before implementing the system, with the goal of achieving desired levels of software quality attributes. An architectural pattern provides a set of specific design decisions applicable to recurrent design problems. Violating these decisions may not only hinder quality attributes, but it may also lead to architectural degradation. The Model-Template-View (MTV) pattern implemented by the Django framework has a set of decisions that promote low coupling and rigorous separation between the parts of an application. However, during the evoution of an applicatoin, design decision may be violated. This way, we investiigate the detection of design problems related to the MTV pattern with the goal of aiding the prevention of architectural degradation in MTV applications. The main contributions of this work are the elaboration of a catalogue of MTV-specific design problems e the implementation of tool for statically detecting these violations. The catalogue and the tool were validated in the context of the Sistema Unificado de Administração Pública (SUAP) developed and maintained by the Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte – IFRN.
12	LUCAS HIAGO DE AZEVÊDO DANTAS A metaheuristic approach to the school timetabling problem at IFRN Advisor : LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : LEONARDO CESAR TEONACIO BEZERRA CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA LUCÍDIO DOS ANJOS FORMIGA CABRAL ROMERITO CAMPOS DE ANDRADE Data: Dec 11, 2018 Show Abstract Every academic year, educational institutions face the need to allocate their classes. The challenge lies in conciling pedagogical needs, organizational resource constraints, and personal preferences. Motivated by the high complexity of combining teacher, student, and classroom availability, as well as various other constraints, the school timetabling problem has long been studied by the academic community. In this context, (meta)heuristic approaches have been the method-of-choice when finding high-quality solutions in a feasible timespan. This work proposes a greedy randomized adaptative search procedure (GRASP) algorithm for the school timetabling problem targeting the technical courses offered at Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). To validate the proposed approach, real-world instances were built from data gathered at different campi and academic years. Results indicate the effectiveness of the algorithm, given the feasible solutions meeting all constraints initially considered while achieving high quality.
13	ERICK BERGAMINI DA SILVA LIMA Quest Design Canvas: A template for creating quests for digital RPGs Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA GILSON SCHWARTZ ROGÉRIO JÚNIOR CORREIA TAVARES Data: Dec 13, 2018 Show Abstract Since the dawn of civilization, humans beings had always been fascinated by games, because they are fun and a great way to pass time. In recent decades, digital games became popular among young people in school age. Among the digital game styles available on the market today, the RPG (Role-playing game) has attracted attention, since its titles are several years in the bestseller list. This is due various features available, such as character customization and progression, interaction with the new and fictional world and problem solving in this world. In this scenario, we find the concept of quest, which are missions given to the player that must be accomplished for the conclusion of the game or to evolute the narrative. In an effort to facilitate the quest produce process, this work propose a methodology called Quest Design Canvas, which allows for faster production, with well defined creative process steps, with the purpose of, finally, obtain a narrative line inserted within a set of missions within a mental map. So, it is intended to reach all the goals to be achieved with a digital game, even being educational, introspective or promotional. As validation, This methodology will be used to produce quests for the massive and multiplayer online RPG game (MMORPG) UFRN - The Video game.
14	JORGE FELLIPHE RODRIGUES BARBOSA PlayEduc: a conceptual framework for developing digital educational games Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA EDUARDO HENRIQUE DA SILVA ARANHA LYNN ROSALINA GAMA ALVES Data: Dec 21, 2018 Show Abstract Research indicates that almost half of the young people who are out of school in Brazil are in this situation because of lack of interest and motivation. Thus, the country has the great challenge of creating the conditions for the school to modernize and regain the interest of young. Aware of this problem of the need to renew the education system, many educators are seeking to put into practice the use of more contemporary methodologies and tools to support learning, with digital educational games being one of them. However, many of the digital games categorized as educational have not proved to be efficient, both in terms of pedagogy and gameplay, maing be considered activities presented digitally. There still is a scarcity of specialized development methodologies for those who wish to build their own educational game. In face of this reality, we present Rocket, a framework based in the areas of psychology, pedagogy and game design, idealized to support processes of development and evaluation of digital educational games. Using the essential elements of each of these areas (psychology, pedagogy and game design), the framework will objectively guide the user in the development or evaluation process of digital educational games.

2017

	Dissertations
1	EMERSON MOURA DE ALENCAR The development of a tool for supporting planning on competence-based education: a user-centered approach Advisor : ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : FERNANDO MARQUES FIGUEIRA FILHO ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS ISABEL DILLMANN NUNES ANA ISABEL MARTINS Data: Feb 3, 2017 Show Abstract The methodology based on competence aims at training of workers with a focus on skills to perform tasks related to their occupation in the labor market. But this new proposal brought challenges pedagogical and teaching teams, the act of planning has been an arduous task, considering so many processes and information that teachers need to understand and develop. Because of this, this paper proposes a solution through a software tool that minimizes the problems faced and provide resources to facilitate the understanding of the methodology. For it was developed an exploratory research with the goal of finding difficulties patterns through online forms and focus group were collected, with teachers from schools of SENAI-DR / RN, relevant data to formulate a proposed solution. The proposed application is currently under development.
2	GEOMEREZ RADUAN DE OLIVEIRA BANDEIRA Self-Management of Resources on Container based Infrastructure for Desktop-as-a-Service: A Case Study on Computer Laboratories of ECT/UFRN Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA MARCOS CESAR MADRUGA ALVES PINHEIRO PAULO HENRIQUE MENDES MAIA Data: Jun 22, 2017 Show Abstract A viable alternative for institutions that have multiple users who need access to desktop applications is Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), which is characterized by the delivery of a desktop environment that runs remotely. Resource virtualization and load balancing are widely used techniques in infrastructures that host services with seasonal demands, replicating instances and distributing requests among them to achieve elasticity. However load balancing is not the most suitable solution for DaaS, since sessions in this service are long lasting and are not migrated to a new server that is added to the balancer, remaining the slowness perceived by users already connected to an overloaded server. In this context, the dynamic resizing of resources in a virtual instance is shown as the most appropriate approach. However, traditional virtualization solutions require a reboot of the affected server, and consequently, terminating DaaS sessions with their respective users. On the other hand, container-based virtualization allows such resizing, but requires manual administrator intervention to adjust the amount of resources on demand. This work presents ConManager, a self-adaptive controller for container-based environments, which aims to dynamically resize virtualized resources to handle seasonal loads. The proposal has been applied as a case study in the computer laboratories of the Escola de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. ConManager monitors the use of resources in laboratories, detecting overhead scenarios, and proposing adaptation plans that are applied to the DaaS service support infrastructure, effectively redistributing resources from underutilized containers to overloaded ones. The tool is currently in use and has brought noticeable gains such as reduced time to adapt resources and simplified environmental management, benefiting the institution's information technology team, responsible for maintaining the service and the academic community that enjoys a Stable computing environment.
3	SAULO RUFINO DE SA Communication architecture between VLE and Learning objects using the LTI IMS specification. Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS CLAUDIA MARIA FERNANDES ARAÚJO RIBEIRO Data: Aug 17, 2017 Show Abstract The Learning Objects (LO) are importants modular and reusable resources to Distance Education thatt composes the Learning Management Systems (LMS), building a tool kit that can be used for teachers in their learning project and a course’s activity fluxs.The LOs can ber hosted directly into LMS or stored into Learning Objects Repositories (LOR), that are suitable to host them in centered form, describing their details using metadata and with eficient search engine for find the requested object. The stored objects in the LOR can be accessed and used in severals LMSs that include them, increasing the resource available variety to mount a course whith their evaluative activities. This dissertation aproachs the proposal of architecture for integration of the Distance Education Secretary’s (DES) LOR of Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte with LMS Moodle using tha LTI especification developed by IMS Global Leaning Consortion.
4	HENRIQUE ANDRE BARBOSA BITTENCOURT DUTRA Hermod: An email platform to support institutional communication Advisor : SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA UIRA KULESZA BRUNO OLIVEIRA SILVESTRE Data: Aug 24, 2017 Show Abstract Organizations that offer services to society, whether public or private, often need to establish a communication channel to send content, such as news, service offerings or other types of information. Among the various forms of institutional communication, the e-mail service has a predominant role. For institutional communication via e-mail to take place satisfactorily, messages must be sent quickly and there should be some feedback mechanisms, such as whether e-mails are delivered to recipients. However, existing commercial solutions with the desired functionalities tend to have high values, which makes it difficult for them to be used by public institutions. Thus, we present Hermod, an e-mail platform for institutional communication that was developed as a solution for the systems of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.
5	EDMILSON PEREIRA DA COSTA JUNIOR An Approach for Self-adaptive Distributed Firewall Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA MARCOS CESAR MADRUGA ALVES PINHEIRO RAONI KULESZA SILVIO COSTA SAMPAIO Data: Aug 25, 2017 Show Abstract The border firewall exercises a fundamental role for corporate network security, acting as the first defense barrier delimiting a secure perimeter. However, the culture of Bring Your Own Device weakens the notion of secure domain, contributing to the creation of attack vectors inside the secure perimeter. Distributed firewall systems emerged with the proposal of protecting individual hosts against attacks originating from inside the network. In such systems, firewall rules are created centrally, then distributed and enforced on all servers that compose the firewall, restricting which services should be available. Meanwhile, software vulnerabilities can make network services vulnerable to attacks, since firewalls usually do not scan application protocols. In this sense, from the discovery of a vulnerability until the publication and application of patches there is an exposure window that must be reduced. Given this scenario, the present work presents a proposal of a self-adaptive distributed firewall system. This proposal is based on monitoring hosts and using a vulnerability assessment system to detect vulnerable services, integrated with components capable of deciding and applying firewall rules on affected hosts. In this way, our approach is able to respond to vulnerabilities discovered in these hosts, helping to mitigate the risk of exploiting the vulnerability. Our system was evaluated in the context of a case study that simulates a corporate network environment, where the results achieved demonstrate its viability.
6	ANDRE LUIZ DE SOUZA BRITO Level-Up: a gamification process for education Advisor : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA FERNANDO MARQUES FIGUEIRA FILHO JOSE GUILHERME DA SILVA SANTA ROSA SÉRGIO ANTÔNIO ANDRADE DE FREITAS Data: Aug 25, 2017 Show Abstract Technology is a force for change in the culture of a society. This transformation often requires the evolution of several fields in human knowledge, one of them being the field of Education. As a generation of youngsters are always connected through the use of technological devices, with the possibility of accessing and exchanging a large amount of information in a fast way, the traditional learning models which are teacher-centered and the students play a passive role are gradualy becoming more inneficent. This inadequacy has a big role in student motivation, that is rapidly decreasing by each year as students feel less connected with their learning environment and their practices. One field of research that has become proeminent in past years concerning student motivation in education is that of Gamification. However, a common problem exists with the construction of gamifyied solutions for education: the lack of a clear design process that guides the gamification towards an efficient model capable of effectively attend to the students needs. To contribute in the solution of this problem, this work proposes a gamification process called Level-Up, based on the design thinking for educators approach, which has as a core principle the investigation and gain of knowledge about the problematic of the students and learning environment before any solution is designed and executed. On top of that, the gamification framework Octalysis is used to evaluate how the motivational aspects are taken into account in the investigated scenario, and how the game elements can be used to change and improve student motivation in order to attain the objectives set by the gamification. To validate this gamification process, a case study is executed in a introductory programming class on a college course, in which promising results were obtained.
7	ERICK SHARLLS RAMOS DE PONTES Developing and Evolving Software Product Lines From Existing Software Systems Advisor : UIRA KULESZA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : UIRA KULESZA CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA EIJI ADACHI MEDEIROS BARBOSA ELDER JOSÉ REIOLI CIRILO Data: Aug 25, 2017 Show Abstract A software product line (SPL) represents a family of related systems that share commonalities and variabilities to meet the needs of a specific market or mission. The adoption of SPL has been applied in several areas in the software industry due to the benefits achieved, such as reduction of development costs, quality improvement and reduction of time to market. However, distinct scenarios can be found when developing a SPL, which lead to 3 approaches for adopting a SPL: (1) proactive approach: there areno software being developed and a SPLis developed from scratch; (2) reactive approach: there is a SPL which is evolved to address new features and products; (3) extractive approach: SPL is developed from the assets of a system or a set of related systems that are already in production. In the context of the extractive and reactive approaches, this dissertation aims to define a method to develop a SPL from existing systems implemented in the Java language. A practical study that extracts and evolves a SPL of the domain of space allocation management is used as a background to define the method.
8	DINARTE ALVES MARTINS FILHO FASTSF: A CODE GENERATION TOOL FOR INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT Advisor : GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AQUILES MEDEIROS FILGUEIRA BURLAMAQUI FRANCISCO MILTON MENDES NETO GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR UIRA KULESZA Data: Aug 29, 2017 Show Abstract The production of software implies a complex production process, which involves managing the variables of time, cost and personnel. The evolution of technology and the competitiveness of industry has raised the need for greater productivity that should be combined with efficiency and quality. In this scenario, there is a growing tendency to use techniques, standards and tools that can make development faster and therefore cheaper. Besides the use of frameworks, tools and design patterns, the automatically generation of parts of the code is a means to overcome developers’ repetitive coding work and it also increases productivity in software implementation. This practice has been evolving and spreading in the last years, with its popularization in several frameworks of application development, primarily in the web development frameworks. This work discusses the study of effects achieved on the developers' productive capacity in the creation and use of a tool called FASTSF, which has the objective of both increasing productivity in the development of web information systems and keeping the team's focus on coding more complex problems.
9	JOÃO VICTOR DE OLIVEIRA NETO A continuos approach to analyze indirect software conflicts Advisor : GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS UIRA KULESZA Felipe Alves Pereira Pinto Data: Aug 31, 2017 Show Abstract The necessity of software evolution for those which solve daily problems became even more frequent and the software engineering had to be adapted in order to be able to delivery products with good quality in tight dead lines. In order to the software continues being useful during its life cycle, to the main purpose whose was developed, its necessary to apply changes or include new features due to changes which happens in the business. Rewrite the same block of code is not a recommended approach on software development, because it spreads code in a distributed and disordered way. Applying the code reuse, the same block of code already wrote is referenced by different use cases through the dependency chain and method calls, where different parts of the code, which are being relate to differents funcionalitys, going to depend to the same component. Changes applyed to a block of code which has direct or indirect relation with differents use cases may lead to umpredictable fails, depending on the number of different artifacts related and the extension of dependency chain related to the artifact which was modified, this change may cause a impact on another use case which, by a first look, does not have any relation which the modified block of code. Predict impacts from in a specific artifact is a task which demands time to analysis, deep knowledge of the source-code and test effort. This paper presents an approach to automatize the identification of possible indirect conflicts using the developed tool, whose can determinate which use cases are more defect prone by source-code changes, providing a more effective direction to the test's efforts. A Study Case was elaborated, assessing a real project of extensive dimension whose doesn't have a automatized test case suite, and the developed tool was able to identify the indirect conflicts on differents cenarios and besides, the tool was able to proof in a empiric experiment which the major failures, caused by indirect conflicts could be avoided if the tool were be used during the development fase.

2016

	Dissertations
1	EMMANOEL MONTEIRO DE SOUSA JUNIOR Escalonando uma Aplicação Paralela com Demanda Variável em Ambiente de Nuvem Advisor : FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES COMMITTEE MEMBERS : AMÉRICO TADEU FALCONE SAMPAIO CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES IDALMIS MILIAN SARDINA MARTINS Data: Jan 20, 2016 Show Abstract Este trabalho propõe uma arquitetura de software responsável pelo escalonamento para processamento de dados com demanda variável em ambientes de nuvem. O sistema construído observa variáveis específicas ao contexto de negócio de uma empresa incubada no Instituto Metropole Digital da UFRN. Tal sistema gera uma estratégia de identificação e utilização de modelos de máquinas disponíveis em um ambiente de nuvem, focando no desempenho do processamento, utilizando-se de estratégias de balanceamento de carga de dados e paralelismo de atividades no fluxo de execução do software. O objetivo é atender a demanda sazonal dentro de um limite padrão de tempo definido pela empresa, controlando os custos operacionais com a utilização de serviços de nuvem na camada de IaaS.
2	ÁLVARO HERMANO DA SILVA Jogo Digital Como Ferramenta Facilitadora no Exercício da Matemática Fundamental Advisor : ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ALBERTO SIGNORETTI ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS CHARLES ANDRYE GALVAO MADEIRA EDUARDO HENRIQUE DA SILVA ARANHA Data: Apr 25, 2016 Show Abstract Para alunos que ingressam no primeiro ano de um curso técnico integrado, a matemática é uma das disciplinas de difícil entendimento. Fatores como falta de atenção, problemas com interpretação de texto e problemas no aprendizado no ensino fundamental, colaboram com as reprovações na disciplina, gerando um aumento no desestímulo do aluno no curso. Com base em relatos dos professores da disciplina de matemática feitos ao setor pedagógico da escola sobre as dificuldades desses alunos em resolver as atividades trabalhadas em sala de aula e após a realização de entrevistas com um grupo de alunos, os referidos fatores de dificuldade foram identificados e possíveis soluções foram traçadas. Uma delas é a implementação de um jogo digital, a ser trabalhado no ambiente escolar, que proporcione o exercício da matemática fundamental, como forma de trabalhar aspectos cognitivos e o conhecimento dos conteúdos da disciplina, gerando dados sobre o desempenho do jogador, proporcionando um feedback ao professor sobre dificuldades e/ou facilidades na resolução das questões. Este trabalho apresenta a proposta de jogo concebida.
3	ROMULO FAGUNDES CANTANHEDE Guardião Cloud - Support Platform Support for Internet of Things Advisor : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : CARLOS EDUARDO DA SILVA JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR CARLOS ANDRE GUIMARÃES FERRAZ Data: Apr 27, 2016 Show Abstract The IoT(Internet of Things) proposes that computer systems are formed byseveral information producers and/or consumer devices, allowing thedevelopment of various solutions based on data collection and analysis.However, in addition to data collection and analysis, it is alsonecessary to make decisions and act on them. This work’s proposal is todevelop a support platform for IoT applications, not only allowing datacollection and analysis, but also their use for decision making andaction. The platform will allow any device with Internet access to sendinformation in various formats, supporting real-time monitoring of thecollected data, as well as the definition of decision-making mechanisms,such as the activation of a particular device or the generation ofalerts. As a case study, the platform was applied to monitor a hospitalstyle environment. Some controlled experimentswere conducted to evaluate the platform, providing the means for thedefinition of some design parameters for its deployment.
4	ARTEJOSE REVOREDO DA SILVA An intelligent environmental control system based on sensors network and pattern classification. Advisor : JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR COMMITTEE MEMBERS : GIBEON SOARES DE AQUINO JUNIOR IVANOVITCH MEDEIROS DANTAS DA SILVA JOAO CARLOS XAVIER JUNIOR LEONARDO AUGUSTO CASILLO Data: Jul 20, 2016 Show Abstract In general, laboratories or labs are workplaces that provide controlled conditions for experiments and measurements to be performed. For this reason, controlling temperature and humidity is an important requirement that needs to be achieved in order to guarantee the reproducibility of processes carried out in labs. Aiming to propose efficient environmental controlling mechanisms, specifically for chemical analysis laboratories, we present in this work an intelligent environmental control system based on sensors network and pattern recognition. Our prototype uses its own data generated by sensors distributed in the environment to identify a pattern of behavior. Through the use of machine learning algorithms, the system identifies the classes within the data (clustering), does the training and testing procedures (classification), so that it can generalize what was learned. Finally, the rules are created in association with previously identified classes in order to control air conditioners, both the main and the spare ones, plus the dehumidifier. In this sense, the prototype keeps temperature and humidity stable and in an effective way.
5	LUCIANO ANTÔNIO CORDEIRO DE SOUSA Exploratory study of tests in a construction monitoring system Advisor : BRUNO SANTANA DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : BRUNO SANTANA DA SILVA CLAUDIA MARIA FERNANDES ARAÚJO RIBEIRO FERNANDO MARQUES FIGUEIRA FILHO Data: Aug 4, 2016 Show Abstract Although testing area has been established in academy, some software development teams in industry do not take proper care of this activity. This work presents a case study about bug reports and tests of the construction monitoring system of an energy company during 3 years. The aim is to identify relationships between bug reports, features, automated testing and modifications to the source code, to understand some consequences of decisions and to identify opportunities for improvement in the analyzed development process.
6	RAFAEL DIAS SANTOS Comparison of HCI evaluation methods during a juridical system design for smartphone Advisor : BRUNO SANTANA DA SILVA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : BRUNO SANTANA DA SILVA ISABEL DILLMANN NUNES LUCIANA APARECIDA MARTINEZ ZAINA SILVIA AMÉLIA BIM Data: Aug 8, 2016 Show Abstract Quality and time are important factors in software development process, because we expect to deliver a high quality product with acceptable cost and deadline. These factors are even more relevant to innovative environments and small businesses, like a startup. Many companies still don’t carry out activities to improve quality of use of software they had developed. Lack of knowledge of HCI evaluation methods and expectation of large increase in coast and deadlines have been arguments to maintain the current culture in some companies. This work compares three HCI evaluation methods well known in literature: heuristic evaluation, communicability evaluation and usability testing. We investigate how they contribute to designer’s work during conception of their interaction and user interface solution. We compared the activities, time of execution, used materials, profile and number of involved evaluators and users, results and difficulties of evaluators during the execution of methods. This comparison was made by a designer as part of SoftUrbano’s juridical system for smartphone. The results can better inform professionals about the HCI evaluation practice and contribute to changing the software development culture in many companies, especially small businesses and startups.
7	THIAGO FERNANDES SILVA DUTRA Beehiveior - Monitoring and Control System for Beekeeping Production Advisor : RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : RAFAEL VIDAL AROCA RUMMENIGGE RUDSON DANTAS SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS Data: Aug 8, 2016 Show Abstract Bees are very important animals to the global ecosystem, mainly for theiractive role in pollination process of many plants on the planet. Beekeeping, currentlydefined as the rational creation of bees, is a global economic activity that annuallymoves a billionaire market. The efficient development of beekeeping involvesnumerous challenges in many aspects, ranging from daily activities to keep the apiaryuntil monitor the behavior of bees and the apiary environment. The UEPA-EAJ (anunit for explore bee products at Jundiaí’s agricultural school) is an important centerfor activities, studies and research on beekeeping in Brazil-RN. This work proposesthe development of a computational tool, composed by automation and controldevices, with the goal to give a better basis for the studies and researches carried outby UEPA-EAJ, as well to improve the daily activities to maintain the apiary of thisunit.
8	EDUARDO LIMA RIBEIRO INTEGRA : A solution for integration of HelpDesk systems Issue Tracking systems in heterogeneous environments Advisor : IDALMIS MILIAN SARDINA MARTINS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : IDALMIS MILIAN SARDINA MARTINS FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES UIRA KULESZA CRISTIANO MARCIEL Data: Aug 10, 2016 Show Abstract Regardless of the area of operation and due to business needs, giventhe pace of innovation, public and private organizations areconstantly adapting to technological changes, either with the bestmarket practices or upgrading their technologies. These frequentchanges often end up creating in the company a very heterogeneousenvironment, where the systems involved in the business were developedusing various platforms (for example, programming language and / ordatabase) operate in an isolated way. In situations like this, thecompany needs to adopt strategies to provide interoperability betweentheir systems and thus ensure a good communication, aiming to promotethe exchange of information between departments and the integration ofbusiness rules. The main objective of this work was to propose anddevelop strategies enabling the integration of systems in theseheterogeneous environments, regardless of platform and developmentlanguage of the systems. In order to solve the current communicationproblems and performance between different information systems in theDepartment of Distance Education (SEDIS) of the Federal University ofRio Grande do Norte (UFRN), it was developed a so-called middlewareINTEGRA designed on a service-oriented architecture. The proposal Itwas created for the SEDIS, but can be extended to other publicinstitutions of higher education. One of the advantages of thearchitecture proposed is to provide the addition of new systemswithout causing a severe impacts of adjustments and changes, ensuringgeneral maintainability of the software. The middleware createscommunication between different help desk systems and issue trackingoffering a range of services through a communication protocol thatstandardizes the exchange and routing of messages. Through theproposed strategy as showed in the poc, it was possible to get abalance between the principle of decoupling and the principle ofuniformly distributing responsibility, thus guaranteeing a lowcoupling and high cohesion, desirable principles in SoftwareEngineering.
9	MARCELO VARELA DE SOUZA Low cost domotic using principles of IoT Advisor : ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS COMMITTEE MEMBERS : ALBERTO SIGNORETTI ANDRE MAURICIO CUNHA CAMPOS IVANOVITCH MEDEIROS DANTAS DA SILVA JOAO MORENO VILAS BOAS DE SOUZA SILVA Data: Aug 11, 2016 Show Abstract Demand for domestic solutions opened the way for the home automation through systems that proposes to improve the quality of life and save resources. This paper makes a brief study of home automation and electronic components required for your application. It also describes the method for the development of a home automation project using concepts of IoT and the Arduino platform. The proposed system has, in addition to low cost, a friendly interface, and consists of an application for smartphones and control sensors for household appliances such as lamps and air conditioners. The development of this system was made through the use of infrared transmitters and receivers, XBee radio frequency modules and Arduino microcontrolled platforms, in some versions, and microcontrolled ESP8266.
10	JULIO CESAR LEONCIO DA SILVA An Exploratory Study of Evaluation and Documentation of Software Architectures in Software Companies Advisor : UIRA KULESZA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : EDUARDO MARTINS GUERRA Felipe Alves Pereira Pinto FERNANDO MARQUES FIGUEIRA FILHO UIRA KULESZA Data: Aug 25, 2016 Show Abstract Usually, the software architect responsible for the software architecture definition and evaluation cannot rank which non-functional requirements must be prioritized during the development of their systems. Because of that, failures may happen during the system execution requiring more time and resources to fix it. In many cases, due to the inexperience of architects or the need for rapid deployment of a system, the non-functional requirements are not considered in the software architecture definition phase and the its documentation is absent or incomplete, making the software architecture difficult to be accessed and understood by others team members and also more difficult the maintenance of its components/modules and relationships. This work raises with public and private software companies which are their main strategies used to define software architecture in terms of its documentation and to ensure it is suitable for non-functional requirements of interest. Our study had the participation of 17 software architects to answer the survey. With the completion of the survey we identified that the non-functional requirements for performance and reliability are the most important to be addressed by the architecture and even with the existence of some approaches to evaluation architectures, they do not seem to be well disseminated and / or used among architects. Besides that, we propose a guide to help software architects in the task of achieving such non-functional requirements during the evolution of software systems. The proposed guide prioritizes the non-functional requirement of performance.
11	ARLINDO RODRIGUES DA SILVA NETO GoldBI: Uma solução de Business Intelligence como serviço Advisor : GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : GLEYDSON DE AZEVEDO FERREIRA LIMA FREDERICO ARAUJO DA SILVA LOPES FRANCISCO DANTAS DE MEDEIROS NETO Data: Aug 26, 2016 Show Abstract The achievement of concrete results with strategic decision making requires analysis of well established data and variables. Nowadays, it is practically impossible conduct a proper analysis without the aid of a software for reporting and statistics. Business Intelligence (BI) has emerged in order to simplify the analysis of management information and statistics, generating a wider range of analytical tools to identify indicators through graphs or dynamic listing of management data. But many BI tools on the market, and has a high cost, limited to use in local networks of desktop environments, in addition to being required high technical standards for its use. The proposal from work is to create a BI tool that is available in the cloud (cloud computing) through SaaS (Software as Service) and can be simple enough so that any user can manipulate it effectively and objectively. Using techniques of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) to facilitate the extraction and processing of such data in a decentralized manner the application should appear light and available in any computing environment.
12	THIAGO DAVID DOS SANTOS MARINHO An Extensible Domain-Specific Language for Generating Performance Testing Advisor : UIRA KULESZA COMMITTEE MEMBERS : Felipe Alves Pereira Pinto FRANKLIN DE SOUZA RAMALHO SERGIO QUEIROZ DE MEDEIROS UIRA KULESZA Data: Aug 30, 2016 Show Abstract This work presents a tool composed by a domain-specific language used to describe textually performance tests, and by a component that uses those described tests to generate projects in different performance test execution platforms. The purpose is to use concepts defined in the language to abstract the concepts of each platform, which are often modeled differently (regarding nomenclature and/or structure) and even dependent on the tool rather than just the domain. The proposed tool supports SOAP, REST and web applications performance tests to JMeter and Silk Performer. It also allows extension to new test types and target platforms. Studies has been made to evaluate the tool’s usage: tests from a company were rewritten with the DSL and then projects were generated on the target platforms, to be executed. This study also served to help in the development of the tool. It was possible to observe the feasibility of using the DSL to different application types, customizing it according to concepts and characterists of platforms and organizations.