Abstract in English:

This article introduces an open-source module responsible for the presentation of verbal (speech) and corporal (animation) behaviors of animated pedagogical agents. This module can be inserted into any learning environment regardless of application domain and platform, being executable under different operating systems. It was implemented in Java as a reactive agent (named Body agent) that communicates with the agent's Mind through a language known as FIPA-ACL. Therefore, it may be inserted into any intelligent learning environment that is also capable to communicate using FIPA-ACL. Persistence of information is ensured by XML files, increasing the agent's portability. The agent also includes a mechanism for automatically updating new behaviors and characters once available in the server. A simulation environment was conceived to test the proposed agent.

Abstract in English:

Despite the many research efforts addressing the integration of mobile nodes into grids, only a few of them have considered the establishment of mobile grids over wireless ad hoc networks (hereafter, mobile ad hoc grids). Clearly, such grids need specialized resource discovery and scheduling mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, though, the research on these mechanisms for mobile ad hoc grids is still preliminary. Besides, and more importantly, it has approached discovery and scheduling as separate mechanisms, which, we argue, is not suitable for mobile ad hoc grids. In this paper, we propose the integration of resource discovery and scheduling for mobile ad hoc grids into a single protocol called DICHOTOMY (DIscovery and sCHeduling prOTOcol for MobilitY). This protocol allows computational tasks to be distributed appropriately in a mobile ad hoc grid, while mitigating the overhead of discovery messages exchanged among the nodes. Our experiments show that the protocol: (i) does proper scheduling, allowing an efficient load balancing among the nodes and helping with lowering the average completion time of tasks; (ii) keeps the discovery efficiency at acceptable levels in mobility scenarios and (iii) scales very well with respect to an increasing number of nodes, both in the total amount of energy savings due to packet transmissions and the distribution of such savings among the nodes.

Abstract in English:

The Lattes platform is the major scientific information system maintained by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). This platform allows to manage the curricular information of researchers and institutions working in Brazil based on the so called Lattes Curriculum. However, the public information is individually available for each researcher, not providing the automatic creation of reports of several scientific productions for research groups. It is thus difficult to extract and to summarize useful knowledge for medium to large size groups of researchers. This paper describes the design, implementation and experiences with scriptLattes: an open-source system to create academic reports of groups based on curricula of the Lattes Database. The scriptLattes system is composed by the following modules: (a) data selection, (b) data preprocessing, (c) redundancy treatment, (d) collaboration graph generation among group members, (e) research map generation based on geographical information, and (f) automatic report creation of bibliographical, technical and artistic production, and academic supervisions. The system has been extensively tested for a large variety of research groups of Brazilian institutions, and the generated reports have shown an alternative to easily extract knowledge from data in the context of Lattes platform. The source code, usage instructions and examples are available at http://scriptlattes.sourceforge.net/.

Abstract in English:

This paper analyses aspects associated with the development of joint human-agent planning agents, showing that they can be implemented, in a unified way, via a constraint-based ontology and related functions. The constraints' properties have already been used by several planning approaches as an option to improve their efficiency and expressiveness. This work demonstrates that such properties can also be employed to implement collaborative concepts, which are maintained transparent to the planning mechanisms. Furthermore, the use of constraints provides several facilities to the implementation of advanced mechanisms associated with the human interaction, as also demonstrated here.