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Land Surface Temperature (LST) is an important factor in ground surface energy balance and in universal climatology studies. Elevation, Land Cover (LC), and vegetation index are three factors that influence ground surface variation, and their influences vary depending on geography. This study aimed to: (i) investigate the seasonal patterns and trends of daytime LST, and (ii) examine the influence of elevation, LC, and vegetation index on daytime LST increase in Taiwan from 2000 to 2021. LST, vegetation, and LC data were downloaded from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) website, and elevation data were downloaded from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) website. The natural cubic spline method was applied to investigate annual seasonal patterns and trends in daytime LST. Linear regression modeling was applied to investigate the influence of elevation, LC, and vegetation index on daytime LST increases. The results showed that the average increase in daytime LST per decade in Taiwan was 0.021 °C. Elevation, LC, and vegetation had significantly affected the daytime LST increase, with R2 of 32.5% and 28.1% for the North and South parts of the country, respectively. The daytime LST increase in the North at elevations higher than 1000 m had an increasing trend, while in the South the increasing trend was found at elevations higher than 350 m above sea level. All types of forest and urban areas in the North had a higher daytime LST increase than the average, while in the South, the areas with water, closed shrubland, and urban parts had a higher daytime LST increase than the average.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented many challenges to employees in every sector by forcing them to work remotely. Office working seems an unusual concept as everyone has had to readjust their lifestyles and working patterns to allow a working from home approach, alongside maintaining a work-life balance. This paper contributes with a prototype where working from home is re-imagined in a post-pandemic world. We explored the use of smartwatches to support the well-being of software developers. A human-centred design approach drives the prototype and evaluation. This paper relies on the User-Centred Design Framework. Data affinity analysis showed that isolation is a paramount problem for software developers working from home. Results show that all the participants involved in the study experienced the feeling of isolation while working from home, some being more extreme than others. While this solution focuses on a particular population, given that smartwatches have become more affordable and ubiquitous, this solution could benefit different types of office workers regardless of the type of work, socioeconomic status, or nationality. This paper investigates the use of smartwatches and virtual reality to support the wellbeing and isolation of people.

Dangerous driving can cause accidents, injuries and loss of life. An efficient assessment helps to identify the absence or degree of dangerous driving to take the appropriate decisions while driving. Previous studies assess dangerous driving through two approaches: (i) using electronic devices or sensors that provide objective variables (acceleration, turns and speed), and (ii) analyzing responses to questionnaires from behavioral science that provide subjective variables (driving thoughts, opinions and perceptions from the driver). However, we believe that a holistic and more realistic assessment requires a combination of both types of variables. Therefore, we propose a three-phase fuzzy system with a multidisciplinary (computer science and behavioral sciences) approach that draws on the strengths of sensors embedded in smartphones and questionnaires to evaluate driver behavior and social desirability. Our proposal combines objective and subjective variables while mitigating the weaknesses of the disciplines used (sensor reading errors and lack of honesty from respondents, respectively). The methods used are of proven reliability in each discipline, and their outputs feed a combined fuzzy system used to handle the vagueness of the input variables, obtaining a personalized result for each driver. The results obtained using the proposed system in a real scenario were efficient at 84.21%, and were validated with mobility experts’ opinions. The presented fuzzy system can support intelligent transportation systems, driving safety, or personnel selection.

Orientador: Sílvio César Camargo Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas Resumo: Esta dissertação relaciona literatura e sociedade a partir de uma perspectiva sociológica. O objetivo foi estudar a ironia presente no romance Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma, do autor Lima Barreto. Partiu-se da ideia de que a ironia foi mobilizada por este autor para compor a forma literária da obra e cifrar o processo de modernização da sociedade brasileira de fins do século XIX e começo do XX. O início da pesquisa foi feito pela leitura interna deste romance. Constatou-se que a forma literária irônica expressa uma relação ambígua entre as ideias em prol de uma sociedade mais justa e a realidade concreta, que negava tais ideias. A partir deste dado interno, procurou-se entender os elementos externos à obra: o autor e o processo social por ele captado (consolidação da Primeira república brasileira). Por isto, objetivou-se, em dois momentos diferentes, investigar qual o significado desta ambiguidade tanto para o processo social em questão, como para a vida de Lima Barreto. Referente ao processo social percebe-se que as transformações do Brasil ao longo do século XIX, que desaguam no fim da escravidão e no advento da República, não acompanham efetivamente os ideais de liberdade e igualdade, que traziam a possibilidade de ampliação da cidadania, perpetuando, assim, antigas formas de hierarquia e exclusão social. Sobre o autor, sua biografia está estritamente vinculada ao processo social em questão, porquanto, em sua infância, ele construiu o ideal de desenvolvimento pleno de sua individualidade, porém, quando adulto, os mecanismos sociais excludentes o impossibilitaram de realizar isto por completo. Assim, depreende-se que as relações entre processo social experiência individual e criação artística expressam uma crítica à constituição do capitalismo no Brasil, como também à dinâmica das relações capitalistas enquanto sistema social, posto que estas relações trazem, em seu horizonte, o desenvolvimento pleno das capacidades humanas, contudo, na esfera concreta este horizonte é negado, sobretudo para os grupos social e historicamente excluídos Abstract: This dissertation brings together literature and society from a sociological perspective. Its aim has been to study the use of irony in the novel The sad end of Policarpo Quaresma, by Brazilian author Lima Barreto. The starting point is that Lima Barreto mobilized irony to compose literary form in order to describe the process of modernization of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Brazilian society. In the early stages of this research it was confirmed that Lima Barreto uses ironic literature to expresses an ambiguous relationship between ideas in favor of a fairer society and the harsh reality of everyday life, which denied these ideas. From this internal fact, an attempt is made to understand elements which are external to the work: the author and the social processes captured by him (the consolidation of the Brazilian First Republic). In order to do so, two moments have been objectified to study the meaning of this ambiguity, both in terms of the social process and in connection with Lima Barreto¿s own life. Regarding the social process it can be perceived that actual transformations taking place throughout Brazil¿s nineteenth century were far from matching the ideas of freedom and equality which aimed to bring about the broadening of citizenship and enfranchisement. Instead, old forms of exclusion and social hierarchy were perpetuated. As for Lima Barreto, his biography is closely linked to the very social process being analyzed, as his infancy saw him incarnate the very idea of developing his individuality, whereas, as an adult, social mechanisms of exclusion prevented him from continuing this development until fulfilment. Therefore, it can be deducted that the relationships between individual social process and artistic creation express a critique of the development of capitalism in Brazil, as well as of the dynamics of capitalist relationships in a broader sense. While occurring within the horizon of the fulfilment of human capacities, human relationships within capitalist social systems deny their own horizon, especially for socially and historically excluded groups Mestrado Sociologia Mestre em Sociologia CAPES

BACKGROUND There is a global challenge related to the increase in the number of people with dementia (PwD) and the diminishing capacity of governments, health systems, and caregivers to provide the best care for them. Cost-effective technology solutions that enable and ensure a good quality of life for PwD via monitoring patients and interventions have been investigated comprehensively in the literature. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to investigate the challenges with the design, deployment and functioning of a Smart Home In a Box (SHIB) approach to monitoring PwD wellbeing within a care home. This could then support future implementations and present further opportunities for the SHIB approach. An important consideration was that most care homes do not have the appropriate infrastructure for installing and using ambient sensors. METHODS The SHIB was evaluated via installation in the rooms of 3 PwD with varying degrees of dementia. Sensors from the SHIB were installed in the rooms of the PwD to test the capabilities of these sensors for detecting Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). The sensors used were: (i) thermal sensors, (ii) contact sensors, (iii) Passive Infrared (PIR) sensors, and (iv) audio level sensors. Data was collected, stored and handled using a ‘SensorCentral’ data platform. RESULTS This study highlighted challenges and opportunities that should be considered when installing and using a SHIB approach in a dementia care home. Lessons learned from this investigation are presented in addition to recommendations that could support the wellbeing monitoring of PwD. This study also presents results from initial data analysis and demonstrates how activities, falls and abnormal behaviors could be detected and acted upon. CONCLUSIONS This study was conducted by Ulster University’s Pervasive Computing Research Group (PCRG) as part of the Northern Ireland Connected Health Innovation Centre (NI-CHIC) project. The design, deployment and functioning of the SHIB approach within Kirk House Care Home in Belfast provided the community with useful lessons, that will continue to be applied to improve future implementations of the SHIB approach. Several challenges arose during the installation, functioning and data collection at Kirk House Care Home, for example, regarding the adaption of technology to a building that was not originally designed for the integration of ambient sensors. The main findings of this study are: (i) most care home buildings were not originally designed to appropriately install ambient sensors, and (ii) installation of SHIB sensors should be adapted depending on the specific case of the care home where they will be installed. It was acknowledged that in addition to care homes, the homes of dementia patients were also not designed for an appropriate integration with ambient sensors. Hence, another possible use of a SHIB approach.

Manually finding relationship networks among compounds can be a hard and time-consuming task. However, this process is fundamental when looking for a metabolic pathway that explains how multiple compounds are related, to identify relevant pathways in organisms, filling gaps on metabolic networks, or when new mechanisms for the synthesis of important compounds are sought. Here, we present PhDSeeker, a new tool for the automatic search of metabolic pathways. This tool is able to relate simultaneously several compounds. Furthermore, its flexibility allows it to be easily configured for addressing a wide range of situations. Solutions found are provided not only in plain text but also as interactive representations that can be analyzed in a web browser. Source code is available at https://github.com/sinc-lab/phdseeker. A web service is also available at https://sinc.unl.edu.ar/web-demo/phds/. Several fully documented study cases, including their settings and solutions files, are also provided as Supplementary Material.

This review provides a comprehensive study and comparative assessment of methods from these two machine learning (ML) approaches for dealing with the prediction of novel pre-miRNAs: supervised and unsupervised training.We present and analyze the machine learning proposals that have appeared during the last 10 years in literature. They have been compared in several prediction tasks involving two model genomes and increasing imbalance levels. This work provides a review of existing ML approaches for premiRNAprediction and fair comparisons of the classifiers with same features and data sets, instead of just a revision of published software tools. The results and the discussion can help the community to select the most adequate bioinformatics approach according to the prediction task at hand. The comparative results obtained suggest that from low to mid imbalance levels between classes, supervised methods can be the best. However, at very high imbalance levels, closer to real case scenarios, models including unsupervised and deep learning can provide better performance. Fil: Stegmayer, Georgina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Di Persia, Leandro Ezequiel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Rubiolo, Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Gerard, Matias Fernando. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Pividori, Milton Damián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Yones, Cristian Ariel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Bugnon, Leandro Ariel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Rodríguez, Tadeo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Raad, Jonathan. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina Fil: Milone, Diego Humberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina