This Research-to-Practice paper details the first edition of a one-year graduate course aimed at facilitating professionals' transition to R&D careers. The proposed methodology successfully addressed the typical challenges inherent in such transitions, aggravated by the specificity of the geographic location of the course. This course is the result of an industry-academy partnership, seeking to attract STEM professionals who intend to migrate to the R&D career in the informatics and computer technology sector. The curriculum, based on the Multiple vortices of Know-How (a methodology of interconnected learning activities) has eleven subjects distributed in three sections (leveling, advanced and residency). The first class had twenty-five students with granted scholarships and five volunteers. The paper details the course methodology and its activities, providing a highlight of how to apply the framework, including the research projects and the residency. Moreover, the paper discusses the student performance, and the course evaluation from the students' perspective. Furthermore, the paper discusses the lessons learned and adjustments implemented for the second class, including the cultivation of soft skills and methods for conducting individual evaluations. Finally, the evidence shows that the methodology is reproducible and viable across a diverse range of scenarios.

This Innovate Practice Full Paper reports a Industry/Academia partnership to improve the qualification of both students and professionals. Consider the following scenario: a city located in a third world country, with one of the lowest countrywide educational performances, hosting an industrial pole based on Federal tax incentives aiming to develop a R&D cluster. The city has basic services issues, from health to urban violence, making the attraction of professionals from other locations unfeasible. As a consequence, the lack of professionals with R&D profile is now considered a relevant risk to the continuation of the city's industrial policies. Therefore, initiatives that shorten the qualification life-cycle of local professionals, while preparing senior students with real-world experience, are welcome. An example of such initiative, reported in this paper, was the software test residence, formed by professionals from the industry, and senior undergraduate and graduate students of a local university. The proposal consisted on defining a set of learning activities where students and professionals would be partners, but still being aware that they belong to different realities (with respect to timing, accountability and accreditation). The challenge can be summarized as follows: how to jointly qualify students and professionals, while respecting the peculiarities of both audiences. In order to address the issue in a short time period, representatives from a global company with R&D site in the city partnered with a local university to define a learning program inspired by the software residence approach. The university's course syllabus in Software Test was reviewed and customized to the on-the-job training subject of interest. Moreover, the approach was based on three nonnegotiable principles: Accountability, Excellence and Sustainability. The experience was successful, reaching 25 participants from four R&D organizations and the university. Results obtained include qualification of 23 participants (only two dropped off), the development of an open source educational material composed by a set of slides for testing automation classes, theory-practice of software testing targeting Test Maturity Model integration (TMMi) level 2, and the improvement in the collaboration between academia and industry for other projects. The paper will detail the experience, and list some lessons learned, including how to synchronize the schedules.

This innovative practice full paper presents a set of engaging actions aimed to encourage women to pursue a Computer Science career in a city of a third world country (Manaus, Brazil). Despite worldwide efforts to promote gender equality, typically, women account for less than 30% of the workforce in technological areas. In third world countries, the situation is much more unbalanced. Poor educational and economic conditions, allied with a chauvinism culture contaminated by sexism and stereotypes, are strong forces that repel the young girls from IT areas. As a result, the percentage of women in local Computer Science majors is lower than expected. The authors detail a program to involve girls from all school levels in computer science career, which is indeed the adaptation of a national program, combined with indigenous elements. The mentioned adaptation was a key success factor to catch the attention of students and local educators. Some activities that are included in this program are lectures at scientific, technological and gender discussion events, realization of dynamics in schools for the dissemination of computational thinking in children and young students, training students to take part in programming contests and develop knowledge into real computational applications. These actions resulted in highlights achieved in programming contests and prizes obtained through application development, and have provided a more conducive academic environment to discuss issues related to the female gender in science and technology fields. Besides the fundamentals of the program, the authors present the results of the last three initiatives, which happened in conjunction with local events, and the promising opportunities perceived in Computer Science major of a local university.

Manaus, the capital of Brazilian Amazon state demands a rapid increase in the number of highly qualified professionals, mostly for its Industrial Pole. Hardware and software development for the consumer electronics and telecommunication sectors are the most challenging areas, due to the amount of open positions contrasting with the quality of local educational Institutions. To address this issue a local higher education organization (Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Amazonas) started, in partnership with Samsung da Amazonia Ltd. (the local subsidiary of the Korean conglomerate), a large scale program based on the so called multiple vortices, and comprising of set of involving activities, including training in classroom, and enrolling students in initiation or graduate projects. After three year of running program, the authors proposed a survey to verify the results achieved so far, more specifically on those two mentioned activities. The survey is designed to answer two questions: A) How mature is the participant in understanding his career; B) How is the participant's perception of the program efficiency in meeting his expectations. The survey is composed by 41 yes/no questions covering five different topics: 1) Perception about career and marked demands; 2) Information about the program purpose and objectives; 3) Changes in the career plan and expectations of the future; 4) Perceived relevance of the program; 5) Strength and weaknesses of the running program. Anti-redundant questions (i.e. two answers leads the same conclusion when one is yes and the other is no) were used to reduce bias and to assign a confidence level to the respondent, afterwards used to weight the student's contribution to the final statistics. The survey was applied to current and former program participants. The paper will detail the results, and the corrective actions suggested by the students' answers. Furthermore, the survey itself, the design and application methodology, which was based on a pilot group of students, will be part of the results presented in this paper.

The lack of professionals is considered a major risk to the Industrial Pole installed in Manaus, Brazil. Specially, STEM education is intricately difficult and if the student is not well involved, supported and motivated, the chances of success are very low, which can be verified by the 25% to 30% dropout rate per semester in our institution. Given this scenario, a qualification program denominated “multiple vortexes of know-how” was conceived to address three aspects: i) reduce student dropout; ii) enlarge the reachable community; iii) offer different levels of knowledge. Vortex is in essence an action, working interconnected and coordinated to other vortexes. Four different actions were prepared: classroom disciplines; a talent development program; holding short-term events, and enrolling in intensive training. This present work describes the vortex that enrolled the major number of students: the classroom disciplines. A catalog of optional undergraduate and graduate disciplines was offered to the students. The best students received a prize based on their performance. In summary, we had around 650 students qualified with 84 scholarship prizes granted. The paper will present as a contribution to the program, the catalog of disciplines and recommendations on how to proceed with the activities.

Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas and the sixth Brazilian largest gross domestic product, demands highly qualified hardware and software developers for consumer electronics and telecommunication sectors of its free trading zone. However, what can be viewed as an opportunity for the youth alumni of local institutions of higher education contrasts with the low level of qualification provided by such institutions. As a consequence, most positions either remain opened or are occupied by professionals from other Brazilian regions. Moreover, the issue relies more on soft skills than on hard skills, as the local institutions are aligned with International standard academic curriculum and cover modern technologies. Soft skill is the enter barrier to the job market. English proficiency, communication skill, writing (in both Portuguese and English) skill, among others, are top listed failure reasons in the hiring processes. As one project manager highlighted: “it is much cheaper and quicker for the company to fill in some specific technological gaps, than to leverage a poor English proficiency”. This paper presents a proposal of an involving activity aiming to address several soft skills at the same time, with minimal disturbance in the student daily routine. The concept is based on the impact of immersing the student in a systematic project development experience. Clear communicated project goal, where the students have specific roles, with assigned accountable peers, everything under the umbrella of an Agile-like software development process (derived from SCRUM) are in the core of the activity. This paper details the incremental implementation methodology of the program among four research areas, and 23 projects or project activities, involving 34 students. The results of the two years running program will also be described, including the increase of progress visibility by advisors, the improvement of students communication and writing skills and the qualification on SCRUM software development process tools and documentation. The authors mapped important success factors in achieving relevant improvement on students' profile, and presented a list of recommendations for the next phase of the program, including some obvious one, as the importance of the active participation of advisors, and some less obvious one, like the resistance to the Internet online tool due to daily meeting coinciding with the peak of Internet usage in the University.

Brazil is experiencing economic growth, with a strong demand for highly qualified professionals. In the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, Manaus, the situation is critical. The lack of professionals is considered a major risk, and to prepare students is a real challenge as there are few undergraduate courses, and the typical dropout rate is very high. STEM education is intricately difficult and if the student is not well involved, supported and motivated, the chances of success are very low. To address this scenario, a qualification program denominated "multiple vortexes of know-how" was conceived to address three aspects: i) reduce student dropout; ii) enlarge the reachable community; iii) offer different levels of knowledge. Vortex is in essence an action, working interconnected and coordinated to other vortexes. Four different actions were prepared: classroom disciplines; a talent development program; holding short-term events, and enrolling in intensive training. This paper describes the first edition of the program, which was accomplished last year at the Institute of Computing at the Federal University of Amazonas. Up until now, the results are quite positive: over 600 students were involved and motivated with these new possibilities. Moreover, the goal of this paper is also to present the lessons learned so far.

An adequate task allocation plan is an effective strategy to reduce collaboration issues in distributed software development. Practitioners adopt distinct processes to allocate tasks as well as diverse labels for the same activities and artifacts. This diversity is also found in literature. Task allocation proposals consider different elements and use distinct names for the same concepts. The lack of a standardized vocabulary and of an understanding of the elements involved impairs knowledge acquisition and sharing. Our paper presents a domain ontology to represent concepts related to task allocation in distributed teams. The ontology was defined based on a literature systematic mapping and on the opinion of experts. Preliminary evaluation suggests that the relationships among concepts are valid in real projects. The ontology brings awareness to managers regarding the factors related to task allocation planning and provides researchers with a framework to define processes and design tools to support such activity.

The analysis of well logs is important on reservoir characterization. One goal of this analysis is to classify lithofacies in order to estimate the reserve of petroleum. This analysis is traditionally conducted as a semi-automated process, where graphs of curves are used to allow human experts to perform the classification task. On the other hand, this problem has been dealt with in the literature as an automatic pattern recognition task. In this context, several aspects have been investigated such as, comparison among classification methods, reservoirs with heterogeneity and data from different wells. This paper addresses the aspect of using data obtained from one well to train an ensemble of heterogeneous classifiers in order to combine their decision to assign labels to data extracted from other wells. All investigated wells are from the same reservoir. In addition, we show that the classifier ensemble does not outperform its members when the training and the test sets are composed of samples obtained from the same well. This comparison indicates that once a human expert has manually classified lithofacies from one well, this information may be used to train a classifier ensemble, which will be able to use this knowledge to achieve high accuracy on classifying samples from wells within the neighboring region, at the same reservoir.

Addresses the issue of automatic hovering of an outdoor autonomous airship using image-based visual servoing. The hovering controller is designed using a full dynamic model of the airship, in a PD error feedback scheme, taking the visual signals as output and extracted from an on-board camera. The behavior and stability of the airship motion during the task execution and subjected to the wind disturbance is studied. The approach is finally validated in simulation using an accurate airship model.

This paper discusses a dynamic approach to target recognition that is based on concepts from the theory of optimal design of experiments. The approach uses a cycle of hypothesis formulation, experiment planning for hypothesis validation, experiment execution, and hypothesis evaluation to confirm or reject the classification of targets into given object classes. Target classes of relevance to specific perceptual tasks of a robot mission are described through parametrization of sensor observations. We use spatial stochastic lattice models to encode sensor-based information and to provide potential target hypotheses. Information-theoretic uncertainty minimization metrics are employed to control the sensing processes and the robot vehicle. The approach presented was applied to an unmanned aerial robot vehicle developed for environmental research and monitoring applications, and initial results are presented showing aerial identification and tracking of large-scale man-made structures and biological targets.