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Claudio T. Silva

Publications and source records attributed to Claudio T. Silva.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Motion Browser: Visualizing and Understanding Complex Upper Limb Movement Under Obstetrical Brachial Plexus Injuries

The brachial plexus is a complex network of peripheral nerves that enables sensing from and control of the movements of the arms and hand. Nowadays, the coordination between the muscles to generate simple movements is still not well understood, hindering the knowledge of how to best treat patients with this type of peripheral nerve injury. To acquire enough information for medical data analysis, physicians conduct motion analysis assessments with patients to produce a rich dataset of electromyographic signals from multiple muscles recorded with joint movements during real-world tasks. However, tools for the analysis and visualization of the data in a succinct and interpretable manner are currently not available. Without the ability to integrate, compare, and compute multiple data sources in one platform, physicians can only compute simple statistical values to describe patient's behavior vaguely, which limits the possibility to answer clinical questions and generate hypotheses for research. To address this challenge, we have developed \systemname, an interactive visual analytics system which provides an efficient framework to extract and compare muscle activity patterns from the patient's limbs and coordinated views to help users analyze muscle signals, motion data, and video information to address different tasks. The system was developed as a result of a collaborative endeavor between computer scientists and orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation physicians. We present case studies showing physicians can utilize the information displayed to understand how individuals coordinate their muscles to initiate appropriate treatment and generate new hypotheses for future research.

cs.GR↗

Shadow Accrual Maps: Efficient Accumulation of City-Scale Shadows Over Time

Large scale shadows from buildings in a city play an important role in determining the environmental quality of public spaces. They can be both beneficial, such as for pedestrians during summer, and detrimental, by impacting vegetation and by blocking direct sunlight. Determining the effects of shadows requires the accumulation of shadows over time across different periods in a year. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient class of approach that uses the properties of sun movement to track the changing position of shadows within a fixed time interval. We use this approach to extend two commonly used shadowing techniques, shadow maps and ray tracing, and demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. Our technique is used to develop an interactive visual analysis system, Shadow Profiler, targeted at city planners and architects that allows them to test the impact of shadows for different development scenarios. We validate the usefulness of this system through case studies set in Manhattan, a dense borough of New York City.

cs.GR↗

Quantifying the presence of graffiti in urban environments

Graffiti is a common phenomenon in urban scenarios. Differently from urban art, graffiti tagging is a vandalism act and many local governments are putting great effort to combat it. The graffiti map of a region can be a very useful resource because it may allow one to potentially combat vandalism in locations with high level of graffiti and also to cleanup saturated regions to discourage future acts. There is currently no automatic way of obtaining a graffiti map of a region and it is obtained by manual inspection by the police or by popular participation. In this sense, we describe an ongoing work where we propose an automatic way of obtaining a graffiti map of a neighbourhood. It consists of the systematic collection of street view images followed by the identification of graffiti tags in the collected dataset and finally, in the calculation of the proposed graffiti level of that location. We validate the proposed method by evaluating the geographical distribution of graffiti in a city known to have high concentration of graffiti -- Sao Paulo, Brazil.

cs.CV↗

Identificação automática de pichação a partir de imagens urbanas

Graffiti tagging is a common issue in great cities an local authorities are on the move to combat it. The tagging map of a city can be a useful tool as it may help to clean-up highly saturated regions and discourage future acts in the neighbourhood and currently there is no way of getting a tagging map of a region in an automatic fashion and manual inspection or crowd participation are required. In this work, we describe a work in progress in creating an automatic way to get a tagging map of a city or region. It is based on the use of street view images and on the detection of graffiti tags in the images.

cs.CV↗

Enabling Reproducible Science with VisTrails

With the increasing amount of data and use of computation in science, software has become an important component in many different domains. Computing is now being used more often and in more aspects of scientific work including data acquisition, simulation, analysis, and visualization. To ensure reproducibility, it is important to capture the different computational processes used as well as their executions. VisTrails is an open-source scientific workflow system for data analysis and visualization that seeks to address the problem of integrating varied tools as well as automatically documenting the methods and parameters employed. Growing from a specific project need to supporting a wide array of users required close collaborations in addition to new research ideas to design a usable and efficient system. The VisTrails project now includes standard software processes like unit testing and developer documentation while serving as a base for further research. In this paper, we describe how VisTrails has developed and how our efforts in structuring and advertising the system have contributed to its adoption in many domains.

cs.SE↗

A wildland fire modeling and visualization environment

We present an overview of a modeling environment, consisting of a coupled atmosphere-wildfire model, utilities for visualization, data processing, and diagnostics, open source software repositories, and a community wiki. The fire model, called SFIRE, is based on a fire-spread model, implemented by the level-set method, and it is coupled with the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model. A version with a subset of the features is distributed with WRF 3.3 as WRF-Fire. In each time step, the fire module takes the wind as input and returns the latent and sensible heat fluxes. The software architecture uses WRF parallel infrastructure for massively parallel computing. Recent features of the code include interpolation from an ideal logarithmic wind profile for nonhomogeneous fuels and ignition from a fire perimeter with an atmosphere and fire spin-up. Real runs use online sources for fuel maps, fine-scale topography, and meteorological data, and can run faster than real time. Visualization pathways allow generating images and animations in many packages, including VisTrails, VAPOR, MayaVi, and Paraview, as well as output to Google Earth. The environment is available from openwfm.org. New diagnostic variables were added to the code recently, including a new kind of fireline intensity, which takes into account also the speed of burning, unlike Byram's fireline intensity.

physics.ao-ph↗