Research group from IFSC is the reference in pattern recognition of plants

IFSC's researchers got the first position in ImageClef Plants, an international contest promoted by the French Society of Botany. The Imageclef was created in 2003, and launches annually contests for the global community involved in the area of ​​pattern recognition. Usually, two types of contests are issued to each edition: the first is related to the problem of medical image identification, an important field which can lead the development of computer programs capable of seek tumors or to aid the analysis of diseases, and the second related to general images. Try to imagine if you could do a Google search for images from other images. For instance, you insert a picture of a car, and your Google search returns images of cars very similar. Would not it be great? Well, this system does not exist yet, but the work of the IFSC's scientists is to identify unique characteristics of certain objects so that, with a picture, you can access your information. READ MORE

SCG arxiv pre-print is select to MIT's Technology Review

University of Sao Paulo's scientists have revealed a straightforward way of using chaos to encrypt messages. Based on cellular automata, the method produces a pseudo-random signal that is used for encryption and decryption as reported by Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog and Kurzweil report. A cellular automata is a grid-like array in which each cell can be either black or white at any instant. In the next time step, each square changes according to a predetermined rule, along the color of the squares around it. The trick is to find a rule that generates a pseudo-random output so that the resulting grid looks like noise.

Ref.: Marina Jeaneth Machicao, Anderson G. Marco, Odemir M. Bruno, Chaotic Encryption Method Based on Life-Like Cellular Automata, arxiv.org/abs/1112.6326v1

The Chaotic Encryption Method Based on Life-Like Cellular Automata in the MIT's Technology Review blog

Chaos-based cryptography: a new promise to online security

A team of researchers at IFSC at the University of S. Paulo is working on the development and improvement of a new encryption system based on chaos theory, more efficient than conventional methods which could offer better security for online financial transactions, for instances, with the advantage of operating at high speed even on devices with limited hardware and low processing capacity. (read more)

SCG is first on ImageClef 2011 - Plant identification challenger

In 2011, was realized the first pilot task will be focused on tree species identification based on leaf images. Leaves are far from being the only discriminant key between tree species but they have the advantage to be easily observable and the most studied organ in the computer vision community. The task will be organized as a classification task over 70 tree species with visual content being the main available information. Additional information only includes contextual meta-data (author, date, locality name) and some EXIF data. Three types of image content will be considered: leaf scans, leaf pictures with a white uniform background (referred as scan-like pictures) and leaf pictures in natural conditions (taken on the tree). The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen sciences initiative conducted by Telabotanica, a French social network of amateur and expert botanists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application.

The SCG team (Dalcimar Casanova, João Florindo and Odemir Bruno) got the best result of the challenger, and become in the first place of the ImageClef Plant Challenger

To read more: ImageClef 2011 Plants

Thesis CTDIA prize

The Academic Dalcimar Casanova won the second best dissertation in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The prize was awarded by the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC-CEIA) during the 2010 Joint Conference.

To read more visit: VII Best MSc Dissertation/PhD Thesis Contest in Artificial Intelligence