This report discusses architectural aspects of web crawlers and details the design, implementation and evaluation of the Viuva Negra (VN) crawler. VN has been used for 4 years, feeding a search engine and an archive of the Portuguese web. In our experiments it crawled over 2 million documents per day, correspondent to 63 GB of data. We describe hazardous situations to crawling found on the web ...

A usability test was conducted of two different manual defibrillators regularly used in the prehospital setting by emergency medical personnel. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate that design attention is needed to make manual defibrillators more error resistant and less hazardous to patient safety. Fourteen paramedics performed four tasks in a “laboratory” environment that included a c...

Providing safe transportation for Hazardous Materials (Hazmat) is a concern that attracts a wide range of resaerchers. Different types of problems have been defined in the literature in order to cope as much as possible with real situations. Most of existing studies consider the transportation between two points, while few of them considered resolving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in the co...

A cross-sectional study in Ahwaz city, Islamic Republic of Iran, described children's indoor and outdoor play patterns. A total of 952 pupils aged 7 and 9 years and 942 parents completed questionnaires. Children's favourite activities were: playing football (22.3%), cycling (13.2%) and watching television (12.3%). This differed from those perceived by the parents who reported watching televisio...

This paper exploits the novelty detection technique towards identifying hazardous situations. The proposed system elaborates on the audio part of the PROMETHEUS database which includes heterogeneous recordings and was captured under real-world conditions. Three types of environments were used: smart-home, indoors public space and outdoors public space. The multidomain set of descriptors was for...

Traffic sign recognition through artificial intelligence tools is an attractive topic in the computer vision community for its clear applications in the automotive industry. This problem is a subset of the larger problem of improving safe driving through intelligent technologies that can recognize objects on the road and help drivers avoid hazardous situations. In this work we evaluated a numbe...

This paper documents hazardous situations on the Web that crawlers must address. This knowledge was accumulated while developing and operating the Viúva Negra (VN) crawler to feed a search engine and a Web archive for the Portuguese Web for four years. The design, implementation and evaluation of the VN crawler are also presented as a case study of a Web crawler design. The case study tested pr...

This chapter describes example use cases for ubiquitous computing technology in a corporate environment that have been evaluated as prototypes under realistic conditions. The main example reduces risk in the handling of hazardous substances by detecting potentially dangerous storage situations and raising alarms if certain rules are violated. We specify the requirements, implementation decision...

A mobile robot deployed for remote inspection, surveying or rescue missions can fail due to various possibilities and can be hardware or software related. These failure scenarios necessitate manual recovery (self-rescue) of the robot from the environment. It would bring unforeseen challenges to recover the mobile robot if the environment where it was deployed had hazardous or harmful conditions...

The successful removal of impacted denture in the oesophagus in a patient is reported, with a review of the literature. A 36-year-old Malay man complained of dysphagia after swallowing his denture. Following unsuccessful attempts at removal via a rigid oesophagoscope, open surgery was performed. Without further delay, the impacted denture was removed by cervical oesophagotomy, and the patient r...