Abstract
Temporal information retrieval has been a topic of great interest in recent years. Its purpose is to improve the effectiveness of information retrieval methods by exploiting temporal information in documents and queries. In this article, we present a survey of the existing literature on temporal information retrieval. In addition to giving an overview of the field, we categorize the relevant research, describe the main contributions, and compare different approaches. We organize existing research to provide a coherent view, discuss several open issues, and point out some possible future research directions in this area. Despite significant advances, the area lacks a systematic arrangement of prior efforts and an overview of state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, an effective end-to-end temporal retrieval system that exploits temporal information to improve the quality of the presented results remains undeveloped.

Abstract
Distributed data aggregation is an important task, allowing the decentralized determination of meaningful global properties, which can then be used to direct the execution of other applications. The resulting values are derived by the distributed computation of functions like COUNT, SUM, and AVERAGE. Some application examples deal with the determination of the network size, total storage capacity, average load, majorities and many others. In the last decade, many different approaches have been proposed, with different trade-offs in terms of accuracy, reliability, message and time complexity. Due to the considerable amount and variety of aggregation algorithms, it can be difficult and time consuming to determine which techniques will be more appropriate to use in specific settings, justifying the existence of a survey to aid in this task. This work reviews the state of the art on distributed data aggregation algorithms, providing three main contributions. First, it formally defines the concept of aggregation, characterizing the different types of aggregation functions. Second, it succinctly describes the main aggregation techniques, organizing them in a taxonomy. Finally, it provides some guidelines toward the selection and use of the most relevant techniques, summarizing their principal characteristics.

Abstract

Abstract
Tabling is a technique that overcomes some limitations of traditional Prolog systems in dealing with redundant sub-computations and recursion. When tabling is combined with multithreading, we have the best of both worlds, since we can exploit the combination of higher declarative semantics with higher procedural control. To support this combination, the Yap Prolog system has, at engine level, multiple designs that vary from a No-Sharing design, where each thread allocates fully private tables, to a Full-Sharing (FS) design, where threads share the complete table space. In this work, we propose an extension to the table space data structures, which we named Private Answer Chaining (PAC), as way to support batched scheduling evaluation with the FS design. Batched scheduling is one of the most successful tabling scheduling strategies, known to be useful when a tabled logic program requires an eager propagation of answers and/or do not requires the complete set of answers to be found. Experimental results show that PAC is a good first approach, since with it the FS design remains quite competitive.

Abstract
This paper presents an evaluation of high-dynamic-range (HDR) video tone mapping on a small screen device (SSD) under reflections. Reflections are common on mobile devices as these devices are predominantly used on the go. With this evaluation, we study the impact of reflections on the screen and how different HDR video tone mapping operators (TMOs) perform under reflective conditions as well as understand if there is a need to develop a new or hybrid TMO that can deal with reflections better. Two well-known HDR video TMOs were evaluated in order to test their performance with and without on-screen reflections. Ninety participants were asked to rank the TMOs for a number of tone-mapped HDR video sequences on an SSD against a reference HDR display. The results show that the greater the area exposed to reflections, the larger the negative impact on a TMO's perceptual accuracy. The results also show that under observed conditions, when reflections are present, the hybrid TMOs do not perform better than the standard TMOs.

Abstract
Virtual environments for driving simulation aimed to scientific purposes require three-dimensional models of realistic road networks. The generation of these networks according to the requirements, if done manually by road design specialists, results in a time consuming task. Procedural generation of road networks comes as a solution to this problem with the creation of complete road networks definition adequate to simulation. This paper proposes a method to automatically generate an optimized definition of very large roads network, in an integrated process, from the selection of nodes in a terrain area, to the network topological definition. The human supervisor can interact with this generation process at any stage, in order to obtain custom road networks definitions. The proposed method reduces the use of specialists for preparing large road networks definitions. These definitions are suitable to integrate into a broader process to create road environments, with different road types, appropriate to conducting scientific experiments in driving simulation.