DEFORESTATION POLYGON ASSESSMENT TOOL: PROVIDING COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATION ON DEFORESTATION IN THE BRAZILIAN CERRADO BIOME

Considered a conservation hotspot of the world biodiversity and a key region for the agriculture production in Brazil, the Cerrado biome has only 7.5% of its native vegetation as fully protected areas. Given this, in 2016 the Brazilian government started an official project to monitoring deforestation in the biome, through the so-called PRODES-Cerrado, responsible for mapping deforested areas from 2000 on, and DETER-Cerrado, responsible to generate deforestation alerts. Seeking to contribute with both context information and confidence levels for the polygons produced by these two monitoring systems, we developed the Deforestation Polygon Assessment Tool. This web-based platform process and presents several analysis for PRODES-Cerrado and DETER-Cerrado polygons using automatic assessments (e.g. BFastMonitor and Weights of Evidence), field validation and spatial analysis with key datasets (e.g. National Land Registry, Land-Use and Land-Cover maps). The platform implements an interactive map which allows a fast and comprehensive visualization of different layers, as well as a Deforestation Report at the polygon level, which gathers all the information about each polygon, providing greater reliability and understanding of the deforestation dynamics in the Cerrado. Future improvements in the platform will consider additional, spatial relations in order to assist government agencies to either prevent or reduce deforestation occurrences in each municipality in the Cerrado biome.

Transdisciplinary System of Systems Development in the Trend to X4.0

Since the announcement of Industry 4.0 in 2012, multiple variants of this industry paradigm have emerged and built on the common platform of Internet of Things. Traditional engineering driven industries such as aerospace and automotive are able to align with Industry 4.0 and operate on requirements of the Internet of Things platform. Process driven industries such as water treatment and food processing are more influenced by societal perspectives and evolve into Water 4.0 or Dairy 4.0. In essence, the main outcomes of these X4.0 (where X can be any one of Quality, Water or a combination of) paradigms are facilitating communications between socio-technical systems and accumulating large amount of data. As the X4.0 paradigms are researched, defined, developed and applied, many real examples in industries have demonstrated the lack of system of systems design consideration, e.g. the issue of training together with the use of digital twin to simulate operation scenarios and faults in maintenance may lag behind events triggered in the hostile real world environment. This paper examines, from a high level system of systems perspective, how transdisciplinary engineering can incorporate data quality on the often neglected system elements of people and process while adapting applications to operate within the X4.0 paradigms.

BUILDING A CULTURE OF CREATIVE THINKING IN BUSINESS STUDIES

Creativity is considered as an intangible characteristic that drives business to success. Creative persons play an important role in fostering both technical and social innovation and progress. Contemporary higher education graduates are expected to possess soft skills including creative thinking, problem-solving, critical thinking, flexibility, motivation, positivity and others. Therefore, the research was designed with the aim to enhance the understanding of the concepts of creativity and creative thinking and to address the question of how creativity and the process which we use when we come up with a new idea can be enhanced within and by higher education institutions. This study examines a creativity-driven study environment to promote a safe, non-judgmental atmosphere and the Creative Platform process meant to develop creativity during regular practical tasks to make it an involuntary reflex and to discover new viewpoints, perspectives, and solutions to any business problem. The framework of the research is based on the analysis of literature and experimental research methods. The results revealed that using special techniques, purposeful creative thinking can be developed beyond creativity subject. Moreover, interdisciplinarity teams lead to better solutions.